Hence the fixation on taking all rational calculation and cost-benefit analysis out of death. If people are permitted to consider death rationally, some will, and their values may not be yours. That, I think, is the central fear: Rational thinking at a point where society’s constraints and rewards cannot apply will lead to collapse and anarchy.
–G

The idea here is that we are not deciding for another person when death is appropriate. We would allow people to decide for themselves when death is appropriate, and allow them the option of asking for help with carrying out their wishes, without fear of prosecution for the other person, or the stigma that Will describes.

Watching someone close to me die of cancer made me very aware at a fairly early age that there are indeed far worse things than death. Making someone go through the torturous pain that accompanies many terminal conditions, or drugging them into semi-consciousness just to deal with it when they would rather be dead but are too sick to do it themselves is what is cruel, in my opinion. I believe that you can say both that life is intrinsically valuable and that each has the right to decide when and how their own life, no matter how valuable, should end.

So my fear is not that there are too many stigmas associated with death, but that there are not enough stigmas. We may decide that some death is morally acceptable, but let’s not advocate getting comfortable with it.

I see. Thanks for explaining your position. I guess I don’t have a big problem with erring on the side of letting people who are not terminal but are living in undending misery consent to be killed. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing to me. (I’m not even sure I’d call it ‘erring.’ Whatwould bother me are cases where people that are depressed but could get help are being killed (in accordance with their consent). (Or other cases relevantly similar to this kind.) But there are always going to be borderline cases with things like these.

And since I consider it to be worse for a terminally ill patient to be forced to live than I do for a severely depressed person to kill himself, I think that assisted suicide should be legal.

Oops – I don’t mean to open a can of worms with this assertion. Let’s narrow the scope of that statement to “there is no way to competently legislate when someone’s quality of life has reached a terminally miserable point.”