The Unfreedom of Assisted Suicide: How the right to die undermines autonomy

— There is a broad discussion throughout many countries in the West that will continue into the foreseeable future about whether or not assisted suicide/dying will increase human happiness by decreasing suffering. Understandably, many of the articles address the issue from a medical standpoint but, at the same time, they assume that freedom will increase with legalization. This article is critical of that assumption and shows that, in fact, the individual autonomy purportedly increased by assisted suicide will in fact decrease. Much of the antiassisted suicide/dying literature stresses the danger of legalization to individuals who might be wrongly put to death. This article stresses the dangers to general freedoms that will accompany a law that sets objective criteria for suicide, which is a subjective decision. The possibility of suicide extends subjective freedom and in some ways defines human freedom inherent in the individual, competent adult. Life, for those who are not slaves, children or incompetent, is a choice. But laws that make assisting suicide possible undermine freedom by limiting the ‘right to die’ to a small group, segregated from the rest of the moral community by objective criteria. Legalization will subject the choice to strict criteria and insisting that the decision to die is validated by the state. The state — rather than the individual — is the ‘final judge’, to use John Stuart Mill’s term. Institutionalization of assisted suicide, by reducing suicide to a medical option, separates freedom to terminate one’s own existence from responsibility for the act. Responsibility is, as Jean-Paul Sartre noted, ‘simply the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom’. Without responsibility, we are no longer the authors of our lives but are subject to forces beyond our control