SUICIDE, ASSISTED SUICIDE, ACTIVE EUTHANASIA

himself, a mysterious inescapable process in which we will each participate and which is therefore the most powerful and inevitable source of empathy and communion we have with every other creature who faces the same frightening challenge. The horror we feel in the willful destruction of a human life reflects our shared inarticulate sense of the intrinsic importance of each of these dimensions of investment.”

Anyone who believes in the sanctity of human life believes that once a human life has begun it matters, intrinsically, that that life go well, that the investment it represents be realized rather than frustrated. Someone’s convictions about his own critical interests are opinions about what it means for his own human life to go well, and these convictions can therefore best be understood as a special application of his general commitment to the sanctity of life. He is eager to make something of his own life, not simply to enjoy it; he treats his own life as something sacred for which Ae is responsible, something he must not waste. He thinks it intrinsically important that he live well, and with integrity....

Someone who thinks his own life would go worse if he lingered near death on a dozen machines for weeks or stayed biologically alive for years as a vegetable believes that he is showing more respect for the human contribution to the sanctity of his life if he makes arrangements in advance to avoid that, and that others show more respect for his life if they avoid it for him. We cannot sensibly argue that he must sacrifice his own interests out of respect for the inviolability of human life. That begs the question, because he thinks dying is the best way to respect that value. So the appeal to the sanctity of life raises here the same crucial political and

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