PETER KNOBEL

constitutional issues that it raises about abortion. Once again the critical questions is whether a decent society will choose coercion or responsibility, whether it will seek to impose a collective judgment on matters of the most profound spiritual character on everyone, or whether it will allow and ask its citizens to make the most central personality-defining judgments about their own lives for themselves.

In contrast Leon Kass , in opposing the right of people to choose to kill themselves or to be killed, recognizes the"indignities and dehumanizations" that modern medical technology often imposes on the end of life and agrees that they ought to be removed. But he further argues:

Dignity in the face of death cannot be given or conferred from the outside but requires a dignity of soul in the human being who faces it.... Dignity as predicable of all human beings... is... to tie dignity to those distinctively human features of human animals, such as thought, image-making, the sense of beauty, freedom, friendship, and the moral life, and not the mere presence of life....Courage, moderation, righteousness and other human virtues are not solely confined to the few. Many of us strive for them with partial success, and still more of us do ourselves honor when we recognize and admire those people nobler and finer than ourselves... Adversity often brings out the best in a man; and often shows best what he is made of. Confronting our own death- or the deaths of our beloved ones- provides an opportunity for the exercise of our humanity, for the great and small alike. Death with dignity, in its most important sense, would mean a dignified attitude and virtuous conduct in the face of death.”

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