Should there be a legal right to die?

The right to die requires clarification. It need not be a right to assistance in ending one's life. Instead, it need only amount to a right not to be prevented from gaining assistance in ending one's life. This distinction is crucial. If the right to die were a right to positive assistance, then others would do wrong if they failed to help. What is worrying about such a rights claim is that it could impose on those who have moral qualms concerning euthanasia or assisted suicide a duty nonetheless to help others die. That claim is more controversial. Thus, the right to die need be interpreted only as a right not to be prevented from being assisted by those who are willing to help. In other words, those who think assisted suicide and euthanasia are immoral should not be forced to (help) kill others. However, they should similarly not be allowed to prevent others from giving assistance to those who have reasonably determined that their lives are not worth continuing. Nobody should be forced to assist, nor forced not to assist. Some might ask why assistance is necessary. If people want to die, why can they not just kill them-selves? There are, in fact, good reasons that assistance may be either necessary or desirable. In some situations , people have become so weak or debilitated that they are quite literally unable to kill themselves. If people have no option of assistance, they might be forced to kill themselves before they feel that life has become unbearable, only because they know that they will be unable to obtain assistance at a later stage, once their condition deteriorates. Even people who are able to kill themselves might prefer the assistance of others, and especially medically trained people. This is because killing oneself can be a messy, undignified, or unduly painful act, and an act that might unnecessarily impose on others. Throwing oneself in front of a train or off a bridge, for example, can cause considerable trauma to others, and those are gruesome ways to die. An overdose could lead to a more dignified death, but laypeople often know too little about how reliably to end their lives that way. Failing to overdose properly or being found before death has occurred could leave a person in a vegetative condition, which is exactly what that person might have been seeking Imagine a society …