Perfectly legal, perfectly clean, perfectly consented to. That is exactly the problem.

"You're against euthanasia? Come on — who are you to stop someone who is suffering from choosing their own death?"

Nobody. I am nobody, and that is precisely the problem, and precisely why I am going to do something slightly disagreeable today: I am going to agree. Not for long, don't worry. Just long enough to pull on the thread.

Let me say at once that I am not going to make the classical Catholic case against euthanasia here — the one about life as a gift, the fifth commandment, the charity owed to the dying, and Saint Thomas explaining that killing oneself is a sin against oneself, against the city, and against God¹. That case exists, it is a good one, and it has one major defect: it convinces only those who are already convinced. Today I do the opposite. I take my opponent's premises, I swallow them, and I look at what comes out.

Let me also say what I will not do: the slippery slope. No "look at Belgium", no "in ten years they'll be killing the depressed", no prophecy. Those things are true, documented, and perfectly useless here, because an honest defender of euthanasia will always answer that you just have to draft the law properly. So I will grant him a law perfectly drafted, perfectly applied, for all eternity. And I will show that this perfect law obliges him to authorise me to kill him.

The contract you are being sold

Every euthanasia law, whether it is called "assisted dying", "medical assistance in dying", "assisted suicide" or any other euphemism cleared by a communications agency, rests on two pillars:

1. Criteria. A serious and incurable illness, a compromised prognosis, refractory suffering — physical or psychological — that is unbearable. The details vary, but the principle is there: there exist states in which death becomes a reasonable option. Call such a state E.
2. Consent. The patient has to ask for it. Freely, lucidly, repeatedly. That is the lock, the guarantee, the magic word repeated to you on every television panel: "Nobody will be killed against their will." Call that consent C.

So let us concede, arguendo, as people who want to sound serious say, the first pillar. Let us grant that there really are states E in which dying is the rational choice. A state in which the suffering is such, the prospect so null, that reason itself, coldly, concludes: better not to be.

And now, the question nobody asks, because it is impolite:

If dying is reasonable in state E, why should your consent be required to kill you?

The treatment one does not refuse

Think for two seconds about how medicine works — real medicine, the kind that heals you. When you arrive unconscious at A&E with your spleen in pieces, they operate. They do not ask your opinion. They cannot, and above all they do not need to: the act is objectively good for you, so they do it. Consent, in medicine, is not what makes an act good; it is what authorises an act already recognised as good to be performed on a person capable of saying no.

Now, we have been told for years that euthanasia is care. Ultimate care, dignified care, the last care. That is the promoters' own word; I am not making it up. Very well. Let us take them at it.

If euthanasia is care, and if state E is a state in which that care is indicated, then the demented patient who can no longer consent should be entitled to it, just as he is entitled to his antibiotic; so should the comatose patient; and you, in state E, should you have the misfortune to refuse, would be in the position of the Jehovah's Witness refusing a transfusion: an irrational patient whose stubbornness is respected out of tolerance, not out of principle.

This is not a prediction. It is already the case in the Netherlands, where an advance directive is enough to have a demented patient euthanised while she struggles². But I promised you I would not lean on that, and I keep my word: the case illustrates, it does not prove. What proves is the logic. Let us get to it.

The three ways out

A recent post on an English-language Thomist blog³ asks exactly this question and honestly catalogues the three answers our age can oppose to the argument. I take them up, in my own style, and I close them one by one. Not for pleasure (well, a little), but because you have to check that the door is properly shut before declaring the house closed.

Door no. 1: "My life belongs to me"

This is the basic liberal answer. My life is like my car: I can destroy it myself without committing an offence, but if you destroy it, that is a crime, even if it was fit for the scrapyard. Private property, respect for title, end of discussion.

Except.

If my life is my property, why criteria? I can wreck my car whenever I like, not only when it has 300,000 kilometres on it and a dead engine. An owner does not have to justify destroying what is his. So, if life is property, the twenty-five-year-old man in a depression should get his injection on simple request, and the doctor who talks him out of it commits an abuse of power. But that is not what the law says, it is not what its defenders say, and it is not what you think deep down. You think that young man is mistaken, that he must be held back, that he must be treated. You think, therefore, that his life is not a piece of property at his disposal. And at that precise moment you join Saint Thomas, whether you know it or not: life is a good we have the use of, not a good we own⁴. A usufruct. The Roman jurist would have understood immediately; the modern voter, less so.

Remember that young man. He will be useful.

Door no. 2: "It is the choosing itself that is dignified"

A subtler answer, and a more honest one, because it finally admits what is at stake. In honour societies, people killed themselves to avoid shame: defeat, rape, disgrace. In ours, disgrace is called dependence. Being washed by another, fed by another, no longer recognising your own children. What is dignified is not death; it is the fact of choosing death rather than submitting to that state.

Fine. But an act of autonomy is, by definition, performed oneself. The samurai holds the sword himself. Euthanasia consists in asking someone else to kill you. There is a rather delicious performative contradiction there: "I assert my autonomy by delegating to a third party the act meant to express it." I will be told about assisted suicide, where the patient swallows the substance himself; granted. But then it is the euthanasia laws that fall, and with them every case in which the patient can no longer perform the act — that is, precisely the cases the law was made for.

And above all: if dignity lies in avoiding state E, then the person already in E, who can no longer choose, is already in indignity. Choice protects only those who can still choose; for the others, the argument from autonomy turns into an argument for administered death.

Door no. 3: "It is a rational, scientific way of living"

The last answer is the one most rarely spelled out, because it hurts those who hold it. Euthanasia is not merely an act, it is a style of death: clean, planned, medicalised, hygienic, without a cry, without a smell, with an appointment and an invoice. And that death expresses a conception of the world in which suffering has no meaning, the body is a machine you switch off, and science is the only road to Truth⁵.

I simply note that this conception is religious. Not in the sense that it has a god, but in the sense that it is a complete alternative to Christianity, with its liturgy, its clergy in white coats, its eschatology (a pacified nothingness) and its dogmas. And a religion, under our secular dispensation, has a very precise status: it is a thing one may not impose on others.

So if euthanasia is a quasi-religious practice, door no. 3 does indeed forbid it to kill you against your will. Bravo. But the price is exorbitant: you have to admit that the "right to die with dignity" is no better founded in reason than the right to go to Mass. And one does not legislate for the Republic on the basis of a faith. Or else give me back Notre-Dame and the Whit Monday holiday.

The machine for sorting wills

The three doors are shut. What remains is to do the job properly, with two premises — yours, and nothing else.

(E) There exist states in which death is the reasonable choice. That is what your criteria say; without it, they would say nothing at all.

(C) In those states, one may kill only with the person's consent.

Question: what is (C) for? There are only two possible answers. Not three.

First answer: consent is what makes the act good. My will makes my death good. But then (E) serves no purpose, since my will suffices; you are back at door no. 1, and the twenty-five-year-old is entitled to his syringe. You did not want to be there. You are.

Second answer: it is state E that makes death a good, and consent is only a safeguard. Fine. Let us look at what that safeguard safeguards.

Take the young man again. He wants to die. You tell him no. Why? Because he is not in E, because his death would not be a good for him, and therefore because his will, however sincere, however often repeated, is mistaken about his own good. You do not execute him. You do not even say that he has the right and that you decline to exercise it on his behalf: you say that his willing is worth nothing, because it is unreasonable. You have just laid down a rule, and the rule is yours, not mine: a will that is mistaken about its own good is not sovereign.

That is where — exactly there — your criteria stop being a safeguard and become a machine. A machine for sorting wills: the ones that count and the ones that do not. And the sorting criterion is not the person; it is E. It is the judgement the law passes on the person's state.

Now turn the machine around.

Here is someone in E who wants to live. By (E), dying is, in their state, the reasonable choice. So living is the unreasonable choice. So their will is of the same species as the young man's: a will mistaken about its own good. You have decided that this species of will is not sovereign. You cannot declare it sovereign now without changing the rule mid-game. Or rather you can, but then say so frankly: it is not the will that counts, it is your judgement on the will. It counts when it says yes inside E, it counts when it says no inside E, it does not count when it says yes outside E. That is no longer a rule, it is a preference. And a preference, once written into law, no longer belongs to you. It belongs to whoever is holding the syringe.

I will be met with one last serious objection: "the wrong of murder is not merely that it contradicts a will, it is that it deprives someone of a good — their life." Yes. A thousand times yes. That is my definition, it is Thomas's, and it has always been the criminal code's. But in E, by hypothesis, life is no longer a good for the one who bears it; it is an evil from which death delivers. You said so. You wrote it. You voted for it. Killing someone in E therefore deprives them of nothing. What remains is, at worst, a will thwarted without injury. And the name for that, in law, is not murder. A will thwarted without injury is a battery. It is cutting a sleeping man's hair. You may find it rude. You may no longer find it criminal, unless you smuggle back in the premise you sold: that life, even in E, remains a good. And if it remains a good, then (E) is false, and your criteria describe nothing.

The software engineer in me calls that a bug. Two rules whose conjunction produces, depending on the branch, either a contradiction or a result nobody wanted. A bug one refuses to fix because it is doing somebody a favour is called a feature.

So here is the conclusion. It rests on no slope, no Belgium, no future. It rests only on what you already believe.

If you are in favour of consensual euthanasia, I must be allowed to kill you even if you do not want me to.

Not that I will. But you no longer have the right to call me a murderer. You have only the right to call me ill-mannered.

Notes