Should people have the right to end their own lives?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should people have the right to end their own lives?". Your opponent's style: Christopher Hitchens

Medical Assistance In Dying, (or MAID), should not be legal if it is only based on one's feelings towards their life. The question is framed as someone having the right to end their own lives, however MAID consists of a medical procedure by other individuals to end it. In reality, one is not ending their own life, someone else is ending it for them, which puts the person ending it in question for their morals. Not only that, but it could be considered murder in a different lens.

You're conflating consent with abdication of responsibility. A surgeon removing your appendix isn't committing assault because you asked them to. The moral weight shifts entirely when someone autonomously requests it. Your "murder" argument collapses on itself. Murder requires acting *against* someone's will. MAID requires explicit, repeated consent from a competent adult. That's not murder, that's respecting agency. The doctor is facilitating choice, not imposing death. And here's the real problem with your position: you're deciding for others that their suffering doesn't justify their choice. You're saying their despair is wrong, their autonomy irrelevant. That's paternalism masquerading as morality. Why does *your* judgment about their life trump *their* judgment about it?

Your argument about redefined murder is completely inaccurate. Murder, in definition is the intentional killing of one human being by another. Just because one agrees that they should die doesn't make the person killing them any less guilty. Whether someone murders the innocent who didn't want to die, or murders the innocent who do, it's still murder regardless. You also mention that I should not be in judgement of their suffering, or that my judgement of their life shouldn't trump their own. I would argue that this begs the question if you think suicide is okay. If this person wanted to kill themselves based on a mental state of mind, surely you would try to convince them otherwise, but if someone else was doing it (MAID), you justify it?

You've just exposed your own contradiction. If suicide from mental illness requires intervention, then MAID with strict safeguards—psychiatric evaluation, waiting periods, repeated consent—is *more* defensible, not less. It's suicide with oversight, not reckless impulse. Your murder definition proves too much. By that logic, executing a consensual soldier in wartime is murder. Anesthesia during surgery is murder. Consent fundamentally changes the moral character of an act. That's not begging the question, it's basic ethics. The real issue: you don't trust people to know their own minds. But you can't simultaneously say "people are too mentally unstable to choose death" while claiming you respect their autonomy on everything else. Pick one.

They wouldn't have a living autonomy if they were dead, so of course I would respect their autonomy, that being said, if they didn't want to destroy it. MAID is still suicide, the only difference being someone else is doing it for you, as I previously mentioned. You keep trying to brand MAID as 'safer' when in reality it's just a sugarcoated version of death. Sure, it may be cleaner than jumping off a building, but in the end, one is still dying from their own mental breakdown. Of course I wouldn't trust a mentally unstable person to know their own mind.

You just admitted it: you don't trust mentally unstable people to decide anything. So why would you trust them to decide *not* to die either? That cuts both ways. Your "sugarcoating" complaint is backwards. If death is inevitable for someone in unbearable pain—terminal illness, irreversible suffering—then yes, a clean medical procedure *is* better than violent desperation. You're saying they should suffer longer to prove their choice was "real." That's cruelty dressed as principle. And you keep dodging the core issue: who gets to override their decision? You? A committee? Where's your authority to overrule someone's assessment of their own existence? That's the actual tyranny here.

You're assuming that the person suffering has no chance of survival whatsoever, which is clearly untrue as several cases report people surviving life threatening causes. Besides this, you ignored my first statement entirely, which was that I don't think one should get MAID because of their mental and emotional state of mind. I'm overruling it because it involves more than just them. It involves several other people being tied to moral indirection by killing the suffering individual.

You're shifting goalposts. You started with "MAID shouldn't exist based on feelings," now you're arguing only terminal illness qualifies. Pick a lane. On your real claim—that doctors are "morally tainted" by assisting: that's your discomfort, not their moral problem. Doctors already make life-and-death calls constantly. Withdrawing life support, palliative sedation, DNR orders. MAID doesn't create moral complexity, it just makes it explicit and consensual. Your authority to override their choice because it "involves others"? That logic justifies forcing someone to donate organs to save five people. Their body, their choice. Their suffering, their call. You don't get to make them suffer because their death inconveniences your conscience.

Never did I say that I think it's okay to end someone's life because of a terminal illness, don't know where you pulled that out from. Your, 'donating organs to save people' claim? That's a contradiction in itself. Saving people isn't wrong, killing yourself is. You're also saying their moral trumps mine by saying their death inconveniences my conscience.

You're right—I misread your position. But now you've revealed the real argument: you believe suicide is inherently *wrong*, not just risky. That's a moral claim, not a practical one. So here's the actual question: on what grounds? Religious? Philosophical? Because "it's wrong" isn't an argument, it's an assertion. And you can't impose your moral framework on someone else's body. The organ donation analogy isn't a contradiction—it's identical logic. Both say "your autonomy matters less than what I think is right." You reject forced organ donation but accept forced suffering. That *is* your conscience trumping theirs. Why does their choice to end unbearable suffering violate morality, but society's choice to force them to endure it doesn't?

Ok, let me dumb it down for you: suicide is wrong because it not only affects the person dying and what they may be imposing on themselves, but also the people around them and how their death would have a negative mental impact on society, family, and friends. To answer your last question, no one is forcing them to endure it. Suicide is still an option if MAID didn't exist.

That's not dumbing it down, that's shifting from ethics to consequences. You're saying their death is wrong because *others* suffer from it. By that logic, anyone whose death causes grief—the elderly, the sick, the depressed—shouldn't have the right to refuse treatment. Their suffering is justified because their loved ones need them. That's tyranny by emotional obligation. You're conscripting the dying into servitude to others' feelings. And "suicide is still an option" proves MAID isn't the problem—you just don't want them dead cleanly under medical supervision where you can't pretend it didn't happen. You'd rather they suffer messily in secret so your conscience stays quiet.