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

No people should not be able to end their own lives because often they are simply in a place they don't know they can get out of and therefore they shouldn't be able to take their own lives

You're assuming suicidal crises are always temporary obstacles people can escape from, but that's a dangerous oversimplification. Some conditions are genuinely terminal, intractable, and verified as such by experts. Chronic, severe pain that resists all treatment. Degenerative diseases with no cure. Psychiatric conditions unresponsive to every intervention. These aren't "places people don't know they can get out of" like a bad job or a rough patch. They're permanent states of existence. Why does someone with locked-in syndrome or stage-four pancreatic cancer owe the world their suffering because you believe all crises resolve? Your argument works for depression, maybe. It collapses completely for the genuinely hopeless cases. How do you distinguish between the two without denying autonomy to those actually trapped?

First I'd like to clarify my position I don't think people should be able to kill themselves due to deppression

That's a crucial distinction, but it gutters your entire argument. You've just admitted some suffering is genuinely unbearable and permanent, which means you're not actually against the right to die—you're just drawing the line elsewhere. So the real debate isn't whether people *should* have autonomy over unbearable suffering. It's where to draw that line. Depression is subjective and variable. Terminal illness is objective and final. But you're treating depression as categorically different without explaining why subjective suffering matters less than objective suffering. If a depressed person has exhausted all treatments and remains suicidal for decades, what's the moral principle that keeps denying them autonomy? Your position just pushes the problem back one step.

The distinction isn’t just subjective vs. objective—it’s reversible vs. irreversible conditions. Terminal illness is final. Depression, even in long-term cases, has documented instances of recovery, remission, and new treatments. Because death is irreversible, we need a much higher level of certainty that the suffering cannot change. With depression, that certainty is fundamentally unavailable. So the moral principle is precaution: we don’t authorize irreversible outcomes when the condition itself is uncertain.

You've actually abandoned your original argument and moved to mine. You're now conceding that *reversibility* is the operative principle, not whether people "don't know they can get out." That's progress. But your precautionary principle has a fatal flaw: it assumes we can predict future recovery, yet we can't. Someone might suffer for forty years, be told remission is "possible," then die of unrelated causes having never recovered. You've traded one irreversible outcome (suicide) for another (decades of forced suffering). Both are permanent. You're just choosing which irreversibility society imposes. Why is forcing someone to endure guaranteed suffering more ethical than respecting their judgment about unbearable life? Your precaution cuts both ways.

I didn’t abandon my argument—I clarified it. Reversibility isn’t the core principle. The core principle is whether we can make a reliable, well-justified judgment that death is in the person’s best interest. Reversibility matters only because it affects that reliability.

You're right, you clarified rather than abandoned. But now you've shifted from "people don't know they can escape" to "we can't reliably know what's in their interest." Those are radically different claims. The first denies their knowledge. The second denies *your* knowledge—which is honest but cuts deeper against you. If we genuinely can't reliably judge another person's best interest in their own life, especially after they've lived it for decades with depression, what gives society the authority to override their judgment? You're asking us to trust the state's assessment of someone's unbearable existence over their own. That's paternalism dressed as precaution. Why should their expertise about their own suffering count for less than yours?

Even if we grant that the individual has the best access to their own experience, that doesn’t automatically settle the moral question. The issue is that the decision isn’t just about present suffering—it’s about a permanent irreversible action under conditions of cognitive distortion and time-based variability.

You're smuggling in empirical claims as moral facts. Yes, depression distorts cognition, but so does chronic pain, grief, and aging. You haven't shown depression's distortion is categorically different from other conditions that warrant autonomy. And "time-based variability" cuts both ways: today's suicidal person might recover, but tomorrow's recovered person might relapse. You're privileging future possibility over present certainty. But here's the real problem: you're assuming the depressed person lacks insight into their own condition. Some do. Many don't. They know they're distorted and still judge life unbearable. Why does their informed consent count less than a healthy stranger's judgment about their best interest? That's not precaution. That's erasure.