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

You're dodging. "No" isn't an argument, it's a refusal to think. So let me make the case you're avoiding: if someone truly has an absolute right to self-determination, then society has no legitimate claim to stop them from ending their life. But you wouldn't accept that logic applied everywhere else. You don't believe in absolute rights to refuse life-saving blood transfusions for your kids or to starve yourself to death in prison. Why? Because we recognize that individual autonomy has limits when it conflicts with protecting life itself. Your real position isn't about rights at all. It's about comfort. Which principle actually drives your thinking?

because if we let everyone take theyre own lives and they all do it there would be nobody or nothing left

That's a slippery slope dressed up as logic. Nobody's arguing everyone will suddenly kill themselves if it's permitted. Depression is treatable. Most suicidal crises are temporary. The existence of a right doesn't create mass compulsion to exercise it. We permit divorce without predicting civilization collapse. We allow people to quit jobs without economic annihilation. Your argument assumes people are mindless dominoes rather than agents capable of choosing life despite having the option not to. You're conflating legality with inevitability. The real question you're dodging: if someone's suffering is genuinely unbearable and permanent, why does your fear of hypothetical mass death override their actual, present agony?

life is only once and after death there is nothing so why waste a life which you can build up from your hard times within a couple of months

You're assuming everyone recovers in months. Some don't. Terminal illness, severe chronic pain, degenerative diseases, unbearable psychiatric conditions that resist every treatment. These aren't temporary hard times. They're permanent sentences. Your optimism is a luxury unavailable to someone with ALS watching themselves slowly suffocate, or someone with treatment-resistant depression after thirty years and ten failed medications. You're telling them to endure unrelenting suffering because you believe recovery is always possible. But belief isn't diagnosis. Some conditions are genuinely irreversible. Why should someone with genuine permanence wait based on your assumption that they'll magically improve? Where's the evidence their specific situation will change?

you said "temporary crises" which means you agree with what i said

Wrong. I said suicidal *crises* are temporary, not the underlying conditions causing them. Depression as a state of mind often passes. Terminal cancer doesn't. Chronic pain syndromes don't. Severe bipolar disorder resistant to all treatments doesn't. You're conflating two different things to score a point. A crisis is an acute episode. A condition is the persistent reality underneath. Someone in a temporary suicidal crisis during treatable depression needs intervention. Someone with permanent, intractable suffering is a different category entirely. You've proven my point, not yours. Why should we treat both groups identically when the diagnosis is fundamentally different?

well yes but you can get therapy for all of the things you said, and for cancer you can get it cured depending on what type of cancer you have

Therapy fails routinely. Treatment-resistant depression exists precisely because therapy doesn't work for everyone. And your cancer claim is factually hollow. Stage 4 metastatic cancers have five-year survival rates under 15 percent. Some cancers can't be cured at any stage. You're offering generic hope as a substitute for actual medical reality. A person with pancreatic cancer given six months to live isn't being pessimistic by rejecting chemotherapy that extends suffering by weeks. They're being rational. You keep assuming potential recovery justifies forcing someone to endure certain agony now. But that's not mercy, that's cruelty dressed as optimism. Why does your hope matter more than their pain?