Shouldn't the right to die be a human right?

[bennyboy]

You're confusing personal emotions and social responsibilities. Simply because we would not want, ourselves, to have a loved one kill themselves, it doesn't automatically follow that the government should be charged with enforcing this desire. Can you lay out your reasoning a little more clearly?

There no such thing as morality without emotion.  If nobody loved or feared or felt pain, there would be very little interest in any concept of goodness or right.  Cosmically speaking, what is intrinsically wrong with raping and killing a small child, for example?  Nothing.  It is our extreme adverse emotional reaction to even the vaguest thought of such a thing that entrenches it in our moral systems-- it is that which simply must not be done, and quite precisely because of our universal abhorrence of the act.

This is one of the jobs of legislation-- to protect us from those boogeymen which most trouble us.  It is to keep the harsher side of reality out of the light, so that we can function as citizens without constantly fearing that our worst nightmares will be manifest at a whim.

But anyway, the right to die of a healthy person is not one that is really controlled by the government. People know how gravity works, how bullets work, how to tie knots in a rope. It is mainly for people who need others to be complicit in their deaths that we are discussing rights. But really, we are talking about the power of an individual to suspend the responsibilities of others in a specific case-- to allow them to kill without consequence-- that we are talking about. But what happens when this suspension is granted more and more easily?

That's a dangerous slope, indeed.