• Ethics

Four of the commentaries criticised my claim that assisted suicide for the terminally ill is discriminatory.1 They were united in this judgement roughly because they insisted that assisted suicide is in fact a benefit and not a harm. I concede that if it is a benefit, then there is no way in which the terminally ill can be disadvantaged by it and hence no way it can be an instance of discrimination. I pointed out in the article that this issue is controversial and could not be settled in my article, nor can it be settled in this brief response.

Assisted suicide harms the terminally ill in several ways. First, it harms the people who do not adopt it by forcing them to defend their continued existence. Second, it harms many of the people who adopt it in so far as they are deprived of a life worth living. Some people might be subtly pressured into thinking, wrongly, that their lives are not worth living, others will choose assisted death freely and fully but will be mistaken about their interests. Others will be better off not having the choice at all. Moreover, there is some way in which these harms are exacerbated by the expressivist effect of these policies. These points are compatible with their …