Right to live

After reading Trevor Hooten’s article on the right to die, I would like to introduce a couple questions that I feel readers need to answer for themselves when considering this issue, and I ask that they do not neglect their discussion.

What does it mean for a right to exist?

Asserting that a right is absolute, that “either it exists or does not,” leads to neglecting many practical aspects when discussing what a right is or isn’t. The answer to this question provides the basis to arguments about rights and it shouldn’t be assumed that all people share a common answer to it. Because of these differences, arguments on rights become confusing, sometimes hostile, because these fundamental differences to thearguments are not addressed.

Is suicide something that is “fundamentally selfish,” or can it be selfless?

The answer to this question for many isn’t an absolute but rather a complex conditional truth. Hooten’s argument that it would be “rank hypocrisy” for suicide to be justified as something other than selfish is in many ways superficial. It can be argued that interactions within an aggregate population (people on a bus, classmates, etc.) is of far less importance than other types of interaction within a society and that equating how individuals treat life or death issues with how individuals treat the most casual of social relationships, is an ad hoc fallacy since in many ways the two are incomparably distinct.

– Joe Sevits

senior, computer science