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Argument: Dignity of human life must override any individual will to be euthanized

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Leon Kass, M.D., Ph.D. Addie Clark Harding Professor, Committee on Social Thought and the College, University of Chicago. “Neither For Love Nor Money,” Public Interest. 1989 – “In forswearing the giving of poison when asked for it, the Hippocratic physician rejects the view that the patient’s choice for death can make killing him right. For the physician, at least, human life in living bodies commands respect and reverence — by its very nature. As its respectability does not depend upon human agreement or patient consent, revocation of one’s consent to live does not deprive one’s living body of respectability. The deepest ethical principle restraining the physician’s power is not the autonomy or freedom of the patient; neither is it his own compassion or good intention. Rather, it is the dignity and mysterious power of human life itself, and therefore, also what the Oath calls the purity and holiness of life and art to which he has sworn devotion.”[1]