Euthanasia violates and devalues the sanctity of human life

The argument

The argument rests on the claim that human life is sacred irrespective of its worth to society, to the market, or of the person's general usefulness or self-reliance. The list is deliberately constructed from the measures by which a life is ordinarily assessed from the outside, and the position denies that any of them bears on the value of the life itself. A life that produces nothing and depends entirely on others has the same standing as any other. From this it follows that we cannot differentiate between better and worse lives on the basis of their quality. Proponents stress that the objection is to the comparison rather than to any particular ranking: once it is accepted that lives can be graded, the question becomes where the line falls, and the principle that would have excluded such grading has already been abandoned. Every human being should instead be treated as an individual whose well-being and right to live is of the utmost importance, no matter what affliction ails them. Legal euthanasia cannot be accepted in this light because of what its most basic premise asserts. Permitting the practice requires holding that there are some lives not worth living any longer on account of suffering or illness, and that claim is precisely the one the sanctity of life excludes. The objection therefore attaches to the justification rather than to the procedure or to the motives of anyone involved. The final claim concerns what follows from establishing such a premise in law. A society that formally recognises the category of a life no longer worth living has altered how its members understand themselves, since anyone whose condition falls within that category must now consider whether they belong to it. Proponents argue that this can have profound and undesirable consequences for the way we think about ourselves as human beings, quite apart from any individual decision made under the law.

Context

The sanctity of human life is the idea that human life has an inherent, non-relative value which should be protected and not violated for any reason, with exception of self-defence or defence of others. It's a major component of many major religious traditions and the basis for human rights.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The sanctity of life is not an absolute law. For instance, many societies permit capital punishment or even passive euthanasia. This view also imposes certain moral considerations on individuals, who might not subscribe to them.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The sanctity of human life is not a universal view or without caveats.