Euthanasia, even when requested by the competent, can never be a humanitarian act, for it attacks the distinctiveness and limitations of being human. We can give our life for another, but we cannot give ultimate authority over our life to another. The decision for euthanasia is not an exercise of human freedom but the abandonment of human freedom. To attempt to turn one's life into an object that is at the final disposition of another is to become less than human, while it places the other in a position of being more than human-a lord of life and death, a possessor of the personhood of others. Human community and the entirety of civilization is premised upon a relationship of moral claims and duties between persons.
Personhood has no meaning apart from life.
If life is a thing that can be renounced or taken at will, the moral structure of human community, understood as a community of persons, is shattered. Whatever the intentions of their proponents, proposals for legalizing euthanasia must be seen not as a solution to discrete problems but as an assault upon the fundamental ideas undergirding the possibility of moral order. The alternative to that moral order is the lethal disorder of a brave new world in which killing is defined as caring, life is viewed as the enemy, and death is counted as a benefit to be bestowed. This unalienable right places a clear limit on the power of the state. Except when government exercises its duty to protect citizens against force and injustice, or when it punishes evildoers, it may not presume for itself an authority over human life.