As with several other issues, the property to analyze is a person’s body. Competent adults own themselves. To own yourself includes the right to own your life. As owners of these things, they have the absolute right to make decisions over them. When a competent adult voluntarily contracts with another competent adult for assistance to terminate their own life, nobody violates the 3L Legal Principle. As the right to trade also includes the right not to trade, the right to live also includes the right not to live.

As with all other issues, the person genuinely committed to the 3LP retains the right to conclude euthanasia is entirely immoral or unwise and to peacefully advise against it. It is also important to note that competency remains a prerequisite to exercising the right to make such decisions. Some people who desire to enter into a euthanasia contract may be depressed or otherwise ill to the point of not being competent. This problem is an issue of determining competency, which can sometimes be challenging to resolve. Competency determinations, especially in this area, must be resolved with the utmost care. However, applying the 3L Legal Principle is simple once the competency issue is appropriately determined.

In 2020, I lost my dear friend Eric. As I write these words, I still suffer from the sharp pain of his untimely and horrible death. Eric was a sophisticated thinker and an honorable man who acted with integrity and lived his life in harmony with the 3LP in all respects. One day, Eric came to my home and told me about a weird feeling in his leg. Shortly after that, Eric was diagnosed with a horrible disease referred to as “ALS.”xviii For the next year, Eric learned everything he could about ALS and explored every possible treatment to no avail. I stood by helplessly as I witnessed Eric physically deteriorate from a fit athlete to walking with a cane, to being confined to a wheelchair, to struggling mightily merely to move or breathe.

During the last few days of his life, his mental competency was never in doubt as I struggled to understand his words. Being fully aware of his fate, Eric reasonably rejected a “life” confined to a bed with multiple tubes in multiple places sustaining him. During his last days, Eric struggled to inform me that he would prefer to continue living only if he could reasonably maintain his ability to communicate with others effectively. Eric loved his life and fought mightily to sustain it. However, when it became apparent he would soon be entirely unable to move or communicate with anyone, Eric knowingly, intelligently, and voluntarily opted to terminate what he carefully and rationally determined to be a pointless existence.

Eric would have preferred to have said a final goodbye to everyone and to have peacefully ended his life with the assistance of a qualified physician to ensure a relatively quick, painless, and dignified death. Instead, some people previously decided euthanasia is immoral. These people forcefully imposed their moral judgment upon everyone through their elected representatives by outlawing euthanasia. As a result of these people forcing their moral judgments on everyone by importing them into the law, a quick, painless, and dignified death was legally unavailable to Eric.

As a result, Eric opted to take his own life by shooting himself in the head. He died alone. Eric was not only a victim of ALS. He was also victimized by others who insisted on coercively superseding Eric’s moral judgments about his own life with their own. They unnecessarily inflicted additional harm upon a peaceful, competent, intelligent, and wonderful fellow human already suffering from a fatal and painful illness. The wrongfulness of imposing our personal moral views on other peaceful and competent adults was never so wrong and apparent to me.

Notwithstanding the circumstances of Eric’s untimely death, his passing was graceful and inspiring. I invite you to learn about my dear friend Eric and his inspiring life story here at www.ericthefun.com and heed his wise advice to live your best life!