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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
What sort of right is the right to life? Does it make sense to speak of a right to die, or to be allowed to die, or to be helped to die, or to die with dignity? Are life and death straightforward alternatives? Are they possible objects of desire or aversion? Can they be given as gifts? If life is a gift, have recipients of it a duty to be grateful? Answers to these questions are obtained by philosophical analysis, chiefly of the concepts of life and death.
1 The Yeomen of the Guard.
2 The Return of the King, Appendix I (v).
3 ‘There's a good deal to be said,’ E C Bentley declared, ‘For being dead’: ‘Not,’ we may reply, ‘by the dead themselves.’
4 Being Reasonable About Religion, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006, Chapter 14.
5 Theologians anxious to defend the doctrine of Hell sometimes suggest that we have an infinite debt to the Creator, and critics say that the Jehovah is a tyrant. But the doctrine of the Incarnation suggests that God, whether as a matter of duty or out of disinterested love, thinks it right to make the utmost sacrifices for those to whom he has given existence. Cruel tyrants do not accept crucifixion for those they rule.