Throughout Western political philosophy, the most essential of natural rights, those things owed to us by virtue of our status as conscious beings, is the right to life: from birth until natural death, no one may justly take another’s life – not even the government.
The reasons for this position depend largely on which philosopher you read. Classical philosophy, articulated most clearly by Plato and Aristotle, argued for a natural right to life because it allowed for a person to fulfill their purpose: to live virtuously and fulfill their duties to society.
Contrastingly, if you read a modern philosopher such as John Locke, who has been described as the philosopher of the American founding, the right to life is important because it allows a person to freely pursue their own interests, especially the accumulation of wealth and property.
The essential difference between these classical and modern conceptions is who one’s life is meant to benefit. For Plato and Aristotle, life is aimed at the good of the whole, the community. For philosophers like Locke, life is pointed towards the good of the individual and the individual only; there’s no moral imperative to think of the wellbeing of others.
Similarly, while classical philosophy tried to instill virtue in its citizenry by striking a balance between a variety of goods, like bravery, patience and the like, modern political philosophy sees only one thing as the most important goal of government: freedom. In Locke’s view, for instance, freedom and liberty should be the chief end of any political system, because individuals require freedom before they can pursue what’s natural to them: pleasure.
This modern insistence on freedom above all else has had negative moral consequences, at least according to some philosophers, by creating a moral libertinism in which one can do whatever one wants, so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else.
You can hurt yourself, experiment with drugs, sleep with whomever you want – just don’t bother anyone else.
In other words: Your life is your own. You virtually have absolute, total and free control over it.
Us living in the present might fail to see the problem with this mindset, given how embedded this attitude has become in our collective psyche.
But one needs look no further than to the north, to Canada, that bastion of freedom, to see the dangerous implications of modern philosophy’s idea of the meaning of life and one’s right to it.
In 2016, Canada established the Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAiD, program, which allowed for euthanasia for those with terminal illnesses– something practiced in Western countries.
But early last month, the Canadian government significantly revised the criteria for MAiD eligibility, extending it beyond physical illness to those with mental illnesses as well.
Anyone who has “a serious and incurable illness,” who suffers from “enduring physical or psychological suffering” and is in an “advanced state of irreversible damage” is now eligible to die with the help of the government. Importantly, a “person’s death does not need to be reasonably foreseeable for MAiD eligibility (i.e., a person does not need to be at the end of life)” to die at the hands of their doctor or medical care provider.
This change in policy is radical and alarming in at least two ways.
First, the Canadian government has provided no clear guidelines for physicians to administer MAiD. According to its online FAQs page, health officials admit there are “no agreed upon standards for psychiatrists or other healthcare practitioners to use to determine if a person’s mental illness is ‘grievous and irremediable’ for the purposes of MAiD.”
“It is important to note,” it says, that its guidelines for the administration of MAiD for mental illness “are just recommendations” and that it “is not clear whether the government will use these recommendations and/or if further instructions or standards for determining grievous and irremediable illness will be developed before MAiD for mental illness as a sole medical condition becomes legal.”
So Canadian doctors and mental healthcare providers are, basically, on their own. There will be no legal or official guidelines to help doctors make what is already a largely impossible (un)ethical decision.
But it gets worse: In a 2019 document, the Canadian government made it clear that all doctors and nurse practitioners must bring MAiD up to any patient that qualifies, even if doing so violates that clinician’s conscious or religious beliefs. 
“While healthcare professionals with conscientious objection may even see providing [MAiD] information as ‘helping’ [a patient end their life early] and thus contrary to their beliefs, the legal obligation to inform has not been found to be an unconstitutional violation of the professional’s beliefs,” the document reads.
Simply put, doctors must, no matter their objections, tell their patients, even their depressed ones, that it is OK to kill themselves – and that the government has given their blessing for them to do so and will even help to see their desire through.
Which brings us to the second disturbing aspect of this “health” policy: It relegates the “choice” of self-inflicted harm and death – known in sane cultures as suicide – to the feelings and whims of a person who by definition feels psychologically ill.
It’s in this second point that we find the clearest connection between the MAiD policy and the modern, Lockean idea of natural rights, and, specifically, the right to life.  
Because Locke believed that the primary aim of government was to protect freedom, not to instill virtue, because Locke thought that one’s life should benefit oneself first and foremost, not the community, and because Locke argued that the purpose of one’s life is to pursue pleasure, not live according to some sort of superordinate principle external to and transcending oneself, his ideas concerning what it means to live, and what it means to live well, necessarily arrives at the same morally vacuous conclusion as MAiD.
But if Locke’s idea about the natural right to life is correct, then MAiD can in fact be a positive moral choice. If life is about the individual and the individual only, if it’s about finding pleasure and repudiating pain and if the only duty one has is to benefit oneself, then of course it’s permissible – even good – to commit suicide; as long as one is seeking alleviation from pain, suicide is fine, even if that pain exists in the mind rather than the body.
What’s more, according to Locke’s logic, it’s the responsibility of the government to provide you with the ability to carry this desire out, even if the result is the most destructive one imaginable.
Make no mistake: This isn’t an argument for a return to the ancient world of the Greeks, the world of Plato and Aristotle, in every single way. But it’s an argument for a return to their conception of government – one aimed at the good of the whole, not solely the individual – and their belief in a right to life that exists for the purpose of fulfilling one’s justly created purpose, the good of others.
If we follow Locke’s modern political and moral prescriptions, we only get a world of hedonism and pleasure – but, ultimately, pain. Or, in the words of Leo Strauss, we receive a life that is little more than “the joyless quest for joy.”
Benjamin Haines is a 24-year-old graduate student from Shreveport.