Our society is founded on the principle that competent citizens should be free to determine their own lives unless there are powerful reasons why they should be prevented.

This is sometimes called the democratic presumption. Citizens in a free, liberal democracy should be entitled to determine their own fate unless there are powerful reasons to deny them over and above the fact we don’t like the idea of what they propose.

The usual set of those powerful reasons are that what they propose will harm others. That clearly is not the case here, so the next question is: are there any good public policy reasons why this young man should not be allowed to be self-determining, why he should be robbed of the freedom of making sense of his life in his own way?

I think that part of what it is to determine your own life, to make autonomous decisions, is also to be in control, if you so choose, of the ending of your life. It is ludicrous to say that people can determine other things such as what they want to say, what they want to do and with whom they want to associate, but be denied what they consider to be the most important dimension of action — whether they continue to live.

I think that he should have that decision, and it is entirely appropriate that he be free to exercise that decision if he wants to.

Exactly the same arguments apply to the parents’ decision to assist their son. It is a competent act that any parent will understand and if they decide that it is right to support their son in his decision then all of us should support the family.

It would be a scandal and an unspeakable cruelty if officials purported to interfere in their decision and their grief. It is shaming on our society that we have to drive him abroad to die in a foreign country when presumably he would have preferred to be able to end his life in the comfort of his home with his family around him.

When other people choose to do what we would not choose to do — what we disapprove of — we always think: can they be in their right mind? But the proper question to ask is: what evidence is there that they are not?

Most of us would fiercely resent, and rightly so, people casting doubt on our competence simply because they disagree with what we propose or wouldn’t do it themselves.

You need powerful reasons to suppose that people are not competent to make decisions that they appear to be competent to make.

It would be a terrible society and a terrible world if everyone’s decisions could be challenged on the grounds that the majority wouldn’t have acted like that, and don’t really like the idea of it.

Where powerful reasons — for the protection of others, or indeed social policy — cannot be shown as to why people’s freedom should be curtailed or competence should be challenged then the presumption is that they are free and competent individuals. So the burden of proof is not on him to demonstrate his competence but on somebody else to say why on earth his competence should be challenged. Whether you or I would choose death in those circumstances is not the point.

I think it is perfectly intelligible that somebody would prefer death — particularly a formerly very active young man — to continued existence almost totally paralysed.

We can understand why that would be a rational choice to make. For those who think there is an afterlife, it seems to me that the idea that there is anything wrong with ending your life prematurely is absurd because you’re not ending your life on that supposition.

There have been many cases of competent people fearing a particular unpleasant sort of continued existence, wanting to arrange their death in circumstances that they would find more tolerable than allowing death to come upon them willy-nilly. Diane Pretty is a case in point. Although this young man was not dying as Diane Pretty was, it is all a matter of degree. We are all dying. It is just a question of how long it has to be before you regard yourself as dying. I don’t think it is a pre-condition of the right to end your own existence that you have to be dying. If you find life intolerable, then it is intolerable.

The only legitimate reason is not that your life is coming to an end. Very often, your life is intolerable precisely because it isn’t coming to an end.

The question is whether or not the law has any interest in the actions of his family in this case. Fortunately for him, he is beyond the claims of the law.

This seems to have been a very well-thought-out course of action that had the support of his family. It has all the hallmarks of competence and there seems to me no reason to challenge it.

John Harris is Lord David Alliance Professor of Bioethics at the University of Manchester

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