Two ancient paradigms of voluntary death and the problem of external sanction in the bioethics of euthanasia

<jats:p>The aim of the article is to prove that the Platonic-Aristotelian prohibition of suicide and the Stoic justification of voluntary death, for all the opposition of their groundings, share the premise that the permissibility of departure from life is certified externally, and that this premise is reproduced in the normative constructions of contemporary euthanasia. The scientific novelty of the study lies in comparing the two ancient paradigms not by the content of the answers they give, but by the source of legitimation of departure, and in testing the coincidence thus revealed against the normative material of currently effective legal orders. As a result, it has been established that the prohibition of suicide rests on a religious-ontological ground in Plato and on a civil-legal ground in Aristotle, whereas the Stoic justification relies on the criterion of the reasonable exit and on the doctrine of indifferents. It is shown that the Stoic criterion is determined not by the will of the agent but by the objective state of affairs. Both paradigms coincide in the premise that the permissibility of departure is certified by an authority external to the person, while diverging on the question of whom life belongs to. The legislation of states which have legalized euthanasia reproduces the same structure: the right to die is nowhere granted as a pure expression of will and is in all cases conditioned upon criteria whose fulfilment is certified by a physician. It is concluded that legalization does not abolish the external authority but replaces it with a medico-legal one.</jats:p>