Murray N. Rothbard, “The Right to Kill, With Dignity?” (1991)

This is a short polemical political essay. Rothbard intervenes in early-1990s debates over euthanasia, living wills, assisted suicide, medical authority, and health-care rationing by arguing that the “right to die” movement becomes morally and politically indistinguishable from a claimed right to kill once it ceases to require the patient’s consent.

For a long time now we have been subjected to a barrage of pro-death propaganda by left-liberals, and by their cheering squad, left, or modal, Libertarians.

The essay’s central move is to reverse the usual libertarian framing. Rothbard does not begin from the autonomy of a patient choosing death, but from the danger that “choice” will be transferred to doctors, courts, ethicists, insurers, or the state. Consent is therefore the decisive boundary: without it, euthanasia is not mercy but homicide. He states the issue in deliberately stark terms:

For what is compulsory euthanasia but murder, pure and simple?

The concrete occasion is the case of Helga Wanglie, an elderly woman in a persistent vegetative state whose living will favored continued life support. For Rothbard, this case exposes whether the “living will” is really about respecting individual will or about ratifying death when professionals approve it. Her directive is important precisely because it is, in his words, “spunky instead of spineless”: it asks that life be preserved rather than ended.

I have long been queasy about the consensual bona fides of the right-to-diers and have wondered what would happen if somebody wrote a Living Will that was spunky instead of spineless, that insistently favored his own life as against his death.

Rothbard emphasizes that Wanglie’s continued care is privately financed, removing the usual taxpayer-burden argument. This detail lets him frame the doctors’ position not as fiscal necessity but as an assertion of authority over another person’s life.

Note, too, that Helga's medical cost is being covered privately, by private health insurance; Helga is no burden on the taxpayer.

The essay then proceeds as a gallery of adversaries: medical ethicist Steven Miles, professor Oliver Childs, medical economist Harry Schwartz, and Hemlock Society leader Derek Humphry. Rothbard reads their language of “resources,” “burden,” “expense,” and “pointless” treatment as evidence that quality-of-life judgments are being converted into permission to kill. His attack on the medical profession is especially severe because he contrasts its stated vocation of preserving life with its willingness to override a patient’s expressed desire to live.

But what are the medical authorities, whose very profession pledges them to keep patients alive to the best of their ability, advocating here if it is not mere murder?

Rothbard’s conceptual structure is thus simple but forceful: individual consent is liberty; professional or judicial substitution of judgment is coercion; coercive euthanasia is murder. When Humphry suggests that courts arbitrate disputes between families and doctors, Rothbard extends the same objection to government. Courts, no more than physicians, can acquire a rightful power to decide that an unwilling patient should die.

The essay’s relevance lies in its fusion of bioethics with Rothbard’s broader libertarian critique of liberal managerial power. He treats “death with dignity” not as a neutral moral vocabulary but as a euphemism for rule by experts, planners, and humanitarians who claim benevolent motives while overriding individual life. The closing pages broaden the Wanglie case into a culture-war indictment of liberals and “modal” libertarians who, in Rothbard’s view, mistake anti-traditional social positions for personal liberty.

No, the mask is off, and Doctor Assisted Death and Mr. Liberal Death With Dignity, and all the rest of the crew turn out to be simply Doctor and Mister Murder.

The essay ends by attacking the “quality of life” standard itself. Rothbard’s point is not that suffering is unreal, but that once outsiders may decide that another person’s life lacks sufficient quality, the language of compassion becomes a mechanism of domination. His rhetoric is hyperbolic, accusatory, and intentionally shocking, but its underlying argument is consistent: a right to die cannot become a right held by others to declare a person better off dead.