Where once bodies were givens that decisively shaped our identity, now they can be reconstructed if their sexed nature is a hindrance to a sense of psychological well-being. Inevitably this plays into all issues of life. Abortion is considered a right because the baby in the womb can be a hindrance to the happiness of the mother. And it has made euthanasia first plausible and now even desirable. The Swiss assisted suicide pod is only the most obvious example of this.

“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” So opines Orson Welles’s character, Harry Lime, in the movie The Third Man. Well, to the cuckoo clock we can now add the assisted suicide pod that has passed an independent legal review confirming that it conforms with Swiss law.

The advent of assisted suicide is both emblematic of the deepest concerns of contemporary Western culture and of the way in which the taboos of yesteryear are being overthrown at an alarming rate. As to the first, it is clear that personal happiness is now the foundational criterion for judging the morality of acts and institutions. This is not the happiness of earlier generations. When, for example, the Founders subscribed the Declaration of Independence and asserted a right to “the pursuit of happiness,” they assumed this “happiness” had an objective moral shape. They assumed the world possessed such, that it was discoverable, and that happiness, private and public, was found by living life in conformity with it. Happiness today is subjective, not objective.

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