Professor Richard Huxtable:

The huge existential question arises at this stage. I will not be able to answer it fully. The main thing I am doing in my evidence and in that article and various books is laying out the sheer existence of these different views. One can frame and express them in different ways. I readily concede the Senator's points. Some people would say that what is intrinsically valuable for life is a life of good quality and what is intrinsically harmful or devalues a life might be suffering, pain, distress and so on, whereas others would say the instrumental value lies in life in and of itself. I will further complicate things with two further points. The first is that I was trying to give a snapshot of the types of clusters of views that are out there and they will be expressed differently. The second point to note, which muddies the waters even further, is the sanctity of life position. If we take that as classically stated, which tends to be in Judaeo-Christian thinking and particularly in Roman Catholic thinking, for example, the sharp focus there is on the intentional ending of life, whether by action or omission. If we then start to explore what is meant by intention, we will realise there are limits. We may, for example, be able to foresee death as an outcome of our behaviour, provided we do not intend it. Things get much murkier much more quickly. I will not be able to resolve this issue but I readily take the Senator's point. There are different ways of expressing the clusters of broadly competing values that are out there.