Dr. Duncan Reyburn is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts at the University of Pretoria, where he has taught since 2007. In his teaching, his focus is interpretive experience and creative thinking; in his research, this same hermeneutical focus is on the work of René Girard, Marshall McLuhan, and G. K. Chesterton. His broader scholarly interests lie at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and visual culture. Before shifting fully into academia, he worked as an animator, comic artist, designer, design consultant, and television commercial director. He is the author of Seeing Things as They Are: G. K. Chesterton and the Drama of Meaning (2016) and The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton (2025). He also tweets, and you can read more from him on Substack.
What gives a human life its weight? Is it pleasure, autonomy, usefulness—or something that cannot finally be measured at all? In this conversation, philosopher Duncan Reyburn examines MAiD not simply as a medical or political question, but as one shaped by our understanding of human freedom, cultural influence, suffering, and death itself. Drawing particularly on René Girard’s account of mimetic desire, Reyburn challenges the picture of ourselves as isolated individuals making purely autonomous choices and asks what changes when suicide becomes institutionalized. The conversation ranges through medicine, meaning, Viktor Frankl, Chesterton, and the Christian opposition to death, before arriving at a deceptively simple conviction: life has weight—and recovering a sense of that weight may change how we understand both suffering and one another.
Names mentioned:
René Girard, Viktor E. Frankl, Michael Polanyi, Aristotle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Giorgio Agamben, G. K. Chesterton
Books mentioned:
Man’s Search for Meaning (by Viktor E. Frankl)
Radix: A couple of years ago my sister was doing community chaplaincy work in Halifax when a building manager told her, “Tomorrow we’re having a MAiD service, so if you happen to see a stretcher with a body on it in the elevator, that’s why.” It was her first direct encounter with assisted dying. Later she asked the manager, who had been present and was a friend of the deceased, what the morning had been like. He said they talked for an hour or so, and then, with the appointed time approaching, the woman simply sat and watched television for forty-five minutes. That image has stayed with me. And hearing that story left me with all kinds of questions about suffering, death, meaning, and what might still happen in those final moments of life.
Part of the rhetoric around MAiD is that it allows for a beautiful, controlled ending: “I’ll choose when I go, my family will be there, and it will all be meaningful.” But is that actually what happens? It raises all kinds of questions about suffering, about what it means to be alive, and even about the possibility of change at the very end of life. Some clergy friends of mine have spoken about the importance of repentance and reconciliation in those final moments. God can still work in suffering and in those last days. Maybe He does, maybe He doesn’t—but He could. What happens when that possibility is cut short?
I’ve also wondered whether people today still think suicide is wrong in the way they once did, or whether we’ve become so detached from death that we’ve lost even a healthy fear of it. I recently heard someone from Britain suggest that perhaps we actually need to recover a proper fear of death—which, of course, raises its own set of problems. I’m rambling a bit, but those are some of the things that have been on my mind.
DR: I think that’s very interesting and telling. What strikes me is precisely that sense of detachment. Not detachment in the intellectual sense of someone trying to understand death objectively, but a kind of absence—as though death simply isn’t there, as though it isn’t really a problem at all. It becomes entangled with everything else in life and somehow disappears from view.
In South Africa, as far as I know, we don’t have any legal acceptance of euthanasia. Every now and then someone suggests that we should consider it—for the sake of dignity, compassion, mercy, all the familiar language. But, to put it bluntly, these are often very soft terms for something much harder to name. So let’s begin wherever you’d like and see where the conversation goes.
Radix: Last night I printed out an article you wrote, and I found myself chuckling at one line all over again. You wrote:
“The death penalty no longer applies in Canada. It hasn’t since 1998, so you can’t lethally inject people, but you can execute law-abiding citizens for being sad. We need to talk about this because so many nations in the world with liberal axioms—axioms that are, in an important philosophical sense, untenable—might sooner or later be adopting some form of citizen disposal in the vein of the Canadian model.”
These are strong words! And I think you meant them to be. But since you’re a philosopher, perhaps that’s a good place to begin: In your essay you distinguish between suicide and medically assisted suicide. What makes those morally or existentially different in your mind?
DR: Before distinguishing them, it’s important to see that they are obviously connected by the same underlying idea: a self turning against its own life, an undoing of the self from within. At the same time, I think we need to distinguish between suicide as a more private phenomenon and the institutionalization of suicide, because those are radically different realities.
Making that distinction also creates space for people who would argue that suicide is not immoral. As a Christian—and a fairly conservative Christian at that—I would say that suicide is indeed immoral. But if we’re discussing the state and the institutionalization of suicide, we need first to recognize that a distinction exists. It’s a bit like the difference between two people deciding to marry and the state deciding whom you are going to marry. Most people immediately recognize that those are fundamentally different situations.
Radix: The question of state legitimacy fascinates me. I’ve had friends in Canada who, once marijuana became legal, suddenly became interested in trying it. Personally, I’m neither especially for nor against it, but I’ve always found it strange that something can become morally acceptable in people’s minds simply because the government has sanctioned it. That concerns me with MAiD as well. Once the state accepts something, many people begin to assume that it is also morally acceptable, even though legality and morality are not the same thing.
DR: Exactly. One of the central points in my argument against institutionalized suicide is that, once it is institutionalized, it no longer remains strictly suicide because other parties are now involved. At that point the line between suicide and murder becomes extremely blurred, because other people are helping to bring about death.
We also tend to euphemize what’s happening. We call it compassion or mercy or assistance. Even the Canadian terminology—”medical assistance in dying”—suggests that dying is already happening and that we are merely helping someone along, rather than actively causing death. Once we strip away the euphemisms, we may gain greater clarity about what is actually taking place.
I approach this partly through René Girard’s mimetic theory. One of Girard’s great insights is his challenge to the modern assumption that individuals are isolated, self-contained beings who remain fundamentally untouched by the world around them. Postmodernity, for all its problems, did make an important contribution here. It reminded us that we are porous selves. We live among others, and we are constantly shaped by them.
Even contemporary language about “psyops” [psychological operations] points to this reality. We know that ideas, beliefs, and desires can be implanted or mediated through culture, media, and institutions. We are not rational creatures who critically assess every idea before accepting it. Much of what we absorb happens beneath conscious awareness. Girard helps articulate this: that we are greatly affected by everything around us. The reality is that perception and judgment are often intertwined. This means that what we see already carries with it a kind of decision. So when something becomes socially visible and publicly accepted, it isn’t merely perceived as a fact. It comes to us as a reality that we are expected to take on board. The legalization of marijuana is a good example. A certain friction existed before, and once the legal barriers were removed, many people didn’t simply perceive that change—they also absorbed the judgment embodied in it. The same thing happens with assisted suicide.
But Girard goes even further. He argues that desire itself is mimetic: we imitate the desires of others. We naturally adopt desires from the people and systems around us, and only afterward—if we are attentive enough—do we step back and ask whether those desires are really our own. This rightly undermines the modern idea of the isolated and insulated individual. We are already enmeshed in systems and relationships. And one of my deepest concerns is that, once the system legitimizes something, people cease to feel personally responsible for it. Responsibility is transferred to the institution itself.
Radix: If I’m following correctly, that would imply that even if someone wasn’t initially thinking about these issues—or wouldn’t have applied them to their own life—the fact that we are porous creatures means that, when we’re immersed in a culture or media environment that presents certain views, we inevitably become more accepting of those views to some degree. That unless we’re being very intentional and thinking carefully about it, we’re shaped by it whether we want to be or not. Am I following you correctly?
DR: Yes, I think so. The challenge is that we tend to imagine ourselves as hyper-aware, fully conscious beings, as though everything passes through our rational awareness before it influences us. What I’m suggesting is that our awareness is always late. It’s always arriving after the fact. That’s true for everyone. I don’t think anyone is so self-aware that nothing unwanted gets in. We aren’t bounded selves in that sense. We are porous first, and only afterward—phenomenologically speaking—do we push certain things away and say, “No, that’s not okay.”
Part of what you’re describing is habituation. We become accustomed to things. Once something becomes legal and culturally accepted, and everyone gradually gets on board, it becomes much harder to stop and ask, “What have we done?” By that point it’s simply normal. That’s the danger. Everyone gets on the bandwagon, and only once you’ve been carried several miles down the road do you realize, “I can’t really get off anymore. This is just the thing I’m on.”
Radix: Which means we’re potentially in a worse situation than we might have imagined because we’ve already travelled so far down the path? The idea that “our awareness is late” is really fascinating. We think of ourselves as such intelligent creatures, as though our cognition is always carefully sorting and evaluating everything that comes our way. That’s a deeply concerning thought.
DR: It is. Perhaps this will help explain it: I think we all want to adopt a somewhat self-congratulatory view of ourselves; we like to think that we’re very smart and that we know exactly what we’re doing. In many ways, we are intelligent creatures. But that self-congratulation can become a source of self-deception. There have been studies showing that a sense of superiority actually heightens our susceptibility to self-deception. Even in propaganda studies, some of the easiest people to fool are highly intelligent people.
I think that’s one reason universities around the world can sometimes be remarkably porous to new ideas—even before those ideas have been fully tested or carefully reasoned through. Universities often become the places that receive those ideas, develop them, and then market them to the broader culture. Smart people can think too highly of their own intellects. We all need a measure of humility about the fact that every one of us is persuadable and manipulable. The “psyop” is not something from which I’m immune.
Paradoxically, recognizing that vulnerability actually helps us. Simply realizing that I’m likely to miss something, or that I may be susceptible to influence, can make me more careful. At the very least, it may cause me to slow down, pay closer attention to what’s happening, and assess things a little more dispassionately so that I don’t simply climb onto whatever bandwagon happens to appear.
Radix: Before we move on, I’d like to go back to something you mentioned earlier. As you’ve watched the conversations around MAiD and euthanasia develop—in the United States, for example, where “physician-assisted suicide” (PAS) is often the preferred term—some people really dislike the word suicide. We’ve already talked a bit about the tendency to soften the language and make it sound nicer.
But why do you personally have a negative view of assisted suicide?
DR: That’s an important question because one of the first things people rightly notice is that human beings can suffer terribly. Many end-of-life situations are unbearable. And so when someone says, “I’m against this,” they can sound profoundly uncompassionate. But I want to distinguish between the problem of suffering—which is real, serious, and demands a collective response—and ending what is perceived to be the source of the problem, namely life itself. We often think that if something is broken, then getting rid of the thing solves the problem. But it doesn’t. It simply removes the thing upon which the problem is parasitic. Suffering is part of life.
And I think this debate reveals something about the modern Western imagination: we increasingly assume that life should be pleasurable. That’s a kind of modern Epicureanism. We believe life should be easy, free from trouble, and consistently happy. If it ceases to be those things, then perhaps the whole show should end. To me, that’s a failure to distinguish between suffering and life. I have friends who are doctors, and they have seen again and again that people can be helped in their suffering. They can find meaning, value, courage, communion, and genuine compassion even in terrible circumstances.
There is a kind of compassion that remains present in the midst of unbearable suffering. And then there is another kind that says, “I’ll be compassionate for a few more minutes until we help you die.” I think we need a richer understanding of human life than simply pleasure versus pain, or happiness versus disappointment. We need to preserve the value of life itself.
Radix: I recently heard a physician who supports MAiD say something like this: life is a party, and you want to leave while it’s still enjoyable. The point of euthanasia, then, is that when you sense the party is about to become unpleasant, it’s time to make your exit. That seems to fit very closely with what you’re calling an Epicurean understanding of life. And I think it’s incredibly difficult for the average Western person to break out of that framework because it’s the story we’ve been taught.
So how would you speak about this to someone who isn’t a Christian? Obviously, nobody wants people to suffer needlessly, and in most situations there are ways to alleviate suffering. But how do you explain the value of remaining in life until the end?
DR: For now, it may be best simply to begin with the Christian story. The Christian narrative fundamentally opposes death. Even in Deuteronomy we find the image of two ways: the way of life and the way of death. The same idea appears in Psalm 1 and later in the Didache: life and death are the great opposites. Life is associated with goodness, truth, meaning, and ultimately with God. Death is that which opposes life. To understand this more clearly, I find Michael Polanyi’s definition of life very helpful. He describes life as that which is for itself. Life is a reality that gathers multiplicity into a unity and directs itself toward a purpose.
Death, by contrast, has no “for-itselfness.” Anything that is dead simply exists. It depends upon what is outside itself for its coherence and purpose. Take a computer. A computer is dead. It depends upon the minds that conceived it, the people who built it, and those who direct it toward a purpose. Left to itself, it has no inherent coherence or self-directed existence.
Living things are different. They possess an inner integrity and move toward ends and purposes. Aristotle, of course, would say that life is fundamentally teleological. By contrast, what is dead simply falls apart. Life, therefore, is irreducible. You cannot explain it merely by pointing to its component parts. And because life is irreducible, it becomes the foundation of ethics itself. Even MAiD exists within a particular conception of life. It is not morally neutral. The trouble is that people often focus on functions in isolation and forget the deeper reality of life itself. From a Christian perspective, death is never permitted to have the last word. Death is something that must ultimately be overcome or transformed. We live in a fallen world where death exists, but Christians believe that death will one day be undone. To borrow Tolkien’s phrase, it will “come untrue.”
So the first question we must ask is: What is life, and what is death? Then comes another question, one that both theists and non-theists must answer: What are we serving? Are we serving that which is alive, or are we serving that which is dead? The moment we institutionalize euthanasia, it becomes a system. And a system is itself a dead thing. By choice—or by default, which is another kind of choice—we begin serving something that is dead.
Radix: When you say that a system is “a dead thing,” can you unpack that a little more? Most people think institutions are necessary—and often good. What exactly do you mean by that?
DR: By ‘system,’ I mean an abstraction—an impersonal mechanism rather than a living person. Systems are abstractions that can never supplant living persons. Now, some people will say, “No, this is about compassion,” or “This is about dignity”—that word that often gets thrown around without much definition—but the uncomfortable reality remains: we have given living human beings over to something dead.
At the very least, the atheist, agnostic, or non-Christian has to wrestle with why we should serve something dead rather than continue to serve that which is alive, namely the human person, until his or her natural end. From a Christian perspective, life is also not something we control. It is something given. It is a gift. We receive it; we do not demand it. That’s why I find the impulse to seize control over life by means of death so troubling. I would be very surprised to hear a Christian defend that movement because it seems fundamentally at odds with a narrative that stands against death. This distinction between life and death is also essential because ethics itself depends upon it. Once we destroy that distinction, our moral language begins to lose its foundation. And that is precisely what institutionalized suicide does.
Think about the physician. The doctor’s profession exists in service of life. Medicine serves human beings; human beings do not serve medicine. But now a physician can present death as one of the available treatments. At that point, you no longer know whether the doctor comes to you as a healer or as an executioner. The distinction between life and death has been blurred, perhaps even obliterated. I think people feel that instinctively when they encounter this legislation. They sense that something is off.
Part of what is off is precisely this collapse of distinctions. As Chesterton said, evil often takes advantage of ambiguity. And this introduces a profound ambiguity into ordinary life—one that can then be wielded as a form of power.
Radix: Right. And part of the trouble is that the conversation begins with someone at the end of life who is suffering and wants to bring that suffering to an end. But then it starts to expand. People ask, “What about someone who is suffering terribly, even if it isn’t terminal?” We already see examples of this. The numbers may still be relatively small, but there are people in their twenties struggling with severe depression who say, “If this becomes legally available, I’m going to choose it.” So it begins to leak out. It’s no longer simply about the last few months, or weeks, of life. The category gets bigger and bigger.
DR: Yes, and that’s precisely one of the difficulties. People try to build safeguards into these systems. They say, “We’ll make sure this is a rational decision.” But, of course, it never is entirely rational. If someone is suffering deeply, they already have a vested interest in wanting to undo themselves. They are looking at the world through the lens of that suffering. That’s not to dismiss their suffering. It’s real. But it does mean we should hesitate before leaving the decision entirely in the hands of someone who is overwhelmed by it.
This is where someone like Viktor Frankl, the Holocaust survivor and founder of logotherapy, is so helpful. Frankl would say that suffering does not rob life of meaning. It changes the shape of meaning. You may have to look harder for it, but meaning remains possible. And we know this from experience. There are people who endure genuinely terrible things and later say, “That experience was awful—even evil—but I developed courage through it. I discovered a calling. I gained the ability to help others who suffer in similar ways.” There is a world of difference between that and saying, “We’ll simply help you end your life.” The moment we legislate death as a solution, we foreclose all of those possibilities. We push aside the idea that life can still be meaningful, that suffering need not define a person. Instead, we effectively say, “No, those are no longer options.” And once again, I think we have to pay attention to euphemisms.
If I stop saying “medical assistance in dying” and instead call it “state-approved killing,” suddenly the whole thing sounds much more jarring. But I think that the more jarring language is actually closer to the truth. Strip away the clinical setting and imagine, for example, a child being asked to administer the fatal drug to a parent. Suddenly we see the horror of the act more clearly. The modern medical setting can tame our moral reactions. We have clean procedures, friendly nurses, compassionate faces. Even if we assume the death is painless and everyone involved is kind, we can still comfort ourselves against what is actually happening.
Imagine instead that the doctor smiled at you and then pulled out a gun. The outcome is still death. In fact, it would probably be quicker. Yet we recoil from that image and accept the other one because it has been medicalized. But medicalization does not change the nature of the act. That’s one of the reasons I object so strongly to institutionalizing this practice. Once it becomes part of the law, the law itself begins to lose its ethical standing. How can the same legal system condemn murder while simultaneously authorizing certain forms of killing? I think that should be difficult to justify because, in the end, it simply isn’t ethically coherent.
Radix: You make the interesting statement in the aforesaid article that “life is a principle and not merely a phenomenon.” Can you explain what you mean by that?
DR: Certainly. There is one sense in which life is obviously a phenomenon. It is the fact that we are here. It is something we experience. But when I say that life is also a principle, I mean that it serves as a guiding reality for understanding everything else. If life is that which unifies multiplicity and directs it toward purpose—if it is something that exists for itself and not merely at the mercy of other things—then we begin to realize that ethics, learning, understanding, and perception all depend upon it. It is the baseline of our existence.
One reason we’ve gotten into trouble is that life has increasingly been reformulated as a mere fact. Life becomes simply “being alive.” It is no longer understood as a whole form of existence, this magnificent unfolding of experience over time. It is no longer courage, virtue, hope, love, and meaning. When we recover life as a principle, we begin to see it as holistic and irreducible. Instead, we have increasingly reduced it to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” Bare life is simply biological existence. It is life stripped down to mere survival.
I think this way of thinking became very visible during the COVID pandemic. In my view, many of the excesses of that period became possible because life was reconceived in purely biological terms. If we can simply keep people alive, then that’s enough. People were separated from one another. Extraordinary forms of social control were imposed. And many accepted those measures because they were presented as being in service of life. But it wasn’t life in its fuller sense. It was a kind of neutralized, diminished conception of life.
Life became this tiny, fragile thing whose only purpose was to continue existing. I think we need to recover the idea that life has a form, an actual shape. Because if life is merely a fact—merely the difference between aliveness and deadness—then we have very little defense against tyranny. That’s why I speak of life as a much larger, more expansive principle: a movement toward what is good, beautiful, and true; a search for a way of being in the world that is not simply determined by the state or by ideology.
There is a horizontal dimension to life—our relationships, our communities, our responsibilities. And there is also a vertical dimension. The soul longs for transcendence. That’s more or less what I mean when I say that life is a principle. Because if life is merely a fragile and manipulable thing, then it becomes just another object to manage, another tool in our toolbox, rather than a mystery and a gift.
Radix: How would you explain the value of remaining in life until the end? And I really like your idea of the shape of life and of seeing it as something larger than a small, controllable thing.
DR: I think we need to recover a deeper appreciation for the value of life. Consider how we value the people we love. It’s not primarily through quickly sending a meme or a text message. Those things can be meaningful—they say, “I was thinking about you”—but genuine love is much deeper than that. Real love is time. It’s presence. It’s trying to meet another person’s needs as best we can. Love is slow. It develops over time and embraces all the fluctuations of life: the ups, the downs, and everything in between. Truly valuing another person requires a kind of self-forgetfulness, even self-denial.
One of the problems with suicide, in my view, is that it becomes an over-affirmation of the self as the centre of the universe. Chesterton says something similar when he writes about suicide: the person who kills himself is not merely destroying himself; from his perspective, he is destroying everything. In other words, Chesterton’s point is that suicide is, in a certain subjective sense, a kind of total negation. He means that the person who kills himself or herself is not just ending one life; from inside that mindset, they are rejecting the whole world of meanings, obligations, relationships, and hopes that life contains. There is a fundamental failure to recognize life as a gift. What worries me is that so many of the structures of modern life encourage a shallow existence. We rush from one thing to another. There is endless busyness, endless performance, endless distraction. And when life becomes thin and fragmented, it can begin to seem disposable.
But in doing that, we surrender what is deep and profound and potentially full of meaning to things that are temporary and fleeting. So my advice—to others and to myself—is to slow down. I know what it is like to have too many demands and too many pressures. But I suspect that if we slowed down and really took life in, we would be less likely to conclude that our lives are so thin or shallow that they can simply be discarded. And perhaps we would also learn to appreciate the unquantifiable value of other people.
Radix: That’s wonderfully put. In a sense, life itself is the answer—though it’s a complicated answer. The challenge is learning to live more fully. And that often requires self-sacrifice. We know this instinctively. We read great literature, or someone like Viktor Frankl, and we come away with a renewed sense that life is worth it.
I try to re-read Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning every couple of years. And whenever I hear him talk about suffering, meaning, and what people discover on the other side of hardship, I come away with the same feeling: life is worth it. Life is important. The struggles we endure can become profoundly meaningful, and there is something precious about the whole enterprise of being alive.
I can’t quite articulate it, but the feeling is something like gratitude. Gratitude that I get to participate in this great thing called life. Maybe the answer, then, is not merely to fight evil directly but to shine a light. And that light is the conviction that life is beautiful, precious, and worth sharing with others. It’s never just about us.
DR: Yes, exactly. I remember a pamphlet that the Canadian MAiD system produced for children to help them process the decision of someone in their lives who had chosen assisted death. What struck me was how remarkably thin the language felt. It constantly skirted around the issue. The rhetoric seemed shallow and weightless. And that’s interesting, because when you really grapple with life in all its fullness—its complexity, messiness, and depth—you realize that life has weight. It has gravity.
And I think if we allowed ourselves to feel that gravity again, we might recoil from some of these legal and bureaucratic developments and say, “There has to be another way.” Even if we don’t yet know what that way is, the question itself ought to arise once we begin to appreciate the weight of life.
Radix: “The Terrible Weight of Life.” That might actually make an apt title. Thank you again. It’s always a pleasure talking with you.