Yes To Life In Spite of Everything

by Viktor E. Frankl

let us ask ourselves what we have to say about the fact that incurably ill people, especially incurably mentally ill people, have been declared to be unworthy of life solely on the basis of their illness, and have been threatened with destruction and even killed. Because we hear repeatedly that the killing of incurably mentally ill people would be the only justifiable measure that people ‘could still understand’ within an otherwise unacceptable programme of political ideology. That is why we would now like to examine all those reasons that, for the most part, are only the tacit basis for such remarks, and to elucidate them with counter-arguments that are as watertight as possible. Since, primarily, we are talking about whether we have the right to kill incurably mentally ill people whose lives are deemed meaningless, and ‘unworthy of living’, we must first ask, ‘What is meant by incurable?’