Abstract
In hospice and home care, patients begun to choose how to die by refusing some treatment that resulted in prolonging life in an unbearable distress. For the purpose, "the right to die"had been introduced based on the right of self-determination. Mill JS wrote, "Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign", which was a typical antecedent of self-determination. Another new problem arose here. If the individual had the right of self-determination, he might be able to insist on the right to kill oneself when he was in an unbearable psychological distress. Here, "the right to kill oneself"was not only insisted on, but some doctors even assisted suicide by prescribing lethal drugs or by using"suicide machine". In this article, three medical states (persistent vegetative state, terminal state and suicide) had been compared and discussed to formulate"the right to kill oneself". It was pointed out that there was an important distinction between"the right to kill oneself"that was done as a kind of medical practice, and"the freedom to die"that was the inviolability of privacy from medicine. It was concluded that"the right to die"was not"the right to choose one's death", but it was a right to choose the way of dying when"the elimination of the patient as a subject"clearly existed because the death was biologically urgent and inevitable by the disease process itself. The difference between euthanasia and assisted suicide was discussed from the formulation mentioned above.
