We live surrounded by discourses that repeat to us that freedom consists in “doing with my life what I want.” Under this premise, laws have been erected that present assisted suicide and euthanasia as if they were civilizational conquests. However, Álvaro Roca dismantles this fallacy from its foundations: man is not the absolute owner of his life, because he has not given it to himself. Life is a gift received, not an object manufactured or a car that can be sold, inherited, or sent to the scrapyard. Pretending otherwise is to reduce human existence to a disposable commodity.
From Permission to Absurdity
Modern philosophers like Tooley or Engelhardt have turned “permission” into the cornerstone of their bioethics: if I accept that another takes my life, there is no violation of any right. Roca denounces the trap: one thing is to renounce a material good and quite another is to dispose of one’s own life as if it were just another property. The comparison between a car and a human being reveals the sophism: life has infinite dignity, irreducible to any calculation of convenience or social contract.
The Unavailability of Life
The legal tradition, from Cicero to the Spanish Constitutional Court, recognizes that life cannot be placed in the hands of individual whim. Not even the most radical freedom includes the power to self-destruct. The law does not protect the will to die, but the obligation to live. That is why even in extreme cases—like the hunger strikes of GRAPO prisoners—the State intervened to preserve life through forced feeding. It was not a matter of paternalism, but of recognizing that human dignity does not disappear when the subject despises it.
Euthanasia: The Revolving Door of Suicide and Homicide
Accepting the right to die implies opening the door to the right to kill. St. Augustine pointed it out centuries ago: whoever believes they can take their own life ends up justifying taking that of their neighbor. Euthanasia is nothing more than a delegated suicide: someone must execute what the patient cannot do for themselves. And if it is legitimized that the State or a doctor administer death, what prevents that same logic from being applied to any life considered “undignified”? The slope is as slippery as it is evident: from suicide to homicide, and from compassion to disposal.
The Great Fallacy of the “Right to Death”
Roca insists that neither life nor death belongs to us. Both are given to us, and in that gift lies the dignity that equals us all. Turning death into a right is the height of modern hubris, an attempt to erase the mystery and subject the most sacred thing to the cold logic of the will. It is not about prohibiting for the sake of prohibiting, but about remembering that human freedom is called to safeguard life, not to destroy it.
In Derecho a vivir, Álvaro Roca confronts the culture of death with philosophical and legal arguments that expose its contradictions. A book that challenges believers and non-believers alike, because it reminds us that life is not a conquered right, but a received gift. And that, by denying it, we do not become freer: we become slaves to a freedom without meaning.