Life & Mortality Quote by Jack Kevorkian

Kevorkian’s provocation here isn’t really about the death penalty; it’s about ownership of moral authority. By invoking Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, he tries to relocate a brutal modern policy inside the polished marble hall of “serious philosophy,” laundering a taboo stance through canonical names. The move is classic Kevorkian: dare the listener to dismiss him as a crank when he’s speaking in the register of a seminar room.

The careful hedging matters. “I will admit” frames the position as reluctant honesty, not bloodlust. “Would seem appropriate” keeps the claim at arm’s length, suggesting he’s describing an ethical inevitability rather than advocating a program. That ambiguity is strategic. Kevorkian spent his public life arguing that killing can be mercy, that medicalized death can be moral. Here he flips the valence: yes, there are deaths that feel like justice. The subtext is a demand for consistency. If society insists on treating some deaths as legitimate, why is assisted suicide singled out as uniquely monstrous?

Context sharpens the edge. In the 1990s, Kevorkian became a cultural lightning rod for euthanasia debates, prosecuted and vilified while capital punishment remained broadly tolerated in American life. This line exploits that hypocrisy, but it also risks sounding like he’s trading compassion for punishment. He’s not trying to become a law-and-order conservative; he’s trying to expose how selective our moral squeamishness is, and who gets to decide which kinds of killing count as civilized.