"When your conscience says law is immoral, don't follow it"
About this Quote
It’s a provocation disguised as common sense: if the law and your conscience collide, loyalty belongs to the inner tribunal. Coming from Jack Kevorkian, the message isn’t abstract civil-disobedience cosplay. It’s a defense brief, a recruiting slogan, and a moral dare, forged in the heat of his assisted-death crusade and the media circus that turned a pathologist into a household villain-hero.
The specific intent is to flip the usual hierarchy. Law is typically framed as society’s conscience made visible; Kevorkian insists it can be the opposite: an instrument that preserves suffering because it’s administratively convenient, politically safer, or culturally squeamish. He’s inviting ordinary people - patients, families, clinicians - to see “illegal” not as inherently wrong, but as a label the state uses to enforce a lagging morality.
The subtext is thornier. “Your conscience” sounds empowering, but it also privatizes ethics: it asks us to trust individual conviction over shared rules. That’s liberating when the law is cruel, and dangerous when conscience is just ego in moral costume. Kevorkian banks on the audience granting him credibility as someone who witnessed pain up close, someone whose defiance was tethered to a concrete, bodily reality rather than ideology.
Context matters because assisted suicide sits at the intersection of autonomy, medicine, religion, and power. Kevorkian’s line works because it compresses that entire conflict into a simple question: who owns the final call - the state, the doctor, the family, or the person living the last chapter?
The specific intent is to flip the usual hierarchy. Law is typically framed as society’s conscience made visible; Kevorkian insists it can be the opposite: an instrument that preserves suffering because it’s administratively convenient, politically safer, or culturally squeamish. He’s inviting ordinary people - patients, families, clinicians - to see “illegal” not as inherently wrong, but as a label the state uses to enforce a lagging morality.
The subtext is thornier. “Your conscience” sounds empowering, but it also privatizes ethics: it asks us to trust individual conviction over shared rules. That’s liberating when the law is cruel, and dangerous when conscience is just ego in moral costume. Kevorkian banks on the audience granting him credibility as someone who witnessed pain up close, someone whose defiance was tethered to a concrete, bodily reality rather than ideology.
Context matters because assisted suicide sits at the intersection of autonomy, medicine, religion, and power. Kevorkian’s line works because it compresses that entire conflict into a simple question: who owns the final call - the state, the doctor, the family, or the person living the last chapter?
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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