 Perhaps Foot’s most penetrating article on applied ethics is her “Euthanasia” (1977). Foot defines euthanasia as a killing that is for the good of the individual in question, and she asks whether such an act can ever be permissible. One central question here is whether it can ever be good for an individual to be deprived of his life, and hence one of Foot’s central purposes is to determine what sort of a good life is for a person. She rejects the narrowly hedonistic view that the value of life is determined by the balance of pleasure versus pain it promises. On her view, life is often still a good to someone who is suffering and who is likely to continue in such a state. Yet she also argues that merely being alive without suffering is not a good (1977 [VV 42]). What is of value, on her view, is the ordinary human life that contains at least a minimum of “basic human goods”, which include: 