 The great merit of the sanctity of life position is that it reflects a common moral sentiment, namely, that killing is wrong in itself. But the sanctity of life view faces several challenges. The first is that its proponents need to show that it is consistent with the justifiability of other forms of killing many have thought defensible, such as killing in wartime or killing in self-defense. Why, in other words, are other forms of killing morally permitted but suicide is not? Second, the sanctity of life view appears to assert that simply being alive, irrespective of the current or expected quality of a person’s life, confers value on a human life. But Peter Singer (1994) and others have argued against the sanctity of life position on the grounds that the value of a continuing life is not intrinsic but extrinsic, to be judged on the basis of the individual’s likely future quality of life. If the value of a person’s continued life is measured by its likely quality, then suicide may be permissible when that quality is low (see  section 3.5).  Third, we may question the inference from the sanctity of life to the moral impermissibility of suicide. Those who engage in suicidal behavior when their futures promise to be extraordinarily bleak do not seem to exhibit insufficient regard for the sanctity of life (Dworkin 1993, 238). Indeed, it may be argued that suicide may affirm the value of human lives in those circumstances where medical or psychological conditions reduce individuals to shadows of their former fully capable selves (Cholbi 2002).