Matthew Parris, in The Times, today gets one thing very right about the assisted suicide debate underway in the UK right now, and one thing very wrong - at least to my mind.

What he gets right is to worry about the state codification of euthanasia. It's the direction being pursued in Scotland: having an 'Authority to Die' certificate from some government body before proceeding to assisted suicide. It seems a tidy way of ensuring against malign pressures. But it's concerning, not just because from there it is only a short step to state sanctioned killers - who are trained, expert, humane - but also an 'Authority to Live', a certificate those drawing heavily on state funds for their health care will require, to ensure they stay lying unconscious in a hospital bed.

What Parris gets wrong is the notion that suicide is the greatest of all human freedoms. He argues that it is the possibility of suicide that keeps life voluntary, an exercise of will, of choice, of defiance. Read what he says. In this bit of the piece, he sounds infantile to me, like a child who wants to preserve its right to throw all the toys out of the pram. And it's deluded: we don't choose life, we're given it. Then we have to decide what to make of it. And even then, our freedom is constrained, not absolute. The art of living is to flourish amidst limitations.

Hurling the ultimate negation of life against life is not to celebrate freedom. It's tragic. And it's that sense of the tragedy of untimely human death we must hold onto in this debate, whatever you believe about assisted suicide. For without that the value of human life is eroded, and with that we are back on the track that Parris so rightly fears, the state-sanctioned authority to live or die.