Our government is one of limited and separated powers, a design deliberately chosen to secure the promise of self-rule and our liberties and to preve… - Neil Gorsuch

The morally defining nature of intentions can be further illustrated by any number of choices we make in daily living. Most of us might be said, for example, to "allow" the poor in our cities and towns to go hungry because we fail to do enough to help them- spending our time and our money in other pursuits, such as family and friends. We may even fully forsee or know that our failure to do more for the poor will mean that some persons will go hungry. While our choices in such cases indubitably say something about who we are, they do not say the same thing about us as would plotting intentionally to starve others. To seek out to starve another person is to endorse that objective, intelligently choose it, and freely will it. By contrast, the occurrence or nonoccurrence of unintended side effects, even ones we foresee as absolutely inevitable (as with the hungry person left unfed), necessarily say less about our success or failure in effecting our free will and intelligence in the free world.
imply put, we live as human beings in a world where we must make choices and take actions that, even when entirely legitimate and good, necessarily harm or damage or impinge upon other goods. And this happens at both the individual and the societal level. In choosing to spend a weekend with family, it may unavoidably mean that some persons in the soup kitchen will go hungry. In choosing to spend additional money on a prescription drug care program that primarily benefits the elderly, we as a society may know with crystalline clarity that we will not be able to increase spending on education for the young. With so many varied and diverse goods to pursue in this life, we cannot help but make choices in pursuit of legitimate and upright aims that also entail inevitable, if unwanted, negative consequences for other instances of human goods.

This Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment. After all, only the words on the page constitute the law adopted by Congress and approved by the President. If judges could add to, remodel, update, or detract from old statutory terms inspired only by extratextual sources and our own imaginations, we would risk amending statutes outside the legislative process reserved for the people’s representatives. And we would deny the people the right to continue relying on the original meaning of the law they have counted on to settle their rights and obligations.

Of course, the movement for legalizing assisted suicide and euthanasia is at least in part the result of a culture increasingly influenced by strict neutralist concepts of autonomy, itself perhaps the byproduct of the baby boomer generation heading into old age... But when it comes not to defending an abstract "right to die" but to making the very concrete and personal decision whether to die, it seems that something more basic may be in play. We have known since Jefferson's time that old-fashioned suicide is often motivated by mental ailments, depression foremost among these. Yet contemporary assisted suicide and euthanasia advocates have long denied that depression plays any meaningful role in assisted suicide and euthanasia requests. The findings in the Journal of Clinical Oncology now point to a contrary conclusion, suggesting that the desire to seek out any early death at the hands of a doctor is itself not so much the result of a dispassionate and cool response to a poor prognosis as it is the product of diagnosable and treatable depression.