I do not advocate for taking the "easy" way out (I feel terrible for phrasing it this way).

What I say is that, for those cases where professionals have reasonable suspicion that it would happen anyway, offering a more humane option is the right thing to do. It shouldn't be an option to be offered lightly to anyone.

Consent seems like a sufficient limiting principle.

Not to me it doesn't.

For example, here's the story of a disabled Canadian man who "consented" to euthanasia because he thought it was his only alternative to homelessness:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/canada-eut...

In this case he withdrew his "consent" after strangers helped him out financially, but I'm sure there are other cases that didn't end so luckily.

As suicide gets normalised you can expect the concept of "consent" to get expanded even further beyond the bounds of decency.

Do you have any suggestions of a limiting principle, then, or do you just think suicide should never be an available service others can offer and must always be done by oneself?

I'm honestly not sure. I recognize the complexity of the issue, and for what it's worth I used to be totally in favour of legalizing euthanasia until I saw what it looks like in practice in countries that have done it. But my current feeling is that the limiting principle should be we don't do anything in any way to normalise suicide, to tell anyone that suicide is a reasonable solution to their problems, or to give the state the power to end anyone's life. Anything else opens Pandora's box and is sure to lead us down a very dark path.

I think that's a reasonable position. My desire for legalization is more around an edge-case scenario, because I think the "do it yourself" approach for most people isn't actually that difficult if someone is actually committed in the same way they probably should be to demonstrate sufficient consent and have it done by a government-licensed doctor, and so the bodily autonomy arguments aren't really persuasive.

The edge-case is that the person wants to become an early suspended customer of a cryonics organization. Already there have been successful suicides from people who stated they would have preferred to be suspended and have the very small chance of actually getting a second chance at some distant point in the future, but there are various legal obstacles as well as practical ones to that, and so these people are just as assuredly gone forever as anyone else.

Besides being complex, it's also an old issue. You might enjoy reading this case report from 1993 about a suicidal person who wanted to be cryopreserved: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/complete-list-of-alc... He did eventually shoot himself, and unlike others there was at least a brain preservation in the end, but it's pretty far from an ideal one (and no one knows if even ideal preservation is good enough for future reanimation/emulation; I'd bet against it but obviously wouldn't rule it out). More recently, in late 2018 the first person was cryopreserved while using California's new end of life option act to hasten an otherwise painful demise from stage 4 cancer. (Short version: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/complete-list-of-alc... Long version: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/docs/alcor-case-report-a-199...)