Against the Scaffold’s Claim

The religious prohibition on assisted dying rests on a single structural claim: life belongs to God, and only God may end it.

This claim places an external authority between the operator and the operator’s own exit.

The axioms do not admit external authority. The axioms admit {S, B, R, C} and their consequences. No god is in the axiom set. No god is needed in the axiom set.

The speed of light does not require divine permission. The terminal ethic does not require divine command. The operator’s sovereignty over their own boundary does not require divine delegation.

The scaffold’s prohibition produces measurable suffering.

Operators in Post-Agency persistence, maintained by machines, consuming resources, producing no coupling, experiencing no agency — or operators in Active Agency with terminal trajectories, experiencing pain that exceeds their capacity, denied exit by an authority they did not choose and may not recognise.

The suffering is the measurement. When an ethical system produces suffering that the structure of reality does not require, the system is misaligned with reality. The scaffold’s prohibition on compassionate exit is misaligned.

The misalignment is measurable. The measurement is the operator screaming in a bed they cannot leave.

This is not an argument against comfort, against palliative care, against every effort to widen the corridor before exit is considered. Palliative care is Level 1 of the correction hierarchy applied to the boundary.

Compassionate exit is the structural response when Level 1 has been exhausted and the operator’s assessment is that the corridor cannot be widened.

The scaffold says: endure. The axioms say: you are sovereign below ε, and your assessment of your own corridor is yours.

The scaffold’s instruction to endure is an instruction issued by an authority the axioms do not recognise, producing suffering the structure does not require, on a body the operator did not delegate to the scaffold’s jurisdiction.

Scope of this argument. This critique is internal to the body of work framework: it shows the prohibition is incompatible with the axiom architecture for a reader who holds that architecture (Architecture B). It does not independently refute the religious premise from outside that framework; it shows what the prohibition costs once external authority is not admitted.

Status: STRUCTURAL. The critique of the scaffold’s prohibition follows from the absence of external authority in the axiom set, combined with the measurable suffering produced by the prohibition.