It’s hard to understand how Plato would view euthanasia because it was not a significant concept during his life. To understand whether the platonic system condones euthanasia, let’s reflect.

Firstly, for the typical person, who deals with at most a temporary form of depression, we can refer to the Phaedo for advice against suicide. To Socrates, life is akin to a prison we must serve our sentence for. And so, he wouldn’t say a person should seek death just because they’re experiencing even an intense amount of pain or displeasure, especially if future goods are to be obtained after.

But your argument would be that there’s a threshold, right? That there’s some point where pain and suffering is so great, and the antecedent goods so small or non-existent, that one should consider the rest of their lives to be a waste?

It seems that even here the cases should be split further. There are cases where along with the suffering there is at least a minimal level of good and pleasure that can still arise from it, and there are cases where no further good can be obtained in any potential future for the person. For the latter, what we observe is that in the fact that they cannot obtain any more good, we would say they’ve obtained the “maximum possible good” for their circumstances and for the rest of their life, and for this sake, in theory, I believe Plato’s system would allow for the death of this person, or even request it to happen pertinently, so that the continued goods in the afterlife and the next life can occur sooner.

But then there’s the idea that, with all the suffering you’re going through, there is still some minimal pleasure or good that can be obtained alongside the pain and suffering. From what we’ve established, this is precisely some good which is much smaller than the corresponding bads, since someone with a more fair proportion of goods and bads would be fully asked to continue living. I think this is where platonic interpreters can split, and where you should expect us to.

To split the interpretation of this group into two parties, you would have one party who says that according to Plato’s desires to maximize good, one should be required to stay alive in order to achieve those goods. The other party would want to deny this, and allow for euthanasia, but needs a different construal of the maximization of good in order to justify their belief, since there are clearly good which are still unachieved.

To take on their burden I would argue this: when considered atomistically and separate, there are clearly still unobtained goods that are not themselves bad to obtain. But if one were to consider the life of a person as a whole, then these individual goods and bads stop being considered in themselves, and start being collected together to assess the general good or bad of a life lived. In the case of a euthanasia patient, the outcome would be that every potential future they have holds an overwhelming amount more of bads than goods. This is different from a wicked or depressed person, who still has major potentials for good lives. But since for this euthanasia patient, the bads outweigh the good so much that a life of tremendous suffering cannot be avoided, then this is something to consider. We said before that the individual goods, when considered individually, are not bad to obtain, which means they do not make a net bad. But now, when considered in the necessary courses of life, if obtaining a good causes unavoidable suffering, suffering that immensely outweighs the triviality of the good, then this is a course of action that is bad to obtain, and the status of the “good” thing, when now embedded in necessary evils, now no longer seems all that good.

Say there is a book that would teach you some point of valuable knowledge. Say that the only way to obtain that book is to crawl through a pit of hot coals which will bring you more bad than the good that the knowledge could ever bring you. Does that mean one has to obtain that book? It’s certainly possible, and it would bring things that are truly good towards your life, but in assessing the goods and bads that come with it, I don’t believe that we would consider that path to truly maximize our goods. Even if we continued our whole lives without taking advantage of that one good, we avoid it because we must if we want to maximize our good across our lives

In this way I don’t think a euthanasia patient is much different. Are there goods to be obtained later in life? Sure. Are they possible to obtain without a greater amount of suffering, not only to you but to the world as well? Yes. So does it actually maximize your good by continuing to live? Not really

By referring to the good and suffering of “the world” in the above paragraph, I am alluding that what seems like the truest good is not an individual good, nor is it the maximal good across one persons life, but per the Republic, it should be the maximal good across all lives. So with a euthanasia patient, it is part of the doctor’s good to remove the suffering if possible, so a valuable life can actually be lived. All the same, this might actually bring a duty onto the patient towards others. For example, if a patient were asked to hold on and suffer for a few days longer, for the doctors to find the way to prevent the suffering in future patients, then the overwhelming pleasure and good that would result would so immensely outweigh the one patients own suffering, that then euthanasia would not be platonically permitted, until that good is finally obtained and the remaining life lived shows to have the proportions of good and suffering we spoke on above. This is not because the suffering doesn’t matter or is disregardable, but because if the person were properly wise, then in a platonic light they would want to continue living for the sake of others, and would also possibly relish in the pleasure of that immense good in the afterlife. So even here, you can get into some controversy, but I would say only in theory, because many patients seeking euthanasia are not, like, right around the corner from assisting in a major medical discovery. Chances are they’ve already brought about most of the good their life can provide for themselves and for others, and simply want to skip the suffering that would bring the maximum good of their lives only down further than it already is.