This article starts out shaky for me, and never really finds its footing. Consider the following passages:

> On one level, we can ask whether human life is valuable in the sense of having inviolable moral status: life is worth living always and unconditionally.

and,

> One may believe that terminally ill patients ought to stay alive and yet maintain – without inconsistency – that their life is not worth living for them.

An obligation to life, whether one understands that as lives ought not be taken by others for any reason, that everyone alive has an affirmative duty to maintain their lives regardless of their circumstances or both, has nothing to do with whether a life is worth living. It's trivially easy to have an obligation to some task that is broadly, or even unanimously, understood as valueless.

If the claim that...

> If your character and intellect are irreparably corrupt, you should hasten to exit life no matter what other goods, including bodily health, you may happen to enjoy. The reason is not that you do not deserve to live, from the legal or moral point of view, but that such living is bad for you – whether you are aware of it or not.

...is to be evaluated, any idea of life having some "inviolable moral status" must be moot. Not in the sense that it's potentially wrong, but in that is irrelevant. Because whether one believes that this status renders "life is worth living always and unconditionally" or simply that it must always be lived worthwhile or not, then what is the point of examining whether it is in fact, worthwhile, if the answer to the question cannot or need not be acted upon?

If a philosopher concludes that someone's isn't worth living because it blatantly betrays their station in society and the Universe at large, what next? If the person disagrees, the philosopher is free to decree that they pity the person all the more for being somehow "not aware of their misery". But what good does that do? (Although there are some definitions of meaning that posit understanding the self to be better than others plays a role.) If the person agrees, and seeks to end their life, life's inviolable moral status prevents them for having a socially-sanctioned means of doing so. (And should they do so anyway, and the philosopher's involvement is learned of, they will likely have a lawsuit on their hands.) Because of this it's understood that should the person simply tell the philosopher to "get bent," the philosopher has no recourse. So the invocation of life's infinite value due to its "inviolable moral status," and further discussion of same, is a digression that adds nothing to the piece.

Devoting those portions of the article to laying out (and perhaps making the case for) how Mr. Machek believes "the ancient philosophers" would have defined a given person's "station in society and the Universe at large" (and/or how Mr. Machek believes modern people should define them) would have been more useful. Those criteria must relate to the individual in question (or their circumstances), or the second half of the title: "For the ancients, it depends" is inaccurate.

I think this would have been especially useful in the sense that a human has a station in "the Universe at large," given how debatable a point that is. As far as many people are concerned, any given, or even all, human life is absolutely irrelevant in the Universe at large. If the argument here is that this viewpoint is fundamentally unsound to the point that it can render one's life not worth living for holding it, direct support for that, even in brief would have enhanced the article.