I know full well from my profession that if a building’s structure is flawed from its foundation, it doesn’t matter how aesthetically pleasing the facade is: the building will eventually collapse. These days, society is celebrating the world’s first face transplant performed using tissue from a person whose death was carried out through “euthanasia” (a lovely euphemism). It’s being sold to us as a scientific triumph; I experienced it with genuine terror.

We are perverting the very anthropology of the human being. To the person who suffers, the system now offers a poisoned escape: validating their idea that their life is worthless, but that their death, on the other hand, is valuable.

Immanuel Kant said that man exists as an end in himself and not merely as a means to be used by this or that will. Yet, the desperate are offered the false illusion that their death will contribute to “saving other lives.” This is utilitarianism at its most crude. By what criteria do we decide that the life of the recipient is worth more than that of the donor? Because one is healthy and the other sick? Because one has hope and the other has lost it? If we accept that only the strong, the healthy, or the “useful” deserve to live, we are engaging in a pure exercise in eugenics.

It’s chilling to learn that the operation was planned in advance; that there was time to coordinate the surgery with the scheduled and assisted suicide. In that interval, instead of a radical intervention to restore hope to the one who wanted to die, there was a logistical dismemberment. It’s the transformation of the patient into merchandise, under the protection, of course, of the law.

Because, speaking of the law, how is it that there’s no debate? How is it that the absolute illegality of using the body of a suffering person who has decided to end their life to improve the lives of others is not questioned? Similarly, it’s unthinkable to pay the deceased’s family for donated organs, as this becomes an incentive to seek death when life appears unproductive. If we allow euthanasia to become a source of revenue for the healthcare system, we are creating a perverse incentive. What prevents a state, always in need of cost savings, from subtly pushing the most vulnerable, the poorest, or the most isolated toward suicide (excuse me, euthanasia) under the pretext of the “common good”?

We have long coexisted with medical graduates—not doctors—who readily accept the role of administrative executioners. When physicians abandon their commitment to protecting life and forgo the  principle of first, do no harm,  instead wielding the logistics of a planned execution, medicine ceases to be the art of healing and becomes a technique for managing biological resources. This is what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”: the capacity of a bureaucratic system to commit atrocious acts simply as a well-executed technical task.

Have we already built our own market of despair? If death becomes “useful” to the system because it provides organs or saves costs, the state stops striving to offer reasons to live: after all, the “relief of suffering” for some may result in an improved quality of life for others… or not? Why invest in excellent treatments or in combating the loneliness of our patients if their planned death is more “profitable” when viewed from a slightly broader perspective?

Not all advancement is progress. If reconstructing someone’s face means destroying the essence of medicine and the intrinsic value of every life—however broken it may be—the price we are paying is our own humanity. Life is not something that can be valued according to its yield or its capacity to be recycled. Either life has absolute value, or we enter a market where the limit will be set simply by whoever has the power—or the money—to decide who is useful and who is not. And we all know what the next step is; I don’t need to explain it.