SAVES is not affiliated with Exit International / Dr Philip Nitschke and opposes the public availability of a 'peaceful pill'.

As guest speaker at the November 2005 public meeting Professor Graham Nerlich explained why he strongly supports SAVES’ aims. He spoke of what he believes it means to ‘lead a life’, and what happens when one can no longer do so. In a candid discussion of his boyhood Graham recounted how his ‘elders and betters’ believed in God, but that he found he could not. Instead he understood Sunday school as a game played in the context of myth or legend. He experienced the beginnings of philosophical thought at a young age, having being reproved as an ‘unbeliever’. He came to understand that good cannot be delivered solely by commandments, and that ethics is, and must be, created with the help of others; but through mutual guidance rather than through blind obedience.

Anyone who shares this view realises what it means to ‘lead a life’, a uniquely human capacity. We are, and should be the ‘moral captains’ of our own lives, just as Socrates was in arguing that the unexamined life was not worth living. In fact Socrates chose to die rather than face exile from Athens, the city that was his life.

Our life is our own work of moral art and when we lose the ability to lead a life our world collapses into mere existence; pain, ethical misery, humiliation and squalor. Professor Nerlich argued that it is therefore profoundly important to have the choice to ‘bow out’ in our own way; the final choice in ‘leading a life’.