There is little question that assessing motivation for elective death across different cultures poses serious difficulties. But however difficult assessment of motivation might be, it at least is open to the cross-cultural dialogue required by the motives clause of the rationality criterion. If nothing else, the value of human life affords a shared basis for discussion of its deliberate abandonment. Moreover, however difficult the application problems considered in Chapter 4 might be, they also are open to cross-cultural dialogue. In short, motivational assessment is amenable to the most intuitive treatment: we can talk about it. We can also talk about the application issues it raises. What we need to discuss in this chapter is still more difficult. Assessment of elective-death reasoning is harder than of motivation because the problems it poses are partly about the very standards used in the assessment. And the standards at issue are fundamental: they are what determine whether a claim or belief or premise is true and whether reasoning is sound. The greater difficulty, then, is due to the need first to find common ground to discuss differences about what standards are appropriate to use in the assessment of elective-death reasoning.

As noted earlier, there is a significant contemporary relativistic inclination to consider reason and rationality historical in nature, and if reason and rationality are deemed historical, the standards for sound reasoning and the truth of beliefs or premises are in effect relativized to culture by being made historically contextual.