A decision by a wealthy Guernsey resident to end his own life and have it recorded by the BBC for national broadcast will have surprised and shocked many islanders. But that act will also have the support of many others who feel that the law on this most sensitive of subjects is currently inadequate.

As we reported yesterday, not only was the assisted suicide a very conscious act, it was, according to his friends, a calculated part of the campaign to get greater acceptance of the individual’s right to select the time of their passing.

Legally, ethically and morally this is a hugely difficult area. And when any religious dimension is brought into the debate it gets even harder to shed light on the subject.

For many, however, the issue is likely to be much more clear-cut: when life becomes unbearable through chronic and progressive illness, should an individual simply be forced to endure it?

While the arguments for and against are infinitely more complex than that, people almost instinctively reduce it to the single matter of limiting suffering and are thus almost intuitively supportive of assisted suicide.

When someone has a profoundly debilitating condition, knows the debasing and dehumanising way in which it will play out, and has rationalised the consequences with loved ones, a draught of something clinically guaranteed to draw the inevitable to an earlier conclusion is a logical choice.

There are clearly many other objections that can be raised to that ‘logic’ but for an increasing number of people in an increasingly secular society, that ability to choose should be theirs by right.

Until legislators catch up with that outlook, it will fall to campaigners like Sir Terry Pratchett and others to try to force the issue, no matter how uncomfortable that may be for the rest of us.

More uncomfortable, however, is the current situation where exercising that choice is available only to those with sufficient means to circumvent the current regulations and who, as a result, have to act sooner rather than later while they can still travel to Switzerland.

That does not seem right either.