Why does the reasoning that a person is not the owner of his life belong only to the halakhic conception?

I didn’t phrase it precisely. Morality within a religious worldview is different on this point from morality within a secular worldview. I didn’t mean here to distinguish between morality and Jewish law, but between a religious conception (morality + Jewish law) and a secular one.

Rabbi, if a person is sadly told that he will be forced to spend the rest of his life on a ventilator and without any ability to move or function at all, does he also have no right to ask to be rid of this burden? Such a life is not a life. I’m writing this painfully out of personal familiarity with people like this, but also rationally I have no doubt that this is, many times, the necessary solution.

It’s hard for me to answer that. As stated, at least from a halakhic standpoint it seems that this is permitted only in circumstances of severe suffering, and even that is not agreed upon. One must of course distinguish between not resuscitating him (where in my opinion there is no problem in such situations, and even in easier situations) and actively killing him. Likewise, between self-killing and someone else killing him.

Sorry for bringing this question back from the dead (picking up a prohibition along the way), following the discussion the Rabbi had with Prof. Enoch. Seemingly it comes out that there is no such thing as a secular moral worldview, only a believing one (even if not a halakhic one). If so, what is the meaning of the distinction the Rabbi proposes in his answer here?
Maybe from a different angle: shouldn’t part of the thin moral worldview of a God who grounds values also include a special relationship between Him and the human being, as the Rabbi concluded at the end of his remarks in “The Argument,” that will is indeed part of the thin moral God? And shouldn’t one also make that picture “fatter” with respect to His being the creator of man as part of grounding that authority to command? And if so, is the position that sees a person’s life as something not in his own hands but in the hands of his Creator still a non-halakhic normative factual claim (Kantian humanism), or only a halakhic-Jewish claim?

Indeed there is no morality without God (secular means without a religious God). But morality is not Jewish law. Morality and Jewish law are two different kinds of what God wants from us.

Thank you for the response. Maybe I wasn’t clear, and maybe I don’t understand. In the reply to the first questioner, the position expressed is that only according to the religious conception is a person not the owner of his life, whereas in a secular moral conception a person does own his life, and therefore a person has legitimacy to take his own life according to his will.
My question is whether the religious component is really needed for the prohibition of doing so. Seemingly the moral facts required are also available to the secular moral person.
That is, if the thin God portrayed in “The Argument” is also necessary in the secular moral worldview, then it follows that there is a God who grounds normative facts. Meaning, such a God created the normative facts and also created man, so that there would be a God with all authority to demand that man obey them. It would seem simply that this picture is enough, even without a religious component, to identify a moral norm (which may perhaps conflict with others) prohibiting a person from taking his own life, on the grounds that life is not his, that he has a task he must fulfill, and so forth. Thanks again.

You mean to ask how I spoke here about secular morality and religious morality? I answered that secular morality is morality with a metaphysical-deistic God, not a religious one. A God who does not forbid suicide (in that person’s view). Of course, it can also be morality without God at all, as Enoch himself believes, even if in my opinion that is not logical (or else it is an implicit belief).

A person who cares about moral and halakhic questions when he comes to kill himself apparently is not in such a bad state, and therefore it is forbidden for him to commit suicide.
On the other hand, a person whose state is so bad that he doesn’t care about anything has already committed suicide.
The hard ethical question is whether doctors are permitted to keep a person alive in a vegetative state or on a ventilator.

Thanks again for the response. I’ll try to sharpen the question once more, and sorry for the bother. What I meant to ask was specifically within the framework of the deistic moral worldview: whether one cannot identify the existence of a prohibition on self-killing there as well (in a narrow description, a conception that can arise from the fact that there is One who gave a person life and imposed on him a mission to do good), or whether one specifically needs a religious God in order to identify this prohibition, by way of revelation.
The Rabbi wrote above that in the religious conception a person is not master of his life; but while an atheistic ethicist (who in the Rabbi’s view is inconsistent or a hidden believer) does not see the fact of creation and the mission imposed on man, the deistic ethicist can perceive them. If so, according to his approach, should there be a prohibition, even if he does not hold a religious worldview? Hope this time I was clearer.

I think I already answered earlier (unless you’re still not being clear). I am arguing that in the case of deism there is room to think that God does not forbid suicide. If you think He does—then yes. But there is room for both interpretations.