On Euthanasia

  • Robert Baker
Chapter
Part of the Biomedical Ethics Reviews book series (BER)

Abstract

Two insights motivate proponents of euthanasia. One is that pain and all the other assaults upon human autonomy attendant upon disease can be so severe that it can be more humane to kill than to prolong dying or even to cure. The second insight is that our lives are preeminently our own to do with and terminate as we will. Some may wish to challenge these insights-they were certainly controversial at other times and places1-but neither the traditional nor the contemporary philosophical debate on euthanasia has focused on them. Although euthanasiasts sometimes act as if this were the issue, antieuthanasiasts by and large concede the point and take the issue to turn not on the moral propriety of isolated acts of mercy killing (on the proverbial desert island), but on the propriety of accepting euthanasia as part of public morality, sanctioned by law. The antieuthanasiasts’ point is that, just as the mere immorality of an act does not suffice to justify making it illegal (which is why there are no statutes proscribing nastiness), so too the mere humaneness and decency of an act does not suffice to provide a warrant for its legality. For laws regulate not individual acts but social practices; and practices, by nature, are iterative; and extensive iteration necessarily transforms the improbable consequences of individual acts into virtual certainties.

Keywords

Palliative Care Spina Bifida Slippery Slope Terminal Patient Traditional Argument 
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Notes and References

  1. 1.
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    See, for example, James Rachels, “Killing and Starving to Death,” Philosophy 54, 1979, 159–171. This article contains Rachels’ most recent and most sophisticated version of the argument. Rachels’ original argument on the subject, “Euthanasia, Killing and Letting Die” was published in John Ladd’s excellent anthology EthicalIssues Relating to Life and Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 146–163. A condensed version appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine 292, January 1974, 78–80. The latter version has been much anthologized and is available in Bonnie Steinbock’s Killing and Letting Die (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980), and Ethical Issues in Death and Dying edited by Tom Beauchamp and Seymour Perlin and also published by Prentice Hall, 1978. Singer’s work is in his Practical Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). Tooley’s argument is in Steinbock, pp. 56–62.Google Scholar
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    Philippa Foot takes this line in “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect,” Oxford Review 5, 1977, and in “Euthanasia”, Philosophy and Public Affairs 6, 1977, 85–112. Foot’s work is explored at some length by Nancy Davis in the Steinbock anthology, pp. 172–214, and by Bruce Russell, “The Relative Strictness of Negative and Positive Rights,” American Philosophical Quarterly 14, 2 April 1977, (also in Steinbock), “Still A Live Issue,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 7, 1978, 278–281 and “The Presumption of Taking Life as Compared to That Against Failing to Save,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4, 3, 1979. Russell’s interlocuter and antagonist on these issues is Richard Trammell, “Saving Life and Taking Life,” Journal of Philosophy LXXII, 5, March 13, 1975, 131–137, “Tooley’s Moral Symmetry Principle,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 5, 1976, 305–313, “The Non-Equivalence of Saving Life and Taking Life” and “The Presumption Against Taking Life,” both in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 4, 1979 and 3, 1978, pp. 53–67, respectively. See also Tooley’s article in Ladd, pp. 63–93 and Judith Thomson’s “Killing, Letting Die, and The Trolley Problem,” The Monist 59, 1976, 204–217.Google Scholar
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    In “Killing and Starving to Death,” Philosophy 54, 1979, pp. 165–166, Rachels develops some formally sufficient conditions for “moral equivalence”. Michael Tooley, who also used this argument, presents a different theory of moral equivalence in “An Irrelevant Consideration: Killing Versus Letting Die” in Steinbock, pp. 56–62.Google Scholar
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    David Sudnow, Passing On (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967), p. 89.Google Scholar
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 1983

Authors and Affiliations

  • Robert Baker

There are no affiliations available

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