Institutionalizing Inequality: The Physical Criterion of Assisted Suicide
The recent legalization of assisted dying in California, along with similar bills before other states, returned assisted suicide to the national spotlight. In Anglo-American dying bills, two criteria restrict eligibility for assisted suicide: (1) the uncoerced request to die (roughly, the "auto...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
[2018]
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| In: |
Christian bioethics
Year: 2018, Volume: 24, Issue: 1, Pages: 17-37 |
| RelBib Classification: | CH Christianity and Society KBQ North America NCA Ethics NCH Medical ethics XA Law |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (Publisher) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | The recent legalization of assisted dying in California, along with similar bills before other states, returned assisted suicide to the national spotlight. In Anglo-American dying bills, two criteria restrict eligibility for assisted suicide: (1) the uncoerced request to die (roughly, the "autonomy" criterion) and (2) severely deteriorated health of a certain kind (roughly, the "physical" criterion) from a six-month terminal illness (US jurisdictions) to severe and irreversible conditions (the Netherlands, Belgium). I argue that the physical criterion in any form violates the equality of respect and moral status of a large class of people, thereby degrading them, and I supplement this with theological considerations drawn from Thomas Aquinas. Even if the slope were not slippery and the autonomy firewall prevented Dutch-style mission creep, the physical criterion itself degrades tens of thousands of sick, disabled, and dying people by insinuating that their lives-but crucially, not other people's-are "objectively" the sort of thing they might reasonably want to dispose of. |
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| ISSN: | 1744-4195 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Christian bioethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/cb/cbx017 |
