APOLOGIA
By Hendrik van der Breggen
(The Carillon, December 1, 2011)

Physician-assisted suicide is a slippery slope

The question of whether physician-assisted suicide (PAS) should be legal in Canada is presently before the B.C. Supreme Court. I have argued previously that PAS is problematic (The Carillon, Aug. 18 and Sept. 29). Today I will sketch an argument for thinking that legalizing PAS puts us on a dangerous slippery slope.

What follows is based on an argument from Paul Chamberlain’s excellent book Final Wishes (Wipf & Stock 2009). (Chamberlain teaches apologetics and philosophy at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia.) According to Chamberlain, there is a non-fallacious slippery slope logically connected to the legalization of PAS for the terminally ill.

Chamberlain’s case hinges on the notion of patient autonomy coupled with the observation that reasons for one action sometimes also justify other actions which are unintended.

In the context of legalized PAS for the terminally ill, patient autonomy becomes understood in terms of the following fundamental principle: the sufferer has the right to choose PAS to end his/her suffering.

Significantly, accepting PAS as a legal right on the basis of this fundamental principle opens up and justifies a host of new situations in which persons suffer and may request PAS. These situations include not only (a) the terminally ill but also (b) the non-terminally ill, (c) the elderly, (d) the disabled, (e) the parent suffering the loss of a child, (f) the person suffering chronic back pain, (g) the depressed teenager, and (h) so on.

So, if we accept PAS in the case of the terminally ill on the basis of the principle behind patient autonomy—i. e., the principle that the sufferer has the right to choose PAS to end his/her suffering—then logic and law will demand that we accept PAS in other cases.

Of course, we can try to set up so-called legal safeguards to limit PAS to the terminally ill, but our courts will do what courts do—they will promote consistency. But consistency demands that all of the above-mentioned suffering persons, if they request PAS (and if they hire a good lawyer), can be quite reasonably seen to have the right to PAS too. Indeed (or so the argument would go), if we have already accepted patient autonomy as a legal justification for PAS, how can we deny them PAS?

Yes, the new situations are different. But their differences are incidental, if not irrelevant. Why? Because at the core of each of these new situations we have a sufferer who requests PAS. Moreover, consistency requires that PAS’s fundamental justifying principle—i.e., that the sufferer has the right to choose PAS to end his/her suffering—will carry more legal weight than the situational differences. The principle is, after all, fundamental (i.e., basic and more important).

The result: Legal acceptance of PAS for the terminally ill will put gobs of grease onto the path that leads to death as a legally permissible solution to the suffering of the non-terminally ill, the elderly, the disabled, the parent suffering the loss of a child, the person suffering chronic back pain, the depressed teenager, and so on.

In other words, the legal acceptance of PAS puts us on a slippery slope that embraces death as a solution to medical, social, and psychological problems.

We should pray that the B.C. Supreme Court realizes that medical, social, and psychological problems require medical, social, and psychological solutions—not killing.

P.S. For other arguments against the wisdom of legalizing physician-assisted suicide, see my Apologia columns On Putting Down Pets and People, Look at Pros and Cons, and  ET CETERA.

P.P.S. For further examination of slippery slope arguments in general, see my Apologia columns Slippery Slope Arguments (Part 1) and Slippery Slope Arguments (Part 2).

(Hendrik van der Breggen, PhD, is assistant professor of philosophy at Providence University College. The views in this column do not always reflect the views of Providence.)