Physician-Assisted Dying: A Slippery Slope?

Some opponents of physician-assisted dying (PAD) argue legalizing PAD inevitably creates a slippery slope to unacceptable uses, and therefore should be rejected. Others regard PAD as acceptable, but only if the eligibility conditions are quite restrictive, including terminal illness and physical disease, and the rejection of euthanasia. Canada has expanded its eligibility conditions, including (in the future) PAD where the sole condition is psychiatric illness. I argue that the problems with psychiatric PAD are greater when combined with the rights-based approach, taken by Canada.

Bonnie Steinbock, PhD, is professor emerita of the Department of Philosophy at the University at Albany/State University of New York. A Fellow of the Hastings Center since 1986, she was a resident scholar at the Bellagio Center on Lake Como, Italy (2008), and has been a visiting professor at Santa Clara University (2012), the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2015) and Monash University in Melbourne, Australia (2017). In addition to 70 articles and 30 opinion pieces, she is the author of Life Before Birth: The Moral and Legal Status of Embryos (Oxford University Press, 1992, 2011) and the editor or co-editor of ten collections, including Killing and Letting Die (1980, 1994), Public Health Ethics: Theory, Policy, and Practice (2006), the Oxford Handbook of Bioethics (2008), and Ethical Issues in Modern Medicine, 4th - 8th editions. With Paul Menzel, she is the co-author of Bioethics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Center for Applied Ethics | Website | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Philosophy Club

Contact the organizers