PHIL 356 Lecture Notes - Lecture 22: Palliative Sedation, Involuntary Euthanasia
Document Summary
> the more important moral divide is between nonvoluntary + voluntary euthanasia---not between active and passive. Response: states have a right to protect individuals from irrational, ill-informed, pressured or unstable decisions to hasten their death . Feinberg: it is sometimes justifiable to deny people a right in order to make it less likely that other people will abuse this right, and thereby cause harm. The claim is when people take the right to act to voluntary euthanasia for granted, they"ll come to think that certain other forms of euthanasia aren"t so bad either. Forms that we now think are morally impermissible. So people"s moral views and attitudes will change in ways that are problematic. Particular, the worry is that they"ll come to think that it"s morally acceptable to hasten the death of people who don"t have the mental capacity to make their own decisions. This is sometimes called a practical slippery slope worry.
