Slippery-slope objections to legalizing physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia.

I n nearly every state in the U.S. today, it is a crime for a doctor either to help a terminally ill person in severe pain commit suicide (physician-assisted suicide, or PAS), or to accede to their request for a quick and painless death by administering a lethal injection (voluntary active euthanasia, or VAE). The one exception is Oregon, which permits PAS under certain conditions. Generally speaking, " conservatives " support a ban on both VAE and PAS; liberals who aren't libertarians support legalization, but with eligibility for a quick death limited to the " terminally ill, " patients in a " persistent vegetative state " (PVS), and perhaps a few other groups; and libertarian liberals support legalization without such limits, the only requirement for eligibility being that one is a competent adult whose choice is uncoerced. This essay tentatively supports some version of the " nonlibertarian liberal " view, which of course must fend off objections from both conservatives—that it goes too far—and libertarians—that it doesn't go far enough. But rather than undertake the large project of defending that view against both sets of critics, my aim in this paper is more modest. This essay argues, primarily for the benefi t of those who like the author are inclined to support some version of the legalization with limits view, that the reply we have to give to what is probably the most important conservative objection to legalization has some unnoticed and many might think unwelcome implications for the kind of reply that we must give to other objections that some conservatives press. One of the conservative objections to legalization is that it would violate the " sanctity of life. " This seems to be an absolute side-constraint that forbids the intentional taking of any " innocent " human life, except possibly in self defense, regardless of whether the person to be killed would be much better off dead, and regardless of whether he gives free and informed consent to being killed. 1 On the face of it, there is nothing religious about the sanctity-of-life principle so formulated; an atheist could consistently believe it. But it is often claimed that it is impossible to defend in the absence of some religious belief about God and his exclusive dominion over all life. (The same could be said of the judgment