Article Text
Abstract
According to the expressivist objection, laws that only allow assisted dying for those suffering from certain medical conditions express the judgement that their lives are not worth living. I have recently argued that an autonomy-based approach that legally allows assisted suicide for all who make an autonomous request is a way to avoid the expressivist objection. In response to this, Thomas Donaldson has argued that rather than avoiding the expressivist objection, an autonomy-based approach extends this objection. According to Donaldson, this is because helping a person achieve a goal requires endorsement of that goal. In this reply, I show that Donaldson misunderstands the target of the expressivist objection: it is not aimed at an individual’s attitude towards another person’s death but rather at a legal regulation. Moreover, helping someone end their life does not necessarily require endorsing this goal—instead, respect for a person’s autonomous choice can be another reason for providing assisted suicide. Donaldson also assumes that the autonomy-based approach requires doctors to accept autonomous requests for assisted dying. Yet, this approach merely makes it legal for individuals (not necessarily only doctors) to provide assisted suicide to autonomous persons but does not require anyone to do so.
- euthanasia
- ethics- medical
- legislation
- personal autonomy
- right to die
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors EB is the sole author and contributor.
Funding The author has not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- An autonomy-based approach to assisted suicide: a way to avoid the expressivist objection against assisted dying laws
- Making a case for the inclusion of refractory and severe mental illness as a sole criterion for Canadians requesting medical assistance in dying (MAiD): a review
- Responses to assisted suicide requests: an interview study with Swiss palliative care physicians
- The Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court regarding assisted suicide: a template for pluralistic states?
- Choosing death in unjust conditions: hope, autonomy and harm reduction
- Organ donation after medical assistance in dying or cessation of life-sustaining treatment requested by conscious patients: the Canadian context
- Canadian French and English newspapers’ portrayals of physicians’ role and medical assistance in dying (MAiD) from 1972 to 2016: a qualitative textual analysis
- Impact of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) on family caregivers
- Expressivism at the beginning and end of life
- ‘How is it possible that at times we can be physicians and at times assistants in suicide?’ Attitudes and experiences of palliative care physicians in respect of the current legal situation of suicide assistance in Switzerland