In light of the recent death of Dr. Death himself: Why do I believe Legalized Euthanasia is wrong? Setting aside the moral issues, which of course would be reason number one in my eyes, there is a danger of then forcing the "state" to draw a line. This never works because who decides where the line should be drawn? Who's to say someone with a "sensible" argument wont erase the line later and draw another less restrictive line?
Apparently this already happening regarding Euthanasia in the Nederlands...
The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope
by Eugene Volokh
Harvard Law Review
"This sort of equality-based slippage has indeed happened in the Netherlands. Dutch courts began by declining to punish doctors who assist the suicides of the terminally ill.
They then extended this to those who are subject to “unbearable suffering,” without any requirement that they be terminally ill.
They then extended this to a person who was in seemingly irremediable mental pain, caused by chronic depression, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse, on the theory that the suffering of the mentally ill is “experienced as unbearable” by them, presumably comparably to how the physically ill experience physical suffering.
Dutch courts then extended this to a 50-year-old woman who was in seemingly irremediable mental pain caused by the death of her two sons, again on the theory that “[h]er suffering was intolerable to her.”
“Intolerable psychological suffering is no different from intolerable physical suffering,” the doctor in that case reasoned, and the court agreed, concluding that “the source of the suffering [was] irrelevan[t].”
A slippery slope indeed.
In the end it is my belief situational ethics does not work. History has proven that a society needs moral absolutes or the society eventually implodes.
Every life must be sacred or no life is.
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