Medical aid in dying, and slippery slopes--the debate in Britain

 The Oxford blog Practical Ethics considers medical aid in dying (MAID), and the slippery slope arguments that accompany current debates on the subject in Britain.

Medical assistance in dying: what are we talking about? By Alberto Giubilini, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics

"Medical assistance in dying  – or “MAiD”,  to use the somehow infelicitous acronym – is likely to be a central topic in bioethics this year. That might not be true of bioethics as an academic field, where MAiD has been widely discussed over the past 40 years. But it is likely true of bioethics as a wider societal and political area of discussion. There are two reasons to think this.  First, the topic has attracted a lot of attention the last year, especially with “slippery slope” concerns around Canada’s policies. Second, MAiD has recently been in the news in the UK, where national elections will take place in 2024.  It is not hard to imagine it will feature in the heated political polarization that always accompanies election campaigns

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"Canada is often taken as the best example in support of ‘slippery slope’ arguments against legalizing MAiD. According to these arguments, even assuming MAiD was acceptable in some form, legalization would open the door to clearly wrong or problematic practices down the line. For instance, legalizing physician-assisted suicide in cases of “unbearable suffering” for someone whose death is reasonably foreseeable in the short term might lead to relaxing our attitudes towards MAiD for those suffering only from mental illness. In the bioethics literature, slippery slope arguments against MAiD have often been put forward and traditionally been dismissed as fallacious, overly cautious, or easily addressable (for an overview and a critical appraisal, see Fumagalli 2020).  However, contrary to the prevailing view, they are not necessarily fallacious in nature (Walton 1992). To many people, Canada is a case in point, calling for a more nuanced take.

"Canada started off by decriminalizing medical assistance in dying in 2016. In 2019, the Superior Court of Quebec found the “reasonable foreseeability of natural death” unconstitutional as an eligibility criterion for MAiD. The criterion was removed in 2021, making MAiD available for patients without terminal illness. From March 2024, patients suffering solely from mental illness will also be able to legally access MAiD. According to Government data, nearly 45,000 people died through MAiD in Canada from 2016 to 2022. Between 2020 and 2022, the number of requests for MAiD increased on average by 28% per year. At the same time, the number of patients found ineligible consistently declined from 8% in 2019 to 3.4% in 2022.

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"One question is about whether suicide is morally permissible. As mentioned, many religious  and non religious views consider suicide in most cases morally impermissible. However, the moral impermissibility of suicide is not a decisive reason against legalizing MAiD. More important is whether suicide is a right and, if so, what type of right it is. That is a different type of question, because arguably we often have the right to do morally wrong things (Waldron 1982). I might have a right to kill myself even if suicide is morally wrong.

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"I have not provided any answer to any of these questions here. I just want to point out that some of the differences in ethical and religious views about suicide or about the right to end one’s own life are less relevant to a debate on MAiD than one might initially assume.

"At the same time, many concerns around slippery slopes are more relevant than one might initially assume. As a matter of fact and of logic, MAiD legislations tend to expand by extending their eligibility criteria. When debating MAiD legislations, we need to ask if we are prepared for that."