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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 July 2009
Physician-assisted suicide is a novel idea having affinities with both suicide and euthanasia. It has affinities with suicide because it involves a self-inflicted death, and it has affinities with euthanasia because the physician is instrumental in the death. It is, however, not exactly either, making it the subject of an exciting debate.
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7. Arguments against natural law theory are notorious and well known, and the Kantian argument presupposes a wholesale commitment to Kantian moral theory that few modern philosophers endorse.
8. Bioethicists sometimes distinguish withholding life-support systems from withholding food and water. The argument is that withholding food and water leads to death by starvation rather than the underlying illness that is typically the cause of death when life-support is withheld. Also, some bioethicists distinguish withholding ordinary from extraordinary treatment. For purposes of this paper, I am glossing over these distinctions.
9. But cf. R.G. Frey who argues that suicide does not logically require that the agent of death be the suicide itself. Frey, who is wonderfully adept at creating imaginative cases, maintains that if actor no. 1 in a play provides another actor no. 2 with real bullets in what is supposed to be a death scene, then, if actor no. 1 is shot and killed by actor no. 2, it is nonetheless a case of suicide. Frey RG. Suicide and self-inflicted death. Philosophy 1981; 56:193–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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11. But see Robert Jay Lifton who, in his The Nazi Doctors (New York: Basic Books, 1986), argues that the Nazis never employed a euthanasia program in any respectable sense of the term and so insists on using quotes around the term when referring to the Nazi practice of eugenics.Google Scholar
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13. Ironically, in that very same work, Kant advocates that philosophers should be secretly consulted by the sovereign who is contemplating war. See Kant, I. Perpetual Peace, 2nd Suppl, 1795. I thank Bob Ginsberg for calling this to my attention.Google Scholar
14. Chalmers L. Clarke pointed out that in the examples cited, there is a consensus that might not be obtained when the poorly kept secret involves physician-assisted suicide.
