Slippery slope argument

The argument

The slippery slope objection here is not a prediction about bad faith but a claim about the impossibility of drafting a stable rule. As the Netherlands' euthanasia guidelines are said to illustrate, any framework permitting the practice must specify the conditions under which it is allowed, and those conditions must be stated in terms that physicians and patients will then apply in particular cases. The objection is that the terms available for the task cannot be made precise. The Dutch criterion of unbearable pain is offered as the example. Unbearability is a description of how a person experiences their situation rather than a measurable quantity, and it cannot be legally defined in a way that would let an assessor determine from the outside whether the threshold has been met. If the central term resists definition, proponents argue, it follows that no objective and precise list of conditions can be compiled that must be fulfilled before voluntary euthanasia may occur. What is left is a formula that is vague and open to interpretation by the physicians and patients who invoke it, and interpretation in practice tends to widen rather than to hold. The argument's second step locates the instability in the justification rather than in the drafting. Any euthanasia regime rests on an underlying assumption: that there are objective circumstances in which ending a life is preferable, and ethically more justified, than prolonging it. Once that assumption is granted, the reasoning behind it does not obviously stop at the consent of the person concerned. If the circumstances themselves are what make ending a life the better outcome, the same premise can be used to argue that involuntary euthanasia is ethically permissible where the person cannot consent, or does not. A slow process of widening the scope of legal euthanasia is therefore presented as ultimately inevitable, not because safeguards will be ignored, but because the principle that licensed the practice in the first place contains no internal stopping point.

Context

One of the most controversial issues surrounding legal euthanasia is safeguarding against possible abuse of the practice. Opponents of legal euthanasia claim that it's impossible to create a set of guidelines which couldn't be manipulated in a way that would let doctors perform involuntary euthanasia. Furthermore, opponents of the legal euthanasia argue that by accepting premises of voluntary euthanasia we assert that there are lives not 'worth' living. After we accept this, we cannot stop a slide towards acceptance of involuntary euthanasia since the premises apply as for voluntary euthanasia.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is no proof that legalizing euthanasia leads to an acceptance of a non-voluntary euthanasia. The guidelines set by the Dutch government work as intended and there is no definitive proof that the scope of the practice was widened. Active, involuntary euthanasia remains illegal in all jurisdictions, even in those where active voluntary euthanasia is legalized.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] No legalization of involuntary euthanasia has ever occurred and there is no evidence to suggest that legalizing voluntary euthanasia would lead to this.