Active and Passive Physician-Assisted Dying and the Terminal Disease Requirement

The view that voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should be made available for terminal patients only is typically warranted by reference to the risks that the procedures are seen to involve. Though they would appear to involve similar risks, the commonly endorsed end-of-life...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Varelius, Jukka (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Wiley-Blackwell [2016]
In: Bioethics
Year: 2016, Volume: 30, Issue: 9, Pages: 663-671
IxTheo Classification:NBE Anthropology
NCH Medical ethics
Further subjects:B Terminal Patient
B Voluntary Active Euthanasia
B non-voluntary passive euthanasia
B physician-assisted suicide
B voluntary passive euthanasia
B Non-terminal patient
Online Access: Volltext (Verlag)
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Summary:The view that voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide should be made available for terminal patients only is typically warranted by reference to the risks that the procedures are seen to involve. Though they would appear to involve similar risks, the commonly endorsed end-of-life practices referred to as passive euthanasia are available also for non-terminal patients. In this article, I assess whether there is good reason to believe that the risks in question would be bigger in the case of voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide than in that of passive euthanasia. I propose that there is not. On that basis, I suggest that limiting access to voluntary active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide to terminal patients only is not consistent with accepting the existing practices of passive euthanasia.
ISSN:1467-8519
Contains:Enthalten in: Bioethics
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1111/bioe.12282