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Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy
Published in: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 4/2010

Open Access 01-11-2010 | Short Communication

Euthanasia: agreeing to disagree?

Author: Søren Holm

Published in: Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy | Issue 4/2010

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Abstract

In discussions about the legalisation of active, voluntary euthanasia it is sometimes claimed that what should happen in a liberal society is that the two sides in the debate “agree to disagree”. This paper explores what is entailed by agreeing to disagree and shows that this is considerably more complicated than what is usually believed to be the case. Agreeing to disagree is philosophically problematic and will often lead to an unstable compromise.
Footnotes
1
In the following all unqualified uses of the term “euthanasia” refer to active, voluntary euthanasia performed by a doctor.
 
2
Let us in passing note that any call for the exclusion of metaphysical commitments from ethical debates about human life and death is potentially highly problematic. First because every participant in the debate has metaphysical commitments that influences their position and second because the exclusion of metaphysical commitments from the debate is likely to be a bigger burden for some participants than for others.
 
3
This is exactly why the “Dutch solution”, leaving euthanasia as technically illegal but not prosecuted if the criteria are fulfilled is often criticised by proponents of euthanasia.
 
4
Even mere decriminalisation of euthanasia by medical doctors could be seen as conveying some form of social acceptance by classifying the act as a medical act and thereby lending it some of the lustre (if such lustre exists) of medicine and the medical profession.
 
Literature
Guttman, Amy. 1993. Democracy. In A companion to contemporary political philosophy, ed. R.E. Goodin, and P. Pettit, 411–421. Oxford: Blackwell.
Guttman, Amy, and Denis Thompson. 1990. Moral conflict and political consensus. Ethics 101: 64–88.CrossRef
Habermas, Jürgen. 1992. Faktizität und Geltung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. Reconciliation through the public use of reasons: Remarks on John Rawls’s political liberalism. Journal of Philosophy 92: 109–131.CrossRef
Holm, Søren. 2003. “Parity of Reasoning” arguments in bioethics—some methodological considerations. In Scratching the surface of bioethics, eds M. Häyry, T. Takala, 47–56, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Holm, Søren. 2006. Policy making in pluralistic society. In Oxford handbook of bioethics, ed. B. Steinbock, 153–174. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Huxtable, Richard. 2007. Euthanasia, ethics and the law—from conflict to compromise. London: Routledge-Cavendish.
McCarthy, Thomas. 1996. Legitimacy and diversity: Dialectical reflections on analytical distinctions. Cardozo Law Review 17: 1083–1125.
Rawls, John. 1996. Political liberalism (with a new introduction and the “reply to Habermas”). New York: Columbia University Press.
Woods, John. 2000. Privatizing death: Metaphysical discouragements of ethical thinking. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 24: 199–218.CrossRef
Metadata
Title
Euthanasia: agreeing to disagree?
Author
Søren Holm
Publication date
01-11-2010
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy / Issue 4/2010
Print ISSN: 1386-7423
Electronic ISSN: 1572-8633
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-010-9264-1

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