Assisted Suicide and Slippery Slopes: Reflections on Oregon

Abstract

Slippery slope argumentation features prominently in debates over assisted suicide. The jurisdiction of Oregon features prominently too, especially as regards parliamentary scrutiny of assisted suicide proposals. This paper examines Oregon’s public data (including certain official pronouncements) on assisted suicide in light of the two basic versions of the slippery slope argument, the empirical and moral-logical versions. Oregon’s data evidences some normatively interesting shifts in its assisted suicide practice which in turn prompts consideration of two elements of moral-logical slippage that are not widely discussed. One is slippage from an initial autonomy-based public justification for assisted suicide which does not include burden-based concerns within its operative account of voluntariness to an evolved public justification that does. The other is an expansion of a terminal illness ground to include chronic illnesses effectively rendered terminal via a refusal of treatment.