In the report, Mr Teague writes: “Many of the safeguards promised by its supporters amount to nothing more than arbitrary restrictions, with no rational foundation. Reason demands their removal, propelling an irreversible expansion of scope that has already taken place in the Netherlands and elsewhere.
“This process is as logically inexorable as it is empirically inevitable, for the very arguments relied upon to justify physician-assisted suicide would also support the introduction of voluntary and, ultimately, non-voluntary euthanasia.”
I’m pretty sure we already have “non-voluntary euthanasia” or, as we might call it, murder. The Gosport Hospital and Liverpool Pathway cases seem to show that to me. In that latter there were bonuses for hitting targets of those “choosing” euthanasia. We know what targets do, right?
I do grasp my life my choice arguments. No, really. I’ve just no idea at all about how we move from where we are to a greater, erm, freedom without it descending into a welter of murder of little old Grannies.
This process is as logically inexorable as it is empirically inevitable…
Not so. The slippery slope argument (aka thin-end-of-the-wedge argument, etc) is an informal logical fallacy. There is no “inexorable” necessity in logic to slither down the slope, because, er, it’s a logical fallacy. Nor is there any empirical inevitability to slithering. Rather, humans have an unfortunate psychological tendency to slither down the slope in certain circumstances (cf abortion); but it’s neither inexorable or inevitable.
As for my-life-my-choice arguments, most people have the choice to end their own lives without assistance, particularly if they plan ahead. Assisted suicide looks like getting someone else to do your dirty work. More generally, assisted suicide seems to me to be another example of the feminisation of our values so that the dominant feature of morality is a vague kindness or niceness rather than hard-headed principles. We see it in liberal attitudes to illegal immigration, parenting, education, racial policy, recruitment…. Such feminisation is decadent.
Sounds like the best way of avoiding being “helped into the beyond” is to stay out of NHS hospitals and associated Local Authority Care services for as long as possible.
Too easy to go into hospital with something minor and come out in a pine box.
‘humans have an unfortunate psychological tendency to slither down the slope’
Alas this does tend to lead to ‘just a little bit more’. Like the fuss about ‘hate speech’ leading inevitably to more and more censorship.
The proposals I have heard about in the media amount to a thicket of legal challenges waiting to happen.
The required approvals and the process to be followed is bound to be expensive. Who will pay for that? If it’s the applicant, cue challenges on behalf of poorer applicants who can’t afford the fees.
The requirement for self-administration? Cue challenges on behalf of applicants who cannot self-administer because of the condition that will kill them. Cue also challenges by people who can self-administer now, but have more than six months to live because their condition has not progressed far enough.
All of the above will lead to progressive weakening of the ‘safeguards’ which persuaded the gullible to vote for the ‘principle’ contained in the Bill. The present proposal is the thin end of a very nasty wedge.
Legalising murder? What could possibly go wrong?
This is an unofficial Labour Party bill that they didn’t want to put in to their manifesto and it says something that senior Labour figures, including TTS, are said to now having second thoughts.
The bill is wide open to physician and judge shopping and as pointed out judicial review against the restrictions.
A badly drafted private member’s bill is not the way to address this difficult subject.
As for my-life-my-choice arguments, most people have the choice to end their own lives without assistance, particularly if they plan ahead.
But like any party, then somebody has to clear up after it. Take the trash out. And you couldn’t exactly make arrangements, could you? Again, like holding a party, you could guarantee some busybody would be contacting the authorities to intervene.
Which is why people are in favour of assisted suicide. You’re not leaving some unsuspecting person to get a, to them, a horrible surprise & no doubt a feeling of guilt because “If I’d realised I could have done something!”
It’s one of the problems of modern society. Your life choices are never your own. There’s always someone around thinks they know better than you do & has the power to compel.
They’ve already legalised and encouraged mutilation for social reasons, so why not this too?
“The slippery slope argument (aka thin-end-of-the-wedge argument, etc) is an informal logical fallacy”. I don’t think so because it’s not a logical argument at all. It’s simply an observation, psychological/sociological, about how humans have behaved in the past, used to predict how they will behave in future.
It’s in the same category as “incentives matter”, an observation that predicts that grannies will be murdered.
What I would welcome is some way of weighing up the advantages (e.g. I’d like a quick, painless death, please) with the disadvantages (e.g. those socialists will murder me so they can steal all my money).
We spend millions a year on sociologists and when we, or at least I, would welcome some insights from them they’ll come up with nothing of the least value.
A current end of life will, made at least 5 years previous, laying out specific medical criteria for being euthanased and granting a power of attourney to named individuals. A request to assess from either the person or someone with that power of attourney. Those criteria assessed by a panel of 3 anonymous randomly appointed medical professionals to unanimously agree whether they have been met. Retests may not be requested for at least 3 months.
That’s the best I can do.
“What I would welcome is some way of weighing up the advantages (e.g. I’d like a quick, painless death, please) ”
Is it quick and painless? It appears that one of the main ways this is administered is via a massive overdose of a cocktail of drugs, taken orally. And that are thus dependent on the human digestive system to take effect, which given the subjects are people who are very ill anyway could vary massively in effectiveness. What studies that have been done show a massive variation in times for death to occur and the amount of suffering that people undergo while dying.
I think most people think this is akin to putting your dog to sleep, you just drift off gently into oblivion. It isn’t, the reality is far more barbaric.
BiS
somebody has to clear up after it…And you couldn’t exactly make arrangements, could you?
Someone has to “clear up” after any death and the clear up is often not arranged in advance. So what’s the problem?
Dearieme
it’s not a logical argument at all. It’s simply an observation, psychological/sociological, about how humans have behaved in the past, used to predict how they will behave in future.
It’s not logical argument precisely because it is a fallacy. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope
I remember sometime back reading someone suggesting that the slippery slope argument wasn’t legit. In this case he gave a few examples, but they all went like this: “they said if we did A it would soon lead to B, then C, etc. all the way to Z. But now that we’ve arrived at Z we think it’s fine.”
I thought it was amusing; he didn’t show that the slope wasn’t actually slippery or that we wouldn’t slide all the way down, just that once there we’d decide it was OK. “Now that we’re breeding babies for food and we realize how tasty and tender they are, we’ve concluded that it’s just fine to do so!”
If we drew the Venn diagram of supporters of “assisted dying” in one part, and supporters of capital punishment in another, I wonder how far they’d overlap?
It’s not a slippery slope, it’s a slippery cliff.
Someone might table an amendment that stipulated that “assisted dying” had to be carried out by garrotte. Mmmm, feel the dignity.
“It’s not logical argument precisely because it is a fallacy.”
No; the reason it’s not a logical argument is because that’s not the category of argument it is. The claim isn’t logical, it’s empirical. You are making a category error. Bullshit on Wikipedia written by some ignorant, prim, little plonker can’t alter that.
It couldn’t happen here, right?
Within a few months the T4 Program—named for the Chancellery offices that directed it from the Berlin address Tiergartenstrasse 4—involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.” Some physicians active in the study of eugenics, who saw Nazism as “applied biology,” enthusiastically endorsed this program. However, the criteria for inclusion in this program were not exclusively genetic, nor were they necessarily based on infirmity. An important criterion was economic. Nazi officials assigned people to this program largely based on their economic productivity. The Nazis referred to the program’s victims as “burdensome lives” and “useless eaters.”
Dearieme: Logic textbooks disagree with you. The fallacy – that there is some necessity in the slippery slope – is seen in operation in the passage TW quotes above. At best, the slippery slope argument is a rule of thumb – a cognitive bias that can yield positive results.
We have lot of waddling pavement-crackers who are “useless eaters”, Steve, but turning them into soap and lampshades would be going a little too far.
Theo – Yarp. Usually I follow the Judeo-Christian ethic of “Thou shalt not kill.” But, that’s just me.
“….propelling an irreversible expansion of scope that has already taken place in the Netherlands..”
Except that it hasn’t?
Law’s pretty clear on what is and isn’t allowed. And except for some minor moving of markers in what actually constitutes “interminable and unalleviatable suffering”, usually because the conditions *were* too strict, giving cause to some bruhaha and Media Embarassment , it’s been pretty much the same since the laws were passed.
It’s not as if the exact conditions for it aren’t to be found through official channels in 12 or so languages, including english. No Leopard sign on the door there.
Something mr. Teague clearly missed when he wrote this comment… Or didn’t bother with because it didn’t fit his Narrative.
“Logic textbooks disagree with you.” Then they are talking bollocks – ordinary academic empire-building I suppose. If a statement does not purport to be a matter of logic but merely a matter of observation then it cannot be a logical fallacy. It could be an observational fallacy – i.e. perhaps the claimed common event isn’t common after all.
If I say Tim’s name is Rupert that’s not a logical fallacy, it’s merely an error of observation.
@Dearieme or you know things about our Host we don’t…. 😉
Honestly…. people fencing with “logic” and its many and varied pitfalls are doing the stupidest thing possible: bitchfighting about the applicability of the rules of engagement of the Marquis the Fantailler..
It’s all fun and games until you meet a Willikins..
Jim,
“ Is it quick and painless? …..”
If there was a quick and painless method that didn’t involve a bullet in the back of the head it would have been mandated for executions in the USA.
There was a good threat on Twitter about cases in countries that have passed such laws, quick it usually isn’t and who knows what pain they are going through.
“If there was a quick and painless method that didn’t involve a bullet in the back of the head it would have been mandated for executions in the USA.”
I thought there were drugs/combinations of drugs that would do the job (for executions) pretty well but that many of them have been taken off the market by the large pharmaceutical companies who own and produce them, because they are opposed to the death penalty? Which is one the reasons US States with a death penalty are struggling to actually execute people by lethal injection in the USA right now, because the number of suppliers they can find to supply them are getting smaller and smaller, and more and more backstreet, and thus quality control is becoming a big issue? And thus more and more executions are being botched due to poor quality drugs/bad combinations/poor availability.
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/lethal-injection-pharma-kill-death-penalty/?cf-view
It would be ironic if the seemingly widespread moves to legalise euthanasia in many Western countries would mean the same drug companies who have gotten on their high moral horses and stopped making or distributing drugs that can be used for executions would then suddenly turn the taps on again for assisted suicides. And maybe thereby assisting US States wanting to procure drugs for executing murderers.
“how we move from where we are to a greater, erm, freedom”
By making assisted suicide legal where someone demonstrates a clear desire for assistance for suicide which is persistent long enough to ensure it is not just a passing whim. And in particular, with absolutely no consideration given to whether or not they ought to want it. Regardless of what level of suffering they appear to be in, if they say that they don’t want suicide then we don’t get to override their wishes. And the other way around, we don’t get to say that they shouldn’t want suicide so we won’t let anyone help them.
@Steve – “Usually I follow the Judeo-Christian ethic of “Thou shalt not kill.””
So what’s your body count up to now? Must be quite high if you’re following the principles of groups which have spent well over a thousand years Crusading to kill Jews, torturing and buring heretics, and generally waging war as if it was the one thing they most enjoyed in life.
“The Camel’s Nose Is in the Tent: Rules, Theories, and Slippery Slopes” by two economists, Mario J. Rizzo and Douglas Glen Whitman, takes slippery slopes seriously and considers in what circumstances they’re likely to come to pass or not. Hard to just write every mention of a “slippery slope” off as a fallacy when there are clear reasons to believe conceding one point will have a domino effect on others points, as it changes the way in which our values our constructed and the context in which we form judgments about them.
https://www.uclalawreview.org/the-camels-nose-is-in-the-tent-rules-theories-and-slippery-slopes/
Slippery slopes have been the topic of a spate of recent literature. In this Article, the authors provide a general theory for understanding and evaluating slippery slope arguments and their associated slippery slope events. The central feature of the theory is a structure of discussion within which all arguments take place. The structure is multilayered, consisting of decisions, rules, theories, and research programs. Each layer influences and shapes the layer beneath: Rules influence decisions, theories influence the choice of rules, and research programs influence the choice of theories. In this structure, slippery slope arguments take the form of meta-arguments, as they purport to predict the future development of arguments in the structure of discussion. Evaluating such arguments requires knowledge of the specific content of the structure of discussion itself. This Article then presents four viable types of slippery slope arguments; draws attention to four different factors that, other things equal, tend to increase the likelihood of slippery slopes; and explores a variety of strategies for coping with slippery slopes.
Chris Snowdon gives a very abbreviated TLDR of the article when explaining why “public health” paternalism is prone to slippery slopes. https://www.cityam.com/behind-the-slippery-slope-mystery/
It is false to say that if you walk onto a slippery slope you will inevitably slide down it. However, it’s a damned sight more likely you will if you do step onto it than if you don’t and removing the fence at the top of the slope makes it more likely you’ll step onto it. Which is why there’s a bloody fence there in the first place.