Can Euthanasia Be Justified?

We are all going to die. I do not believe that there is any moral justification for the view that a person should never be allowed to choose the time and the place. It follows that if the circumstances make it impossible for a person to take their own life without assistance, then there will be cases where it is morally permissible for such assistance to be offered. It does not follow, however, that euthanasia is always justified provided that the decision is freely taken.

We need to think very carefully about the consequences that would arise if euthanasia were legally sanctioned. Would a healthy person be permitted to request euthanasia? Or would a committee of doctors decide whether the quality of a person's life was sufficiently impaired to justify the request? There will inevitably be cases where the request would not have been made, had the patient been able to afford certain expensive drugs. The committee, in granting the request, would be saying in effect, 'As you can't afford the treatment, we agree that you are better off dead.'

My intuition tells me that the scenario I have just described is totally unacceptable. I cannot justify that view with a philosophical argument, although I believe that many intuitions are widely shared. And there will be many other such scenarios.

It is quite possible that, when all the problem cases are taken into consideration, we shall find that it is impossible in practice to formulate a law permitting euthanasia that had adequate safeguards. The paradoxical conclusion is that what is sometimes morally permissible ought never to be legally permissible.