proponents as well as opponents of assisted dying deploy the human dignity trope for their respective ends. The rhetorical tool of human dignity pervades many public policy debates and it is present in many other spheres of social life. Authors often use it to cloak potentially controversial moral considerations in the language of dignity.
3.39 When you come across dignity arguments in bioethics, always investigate whether there is anything substantive to it, or whether it is no more than a pleasant‐sounding word deployed to shame you into agreeing with a particular point of view. We are not suggesting here that it is impossible to create a coherent theory of human dignity, but today it is fair to say that there is no consensus on either the moral basis of human dignity, or its meaning, or its scope.
3.9 Nazi Arguments in Bioethics
3.40 Nazi arguments are not arguments that Nazis necessarily have defended or put forward. Nazi arguments in bioethics, but not just in bioethics, are primarily deployed to end a particular debate or argument. After all, if a point of view is analogous to something the Nazis did or propagated, it is highly likely that there is a serious flaw in it. Equally, if a particular course of action would lead us down a slippery slope toward something akin to the crimes the Nazis committed, we would also have good reason to not seriously consider that course of action. The utilitarian Peter Singer, an influential secular Jewish philosopher, was accused of promoting points of view that were supposedly both analogous to views propagated by the Nazis, and that would lead societies adopting those views down slippery slopes toward Nazi style atrocities (Schöne‐Seifert 1991; Wright 2000).
3.41 Walter Wright describes both the argument from analogy as well as the slippery slope argument. Singer, as you will discover in greater detail in Chapter 5 on beginning of life issues, holds a number of highly controversial views resulting in him defending as moral the killing of certain severely disabled newborns. Significantly, he used language in this context that was identical to the language used by the Nazis.
3.42 In a nutshell Singer holds the view that newborns are not persons, because at birth and for a few weeks after they do not have the intellectual capacities to qualify as such. He also thinks that, by virtue of their disability, some newborns will never reach personhood, even in later life. Only persons have a right to life, so newborns would then not have a right to life. Singer the utilitarian aims to maximize the reduction of the overall amount of suffering in the world and to maximize the overall amount of happiness in the world. He argues in his bestselling book Practical Ethics that some disabled newborns suffer irreversibly a quality of life that is so miserable ‘as not to be worth living, from the internal perspective of a being who will lead that life’ (Singer 2011, 162). There he said it, a life not worth living. Singer thinks that parents of such severely disabled newborns should be permitted to make the choice to have their lives terminated. The troubling thing, for Singer, is that in the 1920s two influential German academics, the leading legal scholar Karl Binding and the medical school professor Alfred Hoche published a book in which they argued for the destruction of lives not worth living (Hoch and Binding 1920). They were not Nazis, and they were arguably driven to some extent by compassion. For instance, they insisted that those lives not worth living should only be terminated if, as Wright quotes them, their life ending ‘must be experienced as a release, at least by the victim; otherwise allowing it is self‐evidently ruled out’ (Wright 2000, 180–181).
3.43 The Nazis, of course, had other ideas when it came to euthanasia and the destruction of human lives they did not consider worth living, and their ideas were quite different from those of the German academics, and they were certainly not analogous to Singer’s views. The Nazis liked Binding and Hoche’s terminology; in fact, ‘life not worth living’ was used extensively by the Nazis and their propaganda machine. It is fair to say that the Nazis did use pretty much the same vocabulary Singer uses. However, that is where the analogy ends. Their so‐called ‘euthanasia’ program was eventually directed at people who experienced pretty much any kind of mental illness, were homosexuals, drug users, or simply homeless. What occurred was plainly and simply the murder of people who would have considered their lives very much worth living. This then isn’t analogous to the case Singer makes in his argument.
3.44 Unsurprisingly perhaps, when Singer was invited by German academics to lecture on this topic, disability rights and other activists protested and succeeded for some time in their efforts aimed at preventing Singer from speaking at German universities. As far as these activists were concerned, Singer propagated views that were analogous to what the Nazis did (Schöne‐Seifert 1991). In reality, while Singer’s views were and are controversial, as you have seen, the Nazi analogy is flawed. It was deployed on this occasion to end any further debate on Singer’s views with regard to the morality of infanticide involving the termination of the lives of certain severely disabled newborns.
3.45 John J. Michalczyk, a medical historian, warns that ‘those who invoke the Nazi analogy in a broad or general fashion are pressing the limits of valid analogy simply because the broader the scope of their reference, the harder it becomes to understand exactly what they think the Holocaust was, and thus why it is of moral relevance to the current issue’ (Michalczyk 1994).
3.46 Others have suggested that if we began taking Singer’s views seriously and implemented them as a matter of government policy we would inevitably be led down the slippery slope toward a Nazi kind of end result. We will now turn to slippery slope type arguments in bioethics.
3.10 Slippery‐Slope Arguments
3.47 Probably the most frequently used rhetorical tool in bioethics debates comes in the shape of slippery‐slope type arguments. Slippery‐slope type arguments come in various forms, but typically they are claims that something terrible would happen if we did a certain arguably desirable thing. A good example of this is: ‘If we introduce voluntary euthanasia for mentally competent terminally ill patients soon the mentally disabled will get murdered, just like the Nazis did.’ A conservative Canadian newspaper editorialized against euthanasia in that country, warning against ‘the slippery slope of assisted dying55’.
3.48 Usually slippery‐slope type arguments are both emotionally appealing and invalid. There are two broad types of slippery‐slope arguments that you quite likely will come across in bioethical arguments. The first type of slippery slope argument is conceptual in nature. It is not as common as the causal slippery slope type argument in bioethics. Conceptual slippery slope arguments claim that the criteria that are proposed to govern new legislation or a new policy are sufficiently imprecise as to open the door to abusive practices. We will come across examples of this kind of slippery‐slope argument in Chapter 11 because conceptual slippery slope arguments appear frequently in discussions about end‐of‐life issues (Somerville 201456). The same holds true for causal slippery slope arguments (Somerville 201457). Causal slippery slope type arguments typically claim that if a given (possibly sound) policy were introduced, this would invariably trigger a chain of events leading to actions or outcomes that are unacceptable (Schüklenk 2011, 47–50).
3.49 Conceptual slippery‐slope arguments are difficult to evaluate as a matter of principle. If you were to legislate that only legally competent
