THE CASE FOR LEGALIZED EUTHANASIA

The recent referendum to legalize voluntary, active euthanasia in Washington state, which was narrowly defeated, has stimulated in-creased public discussion of this troubling ethical issue. In this paper we examine two recent statements against euthanasia, which together pose a seemingly formidable array of considerations against legalizing physi-cian assistance of patients who request to die owing to terminal illness and unbearable suffering. One way to test a controversial moral position such as the legalization of euthanasia, which departs from the tradition of social morality and from traditional medical ethics, is to weigh the merit of the arguments against it. We offer a critique of these arguments and a different ethical view of the issues. In the last part of this paper, we recommend guidelines for a public policy framework to minimize abuses in social experiments with beneficent voluntary euthanasia that are approved by referenda or state legislatures. Such a framework was lacking in the Washington initiative and also to an extent in the Nether-lands, where the practice of physician-performed euthanasia has be-come institutionalized but remains technically illegal. "Always to Care, Never to Kill" Under the heading "Always to Care, Never to Kill, " thirteen1 Jewish and Christian theologians, philosophers, and legal scholars issued a The authors are grateful to Richard J. Bonnie and James F. Childress for their searchin