Human dignity and assisted death

Assisted death is an extremely contested topic in bioethics. Despite the strongly influential role human dignity plays in this debate, it still has not received the appropriate, multifaceted treatment it deserves. Studies show that the notion of dignity already plays an important role in medical contexts. However, its use in these contexts needs to be analyzed and explained in more detail. A detailed philosophical analysis of dignity and how it relates to assisted death will benefit both the general discussion and the specific bioethical context to which it is applied. The goal of this first in-depth examination of the application of human dignity to assisted suicide is threefold. First, it aims to enlighten and explain the widely shared intuitions about human dignity, which has a specific usage in the medical context of terminal illness, because opponents as well as supporters of assisted suicide lay claim to that notion. Second, it aims to push the debate an important step forward because arguments that are often taken for granted can be more fairly reconsidered once their relationship to dignity has been clarified. Third, by making sense of dignity even within the complex and seemingly confused context of this debate, one will have taken an important step toward a clarification of it in general, which might lead to its application in other contexts as wel