Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law

Ethical and legal issues concerning physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia are very much on the public agenda in many jurisdictions. In this timely book L.W. Sumner addresses these issues within the wider context of palliative care for patients in the dying process. His ethical conclusion is that a bright line between assisted death and other widely accepted end-of-life practices, including the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, pain control through high-dose opioids, and terminal sedation, cannot be justified. In the course of the ethical argument many familiar themes are given careful and thorough treatment: conceptions of death, the badness of death, the wrongness of killing, informed consent and refusal, the ethics of suicide, cause of death, the double effect, the sanctity of life, the 'active/passive' distinction, advance directives, and nonvoluntary euthanasia. The legal discussion opens with a survey of some prominent prohibitionist and regulatory regimes and then outlines a model regulatory policy for assisted death. Sumner concludes by defending this policy against a wide range of common objections, including those which appeal to slippery slopes or the possibility of abuse, and by asking how the transition to a regulatory regime might be managed in three common law prohibitionist jurisdictions.

Table of Contents:
Preface 1: Prologue I: Ethics 2: Consent and Refusal 3: Indirect Death 4: Death by Request 5: Deciding for Others II: Law 6: The Legal Landscape 7: From Prohibition to Regulation 8: Epilogue Cases Cited Works Cited Index

About the Author :
L.W. Sumner is University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of four books: Abortion and Moral Theory (1981); The Moral Foundation of Rights (1987); Welfare, Ethics, and Happiness (1996); and The Hateful and the Obscene: Studies in the Limits of Free Expression (2004). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and recipient of the 2009 Molson Prize in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Review :
the target audience extends beyond professional philosophers, and the aim is not merely to understand the situation but to change it. This is altogether laudable, and some pulling of punches might help. And what might well be hoped for this very good book careful, modest, wellstructured throughout is that its importance is not long-lasting and that it helps bring about its own demise. Lucid and powerful... Sumner's book provides a superb example of the relevance of philosophy to public policy.