Alex's Arguments Against Active Euthanasia

In the dialogue between Lindsay and Alex, Alex argues that active euthanasia fundamentally goes against its own principles of dying with dignity and should not be allowed, following Lindsay’s anecdote of a woman utilizing active euthanasia to “die with dignity”. However, the arguments that Alex uses to defend his points, an argument from nature and an argument from dignity, have been discussed and criticized, with many in the philosophical literature arguing that active euthanasia promotes and shows respect for a patient’s dignity and self-determination, rather than undermining it. In this paper, I will reconstruct Alex’s arguments in a more structured form and show that premises behind his arguments are false, rendering his argument unsound.

However, many of the premises assumed by Alex can easily be called into question. Alex argues that since VAE goes against human nature, it is morally wrong, implying that anything that goes against human nature is morally wrong. This introduces several problems, namely the vagueness of what constitutes “human nature” and whether such an absolute statement like “anything” that goes against human nature is morally impermissible. Human nature as a concept is ill-defined, but we can look to other writers on the subject for examples. Gay-Williams, in his essay “The Wrongfulness of Euthanasia,” makes a similar argument to Alex’s, and defines human nature as actions that contribute to our survival. Since all the natural processes that take place in people are aimed towards living, VAE acts against the combined forces of nature keeping people alive (Gay-Williams 1989, 98-99). However, definitions like this run into problems when considering what actions may run contrary to our survival. Take a relatively benign activity, such as high altitude mountain climbing. Near the peak of Mt. Everest, the oxygen levels are so low that the human body simply cannot survive at that altitude and slowly dies. Yet people make summit attempts on Mt. Everest even though they are putting themselves in a potentially fatal position. No one would argue that climbing Mt. Everest is morally impermissible because it acts against human nature. But if climbing Mt. Everest is against “human nature” and yet it is not considered morally impermissible, either we should stop letting people climb mountains or the premise that “anything that goes against human nature is morally impermissible” must be wrong. If some actions can go against this definition of human nature and still be moral, the argument falls apart and we