Euthanasia, Moral Limits and What Argument Alone Cannot Decide

As the United Kingdom again weighs assisted dying, we should be candid about what argument alone can and cannot decide—and about the moral responsibilities we place on those we may ask to help us die.

The question of whether euthanasia ought to be legalised is among the most serious a legislature can face. I do not propose a tidy conclusion. Instead, I want to examine the assumptions that shape the positions people take, because those assumptions determine what we find morally intelligible before any argument begins. I should also say at the outset that there are circumstances in which I believe I would no longer wish to live. That personal fact does not settle the matter. A desire to end one’s life, even one’s own, cannot by itself resolve the moral and legal question of whether the state should make it lawful to assist that death. That question turns, in the end, on what we can coherently regard as thinkable or unthinkable when we speak about human beings and the meaning of killing.

For some, legalisation is unthinkable: the deliberate ending of life by design contradicts their understanding of what it means to be a human being. For others, it is unthinkable not to legalise euthanasia when the law traps people in prolonged, degrading suffering. The divide is not merely a disagreement over premises; it reflects deeper pictures of humanity—pictures that shape what arguments are able to show us. If a conclusion offends that underlying moral reality, no amount of logic will make it acceptable. Only a change in how we see one another— what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein would have called a change in aspect — can do that.

The modern debate is often framed by a consequence‑led outlook: actions are judged right when they maximise the satisfaction of preferences for all affected. On this view, if legalising euthanasia relieves far more suffering than it risks—in spite of a small number of misdiagnoses that may end lives that could have continued—then legalisation is morally required. The further claim is that we should accept a hard conclusion if the argument is sound, however uncomfortable it feels. The discomfort, on this view, is psychological. Psychological discomfort should not overrule reason.

That suggestion forces us to confront a neglected distinction. There is a difference between psychological impossibility and moral impossibility. A person may find it psychologically impossible to board an aeroplane because of a fear of flying. By contrast, a person may find it morally impossible to commit rape because such an act violates what it means for them to be a moral being. To collapse the second into the first — to treat moral impossibility as a species of (mere) aversion or phobia — is to flatten the moral landscape and to misdescribe the reality that matters here most.

Why does this distinction matter for euthanasia? Because consequence‑first reasoning treats our deepest prohibitions as hurdles to be overcome if the calculus points the other way. If, in principle, no conclusion is categorically closed off—if nothing is ruled out as morally impossible in kind, but only in degree—then our understanding of the beings to whom our actions are addressed will shift accordingly. The method does not merely produce conclusions; it invites us to reconceive the object to which those conclusions apply. In this case, it reshapes what a human being is understood to be. That is not a neutral move. It is an invitation to accept a radically different moral landscape.

These questions also unsettle something many people treat as settled: personal autonomy. In public discussion, autonomy and “quality of life” are often invoked as if they were morally neutral facts. They are not. They are moral and cultural concepts whose meaning is interwoven with what a society finds thinkable or unthinkable.

Consider a commonplace contrast. There is robust support for legalising assisted dying in cases of terminal illness such as motor neurone disease, where decline is relentless and the horizon is short. That same support does not readily extend to severe, treatment‑resistant depression, even when it has destroyed a person’s life over decades. If the argument were simply “autonomy plus quality of life,” it would be difficult to explain this divergence. The truth is that most of us, for now, still find it unthinkable to legalise euthanasia for psychiatric illness, and thinkable for certain terminal conditions. The boundary is not drawn by autonomy alone; it is drawn by our culture’s moral imagination. That is why appeals to autonomy so often convince only where the cultural ground has already been prepared.

Supporters of such limitation argue that depression is not a reliable indicator of long‑term suffering and can diminish, whereas terminal disease does not. There is force in that reply. Yet those who have lived with severe depression for decades without relief (my own aunt was one such example) will find little comfort in the suggestion that their suffering is morally lighter because it could have gone otherwise. The point is not to legislate from hard cases. It is to notice that the weight we give to autonomy is itself a function of what we already regard as a permissible object of choice. Autonomy does not adjudicate that boundary from nowhere. It inherits it.

Certain influential accounts only deepen the ambivalence. Kantian autonomy, as rational self‑legislation, insists we treat persons as ends in themselves. But Kantian modes of thinking do not by themselves ensure that others matter to us in the ways that love, loyalty, vulnerability, and grief make vivid to us.  By contrast, utilitarian autonomy, conceived through preference satisfaction and often linked to cognitive capacity (especially by those such as Peter Singer), can, in practice, set aside the claim of the few if relief for the many is at stake. In different ways, both accounts neglect what gives the dilemma its human gravity: that people matter to us, not as abstract bearers of rights or preferences, but as irreplaceable individuals whose lives are bound up with ours. When that is forgotten, “autonomy” is untethered from the very life it is supposed to honour.

This brings me to slippery slopes, and to what might be termed cultural vacuums. A culture is marked not only by what it affirms but also by what it refuses: what it finds unthinkable. Those refusals are not formed in a philosophy seminar. They are sustained by the forms of life—language, law, ritual, and the arts—that teach us how to see one another. A cultural vacuum is what remains when those sustaining forms are hollowed out: when artistic seriousness is dismissed as decorative; when shared traditions are treated as quaint rather than instructive; when the moral languages by which we register the significance of birth, suffering, reconciliation, and death are thinned to technocratic euphemisms. In a cultural vacuum there is no stable terrain on which a “slope” could even be mapped; judgments come to float free of the practices that once gave them sense.

Slippery slopes do not therefore operate like natural forces that drag a society downhill. They operate through cultural change: through the slow altering of what a culture can imagine without moral discomfort. That is why fear of a slide is not, in itself, an argument against legal reform; it is a reminder that law does not merely regulate behaviour. It helps to form a sense of who we are, both collectively and individually. And it can do so in ways that are not immediately visible to those who celebrate a reform for the relief it will bring to clear cases. The ancient Greeks practised infanticide without self‑reproach; Nazi Germany revived eugenic ideas with murderous purpose; other cultures place their dead outside for vultures to consume. None of this proves that legalising euthanasia for the terminally ill will lead to horrors. It does show, however, that what is thinkable is historically contingent and can change with alarming rapidity.

There is another, often neglected, dimension. Most discussion centres on the person who seeks death. Far less attention is paid to those who would be asked to assist it. Conscience clauses may permit doctors to opt out, though some proposals oblige them to refer patients to willing colleagues. But the deeper question remains: what kind of person might we ask someone to become when we ask them to help us die? What kind of person do we become when we ask someone else to help us die?

People frequently misjudge their own capacities. Some are sure they can perform a grave task and find, when confronted with it, that they cannot. Others discover, in extremis, that they can do what they had thought impossible. No one can know in advance how they will respond to killing another human being, even with the patient’s consent and with the intention to relieve suffering. Remorse, where it arises, is not merely a psychological inconvenience to be managed; it is a realisation of the meaning of what one has done. To reduce it to a feeling is to repeat the earlier mistake of collapsing moral impossibility into psychological impossibility. The law should not push people lightly toward acts whose gravity they may only comprehend afterwards.

To say this is not to deny autonomy to the person who asks for help to die. It is to recognise that autonomy is never only about that person (the individual). It is also about the moral burden we place on others when we invite them to assist us to die. That burden is not exhaustively captured by protocols, safeguards, or training. It is borne by a conscience that will still be at work long after the clinic has closed and the paperwork is done.

In political argument – especially in relation to this debate – there is a temptation to monopolise compassion: to declare that only one side truly cares for the suffering, or that only one side truly honours the sanctity of life. That rhetoric expresses a failure of moral seriousness. It refuses to acknowledge the other as a perspective on the world rather than an obstacle to be overcome. To treat people that way is itself a failure of recognition of what it means to be human.

I began by admitting that there are circumstances in which I would no longer wish to live. That confession does not authorise a law. It should, rather, deepen our understanding of what is at stake. The dilemma here is real, and by definition it could go either way. If we are to change the law, we must do so with care proportionate to the act, alert to the difference between moral and psychological impossibility, clear that autonomy does not stand outside culture, and honest about the moral weight we place on those we ask to assist us to die. What is unthinkable now may not remain so. That is precisely why we should proceed—if we proceed at all—with the most exacting sensitivity toward the persons whose lives, loves, and consciences will bear the meaning of what we decide.

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