Everyday attitudes about euthanasia and the slippery slope argument
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-20-2015
Department
Department of Cognitive and Learning Sciences
Abstract
This chapter provides empirical evidence about everyday attitudes concerning euthanasia. These attitudes have important implications for some ethical arguments about euthanasia. Two experiments suggested that some different descriptions of euthanasia have modest effects on people's moral permissibility judgments regarding euthanasia. Experiment 1 (N = 422) used two different types of materials (scenarios and scales) and found that describing euthanasia differently ('euthanasia', 'aid in dying', and 'physician assisted suicide') had modest effects (≈3 % of the total variance) on permissibility judgments. These effects were largely replicated in Experiment 2 (N = 409). However, in Experiment 2, judgments about euthanasia's moral permissibility were best predicted by the voluntariness of the treatment. Voluntariness was a stronger predictor than some demographic factors and some domain general elements of moral judgments. These results help inform some debates about the moral permissibility of euthanasia (e.g., the slippery slope argument) suggesting that some of the key premises of those arguments are unwarranted.
Publication Title
New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia
ISBN
978-3-319-22049-9
Recommended Citation
Feltz, A.
(2015).
Everyday attitudes about euthanasia and the slippery slope argument.
New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,
64, 217-237.
http://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22050-5_13
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/4089