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13 J. Contemp. Health L. & Pol'y 361 (1996-1997)
Physician-Assisted Suicide: A Tragic View

handle is hein.journals/jchlp13 and id is 395 raw text is: PHYSICIAN-ASSISTED SUICIDE: A TRAGIC VIEW John D. Arras, Ph.D.* I. PROLOGUE-A REFLECTION ON THE CAREER OF JOHN FLETCHER Throughout his long and distinguished career, John Fletcher has made major contributions to our public life in a wide variety of important policy debates. He has pursued his vision of a just and decent society with unre- mitting dedication to both the worthy goal of medical progress and to the moral rights of all human beings. His contributions to our ongoing strug- gles with the problems of biomedical research and reproductive technolo- gies reflect not only an extraordinarily keen intellect, but also a host of moral virtues, not the least of which is a remarkable capacity to be led not by well-worn habit and bias, but rather by the power of evidence and argument. In rather stark contrast to a number of well-known scholars who have stuck to their ideologically driven positions well after the latter have been thoroughly discredited by critics, John Fletcher has had the courage and good sense to reverse his thinking and redirect his conclu- sions whenever he thought the arguments demanded it. Perhaps nowhere is this capacity to rethink a well-entrenched position more evident than in John Fletcher's long-standing reflections on the dif- ficult problem of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide (PAS). Fif- teen years ago, Fletcher led a new generation of critics who opposed these practices not on the narrow religious rationale that all such killing is inherently immoral, but rather on the basis of a thoroughly secular, con- sequentialist analysis of the likely bad effects of implementing the prac- tices as a matter of social policy. In an influential essay published in 1982, he argued that allowing a policy of euthanasia would result both in prob- able harms to innocent parties-the poor, the psychologically disturbed, the vulnerable elderly-and in a loss of opportunity for achieving positive goods. * Porterfield Professor of Biomedical Ethics and Professor of Philosophy University of Virginia. The author would like to thank Yale Kamisar, Tom Murray, and Bonnie Steinbock for helpful discussions and exchanges on the issues dealt with in this paper. 1. See John Fletcher, Is Euthanasia Ever Justifiable?, in CONTROVERSIES IN ONCOL- OGY 297 (Peter H. Wiernik ed., 1982).

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