This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk
would lead societies adopting those views down slippery slopes toward Nazi style atrocities (Schöne‐Seifert 1991; Wright 2000).
3.41 Walter Wright describes both the argument from analogy as well as the slippery slope argument. Singer, as you will discover in greater detail in Chapter 5 on beginning of life issues, holds a number of highly controversial views resulting in him defending as moral the killing of certain severely disabled newborns. Significantly, he used language in this context that was identical to the language used by the Nazis.
3.42 In a nutshell Singer holds the view that newborns are not persons, because at birth and for a few weeks after they do not have the intellectual capacities to qualify as such. He also thinks that, by virtue of their disability, some newborns will never reach personhood, even in later life. Only persons have a right to life, so newborns would then not have a right to life. Singer the utilitarian aims to maximize the reduction of the overall amount of suffering in the world and to maximize the overall amount of happiness in the world. He argues in his bestselling book Practical Ethics that some disabled newborns suffer irreversibly a quality of life that is so miserable ‘as not to be worth living, from the internal perspective of a being who will lead that life’ (Singer 2011, 162). There he said it, a life not worth living. Singer thinks that parents of such severely disabled newborns should be permitted to make the choice to have their lives terminated. The troubling thing, for Singer, is that in the 1920s two influential German academics, the leading legal scholar Karl Binding and the medical school professor Alfred Hoche published a book in which they argued for the destruction of lives not worth living (Hoch and Binding 1920). They were not Nazis, and they were arguably driven to some extent by compassion. For instance, they insisted that those lives not worth living should only be terminated if, as Wright quotes them, their life ending ‘must be experienced as a release, at least by the victim; otherwise allowing it is self‐evidently ruled out’ (Wright 2000, 180–181).
3.43 The Nazis, of course, had other ideas when it came to euthanasia and the destruction of human lives they did not consider worth living, and their ideas were quite different from those of the German academics, and they were certainly not analogous to Singer’s views. The Nazis liked Binding and Hoche’s terminology; in fact, ‘life not worth living’ was used extensively by the Nazis and their propaganda machine. It is fair to say that the Nazis did use pretty much the same vocabulary Singer uses. However, that is where the analogy ends. Their so‐called ‘euthanasia’ program was eventually directed at people who experienced pretty much any kind of mental illness, were homosexuals, drug users, or simply homeless. What occurred was plainly and simply the murder of people who would have considered their lives very much worth living. This then isn’t analogous to the case Singer makes in his argument.
3.44 Unsurprisingly perhaps, when Singer was invited by German academics to lecture on this topic, disability rights and other activists protested and succeeded for some time in their efforts aimed at preventing Singer from speaking at German universities. As far as these activists were concerned, Singer propagated views that were analogous to what the Nazis did (Schöne‐Seifert 1991). In reality, while Singer’s views were and are controversial, as you have seen, the Nazi analogy is flawed. It was deployed on this occasion to end any further debate on Singer’s views with regard to the morality of infanticide involving the termination of the lives of certain severely disabled newborns.
3.45 John J. Michalczyk, a medical historian, warns that ‘those who invoke the Nazi analogy in a broad or general fashion are pressing the limits of valid analogy simply because the broader the scope of their reference, the harder it becomes to understand exactly what they think the Holocaust was, and thus why it is of moral relevance to the current issue’ (Michalczyk 1994).
3.46 Others have suggested that if we began taking Singer’s views seriously and implemented them as a matter of government policy we would inevitably be led down the slippery slope toward a Nazi kind of end result. We will now turn to slippery slope type arguments in bioethics.
3.10 Slippery‐Slope Arguments
3.47 Probably the most frequently used rhetorical tool in bioethics debates comes in the shape of slippery‐slope type arguments. Slippery‐slope type arguments come in various forms, but typically they are claims that something terrible would happen if we did a certain arguably desirable thing. A good example of this is: ‘If we introduce voluntary euthanasia for mentally competent terminally ill patients soon the mentally disabled will get murdered, just like the Nazis did.’ A conservative Canadian newspaper editorialized against euthanasia in that country, warning against ‘the slippery slope of assisted dying55’.
3.48 Usually slippery‐slope type arguments are both emotionally appealing and invalid. There are two broad types of slippery‐slope arguments that you quite likely will come across in bioethical arguments. The first type of slippery slope argument is conceptual in nature. It is not as common as the causal slippery slope type argument in bioethics. Conceptual slippery slope arguments claim that the criteria that are proposed to govern new legislation or a new policy are sufficiently imprecise as to open the door to abusive practices. We will come across examples of this kind of slippery‐slope argument in Chapter 11 because conceptual slippery slope arguments appear frequently in discussions about end‐of‐life issues (Somerville 201456). The same holds true for causal slippery slope arguments (Somerville 201457). Causal slippery slope type arguments typically claim that if a given (possibly sound) policy were introduced, this would invariably trigger a chain of events leading to actions or outcomes that are unacceptable (Schüklenk 2011, 47–50).
3.49 Conceptual slippery‐slope arguments are difficult to evaluate as a matter of principle. If you were to legislate that only legally competent individuals suffering from a terminal illness would be allowed to request a medically assisted death, would that really lead to a slippery slope endangering the mentally incompetent or people with depression, say, because competence assessments are not as reliable as mathematical proof? It is difficult to address this argument, except by noting that we undertake competency assessments of individuals in a large number of situations on a daily basis. The proposition that we should never implement legislation unless the concepts are as clear as the laws of physics would in effect prevent us from legislating at all.
3.50 Causal slippery slope arguments are much clearer in nature. They stipulate that if you do X, Y will invariably follow. The claim here is, of course, empirical. The inevitability is what typically is in doubt. ‘For example, opponents of genetic testing and screening say that there is no way to control the slippery slope from therapeutic uses of these new techniques to eugenic ones’ (Schüklenk 2011, 47). There are several problems with these kinds of argument. For starters, we do not know whether the empirical slope that is claimed here does actually exist. Is the inevitability of what is claimed truly inevitable, let alone likely? Given the slippery slope concerns raised would it truly be beyond our capacity to regulate and legislate against such outcomes? Even if there were actions that could be described as eugenic, would they necessarily be unethical? One problem with this line of reasoning is that it often is rhetorical in nature. A label is attached to a particular outcome, typically in a question‐begging manner, with the obvious aim being to persuade us to reject both the outcome and the slippery slope event that led to it. This we are supposedly only able to achieve by rejecting a particular proposed policy or action. Last but not least, there