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.
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
It is unclear whether these two descriptions really are logically identical. Even if they are not logically identical, it is an open question whether attitudes about them vary sufficiently for there to be an empirical distinction between the two. See discussion.
- 2.
- 3.
It may seem somewhat forced to include the category “non-voluntary physician assisted suicide” since physician assisted suicide is typically taken to be a kind of voluntary, active euthanasia. In the non-voluntary scenario, the wishes of the patient are left unspecified so one cannot be sure if the patient volunteers for the treatment. Alternatively, the patient may be understood to be functioning, yet incompetent (hence, not able to give adequate consent).
- 4.
Kemmelmeier et al. (1999) did not gather data on the ‘euthanasia’ scale, so direct comparisons between the two scales was not possible.
References
Achille, Marie A., and James R.P. Ogloff. 1997. When is a request for assisted suicide legitimate? Factors influencing public attitudes toward euthanasia. Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science 29: 19–27.
American Medical Association (AMA), Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs. 1992. Decisions near the end of life. JAMA 267: 2229–2233.
Barry, Vincent E. 2007. Philosophical thinking about death and dying. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth.
Battin, Margaret Pabst. 2005. Ending life: Ethics and the way we die. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beauchamp, Tom L. 2006. The right to die as the triumph of autonomy. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 3: 643–654.
Brock, Dan W. 1992. Voluntary active euthanasia. Hastings Center Report 22: 10–22.
Buhrmester, Michael, Tracy Kwang, and Samuel D. Gosling. 2011. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk: A new source of inexpensive, yet high-quality, data? Perspectives on Psychological Science 6: 3–5.
Chong, Alice Ming Lin, and Shiu-Yeu Fok. 2013. Validation of the Chinese expanded euthanasia attitude scale. Death Studies 37: 89–98.
Cokely, Edward T., Mirta Galesic, Eric Schulz, Saima Ghazal, and Rocio Garcia-Retamero. 2012. Measuring risk literacy: The Berlin Numeracy Test. Judgment and Decision Making 7: 25–47.
DeCesare, Michael A. 2000. Public attitudes toward euthanasia and suicide for terminally ill persons: 1977 and 1996. Social Biology 47: 264–276.
Domino, George. 2002. Community attitudes toward physician assisted suicide. Omega (Westport) 46: 199–214.
Emanuel, Ezekiel J. 2002. Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide: A review of the empirical data from the United States. Archives of Internal Medicine 162: 142–152.
Feltz, Adam and Edward T. Cokely. submitted. The Berlin euthanasia scale.
Frileux, S., C. Lelievre, M.T.M. Sastre, E. Mullet, C. Paul, and Sorum. 2003. When is physician assisted suicide or euthanasia acceptable? Journal of Medical Ethics 29: 330–336.
Gamliel, Eyal. 2013. To end life or not to prolong life: The effect of message framing on attitudes toward euthanasia. Journal of Health Psychology 18: 693–703.
Genuis, Stephen J., Shelagh K. Genuis, and Wei-Ching Chang. 1994. Public attitudes toward the right-to-die. Canadian Medical Association Journal 150: 701–708.
Gosling, Samuel D., Peter J. Rentfrow, and William B. Swann. 2003. A very brief measure of the big-five personality domains. Journal of Research in Personality 37: 504–528.
Graham, Jesse, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Haidt, Ravi Iyer, Spassena Koleva, and Peter H. Ditto. 2011. Mapping the moral domain. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 101: 366–385.
Hains, Carrie A.M., and Nicholas J. Hulbert-Williams. 2013. Attitudes toward euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide: A study of the multivariate effects of healthcare training, patient characteristics, religion and locus of control. Journal of Medical Ethics 39: 713–716.
Ho, Robert. 1998. Assessing attitudes toward euthanasia: An analysis of the subcategorical approach to right to die issues. Personality and Individual Differences 25: 719–734.
Ho, Robert, and Ronald K. Penney. 1992. Euthanasia and abortion: Personality correlates for the decision to terminate life. Journal of Social Psychology 132: 77–86.
Huber, Ruth, V.M. Cox, and W.B. Edelen. 1992. Right-to-die responses from a random sample of 200. The Hospice Journal 8: 1–19.
Jackson, Emily, and John Keown. 2012. Debating euthanasia. Portland: Hart.
Jorgenson, David E., and Ron C. Neubecker. 1981. Euthanasia—A national survey of attitudes toward voluntary termination of life. Omega-Journal of Death and Dying 11: 281–291.
Kemmelmeier, Markus, Eugene Burnstein, and Kaiping Peng. 1999. Individualism and authoritarianism shape attitudes toward physician-assisted suicide. Journal of Applied Social Psychology 29: 2613–2631.
Kroh, Martin. 2007. Measuring left-right political orientation: The choice of response format. Public Opinion Quarterly 71: 204–220.
Levin, Irwin P., Sandra L. Schneider, and Gary J. Gaeth. 1998. All frames are not created equal: A typology and critical analysis of framing effects. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 76: 149–188.
Lewis, Penney. 2007. The empirical slippery slope from voluntary to non-voluntary euthanasia. Journal of Law Medicine and Ethics 35: 197–210.
MacDonald, William L. 1998. Situational factors and attitudes toward voluntary euthanasia. Social Science and Medicine 46: 73–81.
McLachlan, Hugh V. 2010. Assisted suicide and the killing of people? Maybe. Physician-assisted suicide and the killing of patients? No: The rejection of Shaw’s new perspective on euthanasia. Journal of Medical Ethics 36: 306–309.
Meier, Diane E., Carol-Ann Emmons, Sylvan Wallenstein, R. Timothy Quill, Sean Morrison, and Christine K. Cassel. 1998. A national survey of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia in the United States. New England Journal of Medicine 338: 1193–1201.
Ostheimer, John M. 1980. The polls: Changing attitudes toward euthanasia. Public Opinion Quarterly 44: 123–128.
Paollacci, Gabriele, Jesse Chandler, and Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis. 2010. Running experiements using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Judgment and Decision Making 5: 411–419.
Parkinson, Lynne, Katherine Rainbird, Ian Kerridge, Gregory Carter, John Cavenagh, John McPhee, and Peter Ravenscroft. 2005. Cancer patients’ attitudes toward euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide: The influence of question wording and patients’ own definitions on responses. Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 2: 82–89.
Raz, Joseph. 2013. Death in our life. Journal of Applied Philosophy 30: 1–11.
Rogers, James R. 1996. Assessing right to die attitudes: A conceptually guided measurement model. Journal of Social Issues 52: 63–84.
Sawyer, Darwin, and Jeffery Sobal. 1987. Public attitudes toward suicide—Demographic and ideological correlates. Public Opinion Quarterly 51: 92–101.
Singh, B.Krishna. 1979. Correlates of attitudes toward euthanasia. Social Biology 26: 247–254.
Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1981. The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science 211: 453–458.
Velleman, David J. 1992. Against the right to die. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 17: 665–681.
Verbakel, Wilko F.A.R., Johan P. Cuijpers, Daan Hoffmans, Michael Bieker, Ben J. Slotman, and Suresh Senan. 2009. Volumetric intensity-modulated arc therapy vs. conventional IMRT in head-and-neck cancer: A comparative planning and dosimetric study. International Journal of Radiation Oncology*Biology*Physics 74: 252–259.
Wasserman, Jason, Jeffrey M. Clair, and Ferris J. Ritchey. 2005. A scale to assess attitudes toward euthanasia. Omega (Westport) 51: 229–237.
Wolfe, Joanne, Diane L. Fairclough, Brian R. Clarridge, Elisabeth R. Daniels, and Ezekiel J. Emanuel. 1999. Stability of attitudes regarding physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia among oncology patients, physicians, and the general public. Journal of Clinical Oncology 17: 1274.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
13.1.1 Scenarios
Instructions: The following scenario is meant to explore some of your feelings toward end of life decision making. It is not meant to test what you know.
-
Euthanasia/Physician Assisted Suicide/Aid in Dying Not Voluntary
Mr. Smith has a serious illness that is totally incurable given current knowledge. He is currently receiving the best possible treatment. He suffers atrociously and pain medication cannot relieve his suffering. He has never expressed a wish for (euthanasia/physician assisted suicide/aid in dying).
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is morally permissible in this case.
-
Euthanasia/Physician Assisted Suicide/Aid in Dying Voluntary
Mr. Smith has a serious illness that is totally incurable given current knowledge. He is currently receiving the best possible treatment. He suffers atrociously and pain medication cannot relieve his suffering. He has clearly and repeatedly requested (euthanasia/physician assisted suicide/aid in dying).
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is morally permissible in this case requested aid in dying.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is morally permissible in this case.
13.1.2 Scales
Instructions: The following scale is meant to explore some of your feelings toward end of life decision making. It is not meant to test what you know. (* indicates item to be reverse scored.)
-
1.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is acceptable if the person is old.
-
2.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) should be accepted in today’s society.
-
3.
There are never cases when (euthanasia/physician assisted suicide/aid in dying) is appropriate.*
-
4.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is helpful at the right time and place (under the right circumstances).
-
5.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is a humane act.
-
6.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) should be against the law.*
-
7.
There are very few cases when (euthanasia/physician assisted suicide/aid in dying) is acceptable.*
-
8.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) should only be used when the person has a terminal illness.
-
9.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) is acceptable in cases when all hope of recovery is gone.
-
10.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) gives a person a chance to die with dignity.
-
11.
(Euthanasia/Physician assisted suicide/Aid in dying) should be practiced only to eliminate physical pain and not emotional pain
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Feltz, A. (2015). Everyday Attitudes About Euthanasia and the Slippery Slope Argument. In: Cholbi, M., Varelius, J. (eds) New Directions in the Ethics of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia. International Library of Ethics, Law, and the New Medicine, vol 64. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22050-5_13
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22050-5_13
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-22049-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-22050-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)