The Slippery Slope Argument in the Context of Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide

This article analyzes the slippery slope argument and its application to the problem of legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. The argument is often referred to in discussions of abortion, in vitro fertilization, etc., but it has been little developed in the Russian-language literature. This explains the relevance and novelty of this article. The focus is on the ways of representation of the argument in research. It distinguishes its main types: logical (disintegrating into no-principle distinction argument and the soritical argument), empirical (or psychological argument), and non-logical (metaphorical). Each of these types of argument is constructed according to a certain principle and has a number of features and critiques. A common place for criticism of an argument is its focus on the future so that it makes reasoning probabilistic. The logical type of argument is centered around denoting the transition between the original event and its adverse consequences and denotes the action of social factors to accelerate the transition. The no-principal distinction argument implies that there is no moral distinction between the events at the beginning and the end of the slope. The soritical argument involves intermediate steps between questionable and unacceptable practices. The conceptual slope is another variant of the logical kind of argument. The empirical argument illustrates a situation of changing societal values which results in an easier acceptance of morally disapproved practices. The metaphorical argument is used to illustrate the metaphor of slope and the situation of the accumulation of small problems that lead to serious undesirable results. The non-logical kind of argument centers around the routinization of practice, desensitization, and exploitation of unprotected groups in society. Exploitation can be called the victims' slope. It grounds its consideration on the abuse of the practice being administered. Application of the ethical methodology (theoretical-logical and empirical-historical) to the types of arguments and ways of their application allows us to highlight the value component of the argument, to determine its dilemma nature and to correlate it with bioethical principles. The application of bioethical principles to suppress the transition to undesirable consequences is critiqued on the basis of particularly difficult cases in which one is unable to articulate one's decision. The criticism of the argument is built on the probabilistic nature of the reasoning, the lack of reflection on the underlying premise and the lack of empirical evidence. It concludes that the slippery slope argument is incapable of being the only valid justification for rejecting the practices of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia.

How’s Life After the Collapse? Populism as a Representation Linkage and the Emergence of a Populist/Anti-Populist Political Divide in Italy (1994–2018)

Populism is a hot topic in academia. The causes of this phenomenon have received much attention with many studies focusing on the role of the high levels of unresponsiveness of mainstream parties in triggering a populist response. In this respect, in many cases, populist parties have become a relevant electoral force in the concomitance with an electoral decline of mainstream political options, mostly in the last decades. This article considers a situation in which the whole party system’s unresponsiveness reaches its zenith, and the party system collapses. A collapse is the result of the incapacity of most of the parties in the system to fulfill their basic function, i.e., to represent voters’ interests. When this happens, none of the types of linkages—programmatic, clientelist, or personalist—that tie parties and voters are effective. Empirical observation shows that in those cases populism can perform as a sort of representation linkage to re-connect parti(es) and voters on the basis of the moral distinction between “the people” and “the elite.” Through a discursive strategy of blame attribution, populistm can attract a large portion of the vote. At this point, its opposing ideology—anti-populism—also arouses. In other words, populism/anti-populism may result in a political cleavage that structures the party system by itself or, more frequently, with other cleavages. To elucidate this argument, the paper explores the case of Italy between 1994 and 2018. The electoral relevance of populist parties translated first into a discursive cleavage, which, in turn, changed the space of competition with the emergence of a new political axis, namely populism/anti-populism. This paper's central claim is that the dynamics of partisan competition cannot be understood by overlooking the populism/anti-populism political divide. The conclusion touches on one implication of the emergence of this political cleavage, namely change of the incentives for coalition building. In fact, when populism and anti-populism structure, at least partially, the party system changing the space of interparty competition, this in turn may affect the determinants behind parties’ coalition-building choices.

Abortion and multifetal pregnancy reduction: An ethical comparison

In recent years, multifetal pregnancy reduction (MFPR) has increasingly been a subject of debate in Norway. The intensity of this debate reached a tentative maximum when the Legislation Department delivered their interpretative statement, Section 2 - Interpretation of the Abortion Act, in 2016 in response to a request from the Ministry of Health (2014) that the Legislation Department consider whether the Abortion Act allows for MFPR of healthy fetuses in multiple pregnancies. The Legislation Department concluded that the current abortion legislation [as of 2016] allows for MFPR subject to the constraints that the law otherwise stipulates. The debate has not subsided, and during autumn 2018 it was further intensified in connection with the Norwegian Christian Democratic "crossroads" policy and signals from the Conservatives to consider removing section 2.3c and to forbid MFPR. Many of the arguments in the MFPR debate are seemingly similar to arguments put forward in the general abortion debate, and an analysis to ascertain what distinguishes MFPR from other abortions has yet to be conducted. The aim of this article is, therefore, to examine whether there is a moral distinction between abortion and MFPR of healthy fetuses. We will cover the typical arguments emerging in the debate in Norway and exemplify them with scholarly articles from the literature. We have dubbed the most important arguments against MFPR that we have identified the harm argument, the slippery-slope argument, the intention argument, the grief argument, the long-term psychological effects for the woman argument, and the sorting argument. We conclude that these arguments do not measure up in terms of demonstrating a morally relevant difference between MFPR of healthy fetuses and other abortions. Our conclusion is, therefore — despite what several discussants seem to think — that there is no morally relevant difference between the two. Therefore, on the same conditions as we allow for abortions, we should also allow MFPR. Keywords: abortion, ethics, medical ethics, MFPR, selective MFPR

Just Kidding: Stand-Up, Speech Acts and Slurs

People respond to moral criticism of their speech by claiming that they were joking. In this paper, I develop a speech act analysis of the humor excuse consisting of a negative stage, in which the speaker denies he or she was making an assertion, and a positive stage, in which the speaker claims she or he was engaged in non-serious/humorous speech instead. This analysis, however, runs afoul of the group identity objection, according to which there is a moral distinction between jokes targeting members of vulnerable groups made by members of those groups and similar jokes made by non-members. In order to avoid this objection, I offer a revision to the speech act analysis that draws upon Perry’s distinction between beliefs and belief-states.

Costa, cancer and coronavirus: contractualism as a guide to the ethics of lockdown

Lockdown measures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic involve placing huge burdens on some members of society for the sake of benefiting other members of society. How should we decide when these policies are permissible? Many writers propose we should address this question using cost-benefit analysis (CBA), a broadly consequentialist approach. We argue for an alternative non-consequentialist approach, grounded in contractualist moral theorising. The first section sets up key issues in the ethics of lockdown, and sketches the apparent appeal of addressing these problems in a CBA frame. The second section argues that CBA fundamentally distorts the normative landscape in two ways: first, in principle, it allows very many morally trivial preferences—say, for a coffee—might outweigh morally weighty life-and-death concerns; second, it is insensitive to the core moral distinction between victims and vectors of disease. The third section sketches our non-consequentialist alternative, grounded in Thomas Scanlon’s contractualist moral theory. On this account, the ethics of self-defence implies a strong default presumption in favour of a highly restrictive, universal lockdown policy: we then ask whether there are alternatives to such a policy which are justifiable to all affected parties, paying particular attention to the complaints of those most burdened by policy. In the fourth section, we defend our contractualist approach against the charge that it is impractical or counterintuitive, noting that actual CBAs face similar, or worse, challenges.

Explanatory Relevance and the Doing/Allowing Distinction

This chapter by Jacob Ross clarifies the traditional moral distinction between actions and omissions. He levels various objections against counterfactual and causal ways of drawing the distinction, and proposes instead an explanatory view that avoids the objections while capturing our moral judgments about the relevant cases.

Creating and upholding an elite community: ‘Consecrating exclusion’ in Djursholm, Sweden

This article addresses a largely neglected area of study in sociology, namely the consecration of people in elite communities. Through the notion of ‘consecrating exclusion’, I explore how Sweden’s foremost elite community Djursholm was founded in 1889, and how its aura and character as an exclusive neighbourhood are maintained today. Data come from historical material and a five-year ethnographic study consisting of field observations, interviews and archival material. I analyse how Djursholm was created as a sanctuary for the economic elite in Sweden and that its foremost purpose has been to socially elevate its residents, making them appear honourable and morally superior. I report how the community has defended its borders by various practices of exclusion, and how Djursholm aims to present itself as a role-model, a ‘shining city upon a hill’ which is critical to its social standing and status. The study contributes to the sociology of elites in three ways: (a) theoretically through the notion of ‘consecrating exclusion’, by synthesizing ideas on social and moral distinction with ideas on symbolic boundaries and moral hierarchies; (b) empirically by presenting in-depth qualitative data on the construction and maintenance of a peculiar elite community, noting that few studies have reported data from a neighbourhood designated as ‘elite’ from the start; and (c) methodologically by drawing on a mix of methods including historical documents, interviews and participant observation in order to examine both historical and contemporary aspects of ‘consecrating exclusion’.

On the Moral Distinction between Intention and Advertence

This chapter discusses the moral implications of the distinction between intention and advertence. Excepting the special category of oblique intention, the criminal law broadly embraces the distinction outlined in the previous chapter, between intended actions and those merely foreseen. That embrace calls for normative defence. One way of defending it is to appeal to what can be called the standard view, that intended wrongdoing is, ceteris paribus, inherently more culpable than advertently risked wrongdoing. However, there are reasons to doubt the standard view. This chapter offers a different, albeit compatible, explanation. On the account presented here, the most systematic difference between intended and foreseen wrongdoing is not measured in degrees of culpability. Rather, it is worked out in terms of what actions may legitimately be invoked to justify pro tanto wrongdoing. In general, foreseen actions do not lend any favourable weight to the justification of intended ones, whereas intended actions can lend favourable weight to the justification of foreseen ones.