L'aiuto medico a morire: oltre lo spettro del pendio scivoloso

One of the main reasons justifying the opposition to assisted dying in countries such as the UK, Germany and Italy is provided by the slippery slope argument. The legalization of assisted dying would be a first and decisive step towards the gradual acceptance by public opinion, medical professions, and political decision-makers of the medical killing of people unable to consent. Given that this outcome is morally disgraceful, assisted dying should not be permitted in the first place. Slippery slope arguments are popular in a wide range of debates across bioethics, law, and public policy, and are widely employed to prevent policymakers from extending the right to assisted dying to new categories of persons in those jurisdictions where that right is already recognized. However, it is highly disputed whether arguments of this sort are able to support their conclusions or should rather be dismissed because ill-grounded. In this article I try to answer this question. To do that, I first show that various versions of the slippery slope arguments are actually present in the debate on assisted dying. I then claim that the only version of the argument that is not ill-grounded supports the opposite conclusion, namely that the non-recognition of the right to assisted dying may be a first step on the slippery slope to unvoluntary euthanasia in many legal systems.