Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide. Rethinking the ?Philosopher?s Brief?

EDUARDO RIVERA LÓPEZ

Simposio; Second NYU-UBA Annual Conference: The Legacy of Ronald Dworkin?; 2015

Universidad de Buenos Aires y New York University

Ronald Dworkin published his acclaimed Life Dominion in 1993. In 1994, two leading cases of the US constitutional law on euthanasia and assisted suicide were initiated: ?Washington vs. Glucksberg? and ?Vacco vs. Quill?. These cases were decided by the US Supreme Court in 1997, preceded by a number of ?amici curiae?. One of them is the famous ?Philosopher?s Brief?, written by the most outstanding moral philosophers of that time (Dworkin among them). All in all, about 20 years have passed from those events. The cases were decided against Dworkin?s position, and no attempt to legalize assisted suicide or active euthanasia since then has been successful in Latin America. My purpose is to explain this failure and, on the basis of this explanation, to critically revisit some of the arguments deployed by Dworkin and the philosophers.