Abstract

Although those with liberal attitudes towards voluntary euthanasia are often castigated as crude consequentialists who give overriding value to social utility, two common arguments against permitting active voluntary euthanasia even in the most desperate of cases, the slippery‐slope argument and the argument that further research into terminal care and pain control will be discouraged, are entirely consequentialist, and to invoke them to justify withholding assistance in these desperate cases is to fail to respect patients as ends in themselves.