Peter Schaber

During the last years, more and more countries have introduced a practice of assisted dying in their medical system and regulated it by separate laws or by additions to the existing body of criminal law. In this respect, the two neighboring countries, Germany and Switzerland, are exceptional cases. In both countries, there exists a long‐standing and largely uncontested legal prohibition of euthanasia, but only minimal state regulation concerning assisted suicide. Right‐to‐die organizations face the challenge of filling the gap by defining their own rules. In this, the largest right‐to‐die organizations in both countries are advised by individual ethicists or ethics committees, with the mission to uphold ethical standards. The paper compares the role of ethical counseling in these organizations (in which the authors are the heads of the respective ethics committees) and describes the scope of their counseling work and the extent of their responsibility for maintaining an ethically defensible practice.

If a person competently requests another person to assist her in dying, she thereby exercises her normative power to make the act permissible that belongs to her rights over her own body. Denying a person this normative power means, on the view developed in this chapter, to disrespect her human dignity. We thus argue against views that regard terminating one’s own life (by the help of others) as morally impermissible for reasons of human dignity. At the same time, however, we do not think that exercises of a person’s normative power to end her life provide others with any reasons to help nor does it put them' under a duty to assist. Respect for human dignity only requires us to respect a person’s normative power to make assisting acts morally permissible.

At the centre of the metaethical debate that took off from G.E. Moore's Principia Ethica (1903) was his critique of ethical naturalism. While Moore's own arguments against ethical naturalism find little acceptance these days, an alternative ground for thinking that ethical properties and facts could not be natural has gained prominence: No natural account can be given of normativity. This collection contains original essays from both sides of the debate. Representing a wide range of metaethical views, the authors develop diverse accounts of normativity and discuss what it means for a concept to be natural. Contributions are by Norbert Anwander, David Copp, Neil Roughley, Peter Schaber, Thomas Schmidt, Tatjana Tarkian, and Theo van Willigenburg.