The Compassionate State? ‘Voluntary Assisted Dying’, Neoliberalism, and a Virtue Without an Anchor
- Publisher:
- ANU Press
- Publication Type:
- Chapter
- Citation:
- Voluntary Assisted Dying Law? Health? Justice?, 2022, pp. 75-94
- Issue Date:
- 2022-02-22
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This article does not focus on the ethical issues surrounding the newly legal interventions that the Act legalises, referred to by the Cambridge Textbook of Bioethics as ‘physician assisted suicide’ and ‘euthanasia’.4 Commentaries that analyse the ethics of these acts already abound. Nor does the article in substance seek to grapple with the tragedy of those who die in pain or without adequate care: that indeed is a crucial moral question, globally, which equally tragically is circumvented when the fact of inadequate care is used as a bait-and-switch argument to propose only one solution to it. Instead, it presents an analysis of the use of the term ‘compassion’ in Hennessy’s tweet, which itself is reflective of the language and thrust of political and public sentiment following the voluntary assisted dying (hereafter referred to as VAD) debate. The claim here is that the state that legislates for VAD is the ‘compassionate state’. In the words of the Premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, in the media conference following the Act’s passing:
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