Physician-assisted dying: review of issues and roles for health psychologists.

The authors review the recent empirical and theoretical literature on physician-assisted dying (PAD) since implementation of the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODDA) in 1997. The authors provide a brief overview of end-of-life practices; consider ethical and practical issues regarding PAD; outline governments' acts and health care organizations' current codified principles regarding PAD, including the American Psychological Association's goal to increase the visibility of psychology in end-of-life issues; examine recent data pertinent to ODDA implementation and psychologists' attitudes regarding PAD; and outline potential roles for health psychologists responding to requests for PAD and implementing PAD (where it is legal). Health psychologists can assume at least 4 roles regarding PAD: (a) policy advocates, (b) educators, (c) practitioners, and (d) researchers.     

Attitudes,Tracing, and Control

There is an apparent tension in our everyday moral responsibility practices. On the one hand, it is commonly assumed that moral responsibility requires voluntary control: an agent can be morally responsible only for those things that fall within the scope of her voluntary control. On the other hand, we regularly praise and blame individuals for mental states and conditions that appear to fall outside the scope of their voluntary control, such as desires, emotions, beliefs, and other attitudes. In order to resolve this apparent tension, many philosophers appeal to a tracing principle to argue that agents are morally responsible (only) for those attitudes whose existence can be traced back, causally, to a voluntary action or omission in the past. My aim in this article is to critically evaluate this tracing strategy and to argue that it gives us a misguided picture of when and why we are morally responsible for our attitudes. I argue that we should accept a ‘judgment sensitivity’ condition of moral responsibility rather than a ‘voluntary control’ condition, and defend this account against various objections.