Rich, white, and vulnerable: rethinking oppressive socialization in the euthanasia debate.

Anita Silvers (1998) has criticized those who argue that members of marginalized groups are vulnerable to a special threat posed by physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and voluntary active euthanasia (VAE). She argues that paternalistic measures prohibiting PAS/VAE in order to protect these groups only serve to marginalize them further by characterizing them as belonging to a definitively weak class. I offer a new conception of vulnerability, one that demonstrates how rich, educated, white males, who are typically regarded as having their autonomy enhanced by their social status, are just as, if not more, vulnerable to threats posed by PAS/VAE as a result of the harmful social messages at work just below the surface of contemporary Western culture. I use this new conception of vulnerability to reinforce arguments for continued statutory prohibitions on PAS/VAE.

Health as normal function: a weak link in Daniels's theory of just health distribution.

Drawing on Christopher Boorse's Biostatistical Theory (BST), Norman Daniels contends that a genuine health need is one which is necessary to restore normal functioning - a supposedly objective notion which he believes can be read from the natural world without reference to potentially controversial normative categories. But despite his claims to the contrary, this conception of health harbors arbitrary evaluative judgments which make room for intractable disagreement as to which conditions should count as genuine health needs and therefore which needs should be met. I begin by offering a brief summary of Boorse's BST, the theory to which Daniels appeals for providing the conception of health as normal functioning upon which his overall distributive scheme rests. Next, I consider what I call practical objections to Daniels's use of Boorse's theory. Finally I recount Elseljin Kingma's theoretical objection to Boorse's BST and discuss its impact on Daniels's overall theory. Though I conclude that Boorse's view, so weakened, will no longer be able to sustain the judgments which Daniels's theory uses it to reach, in the end, I offer Daniels an olive branch by briefly sketching an alternative strategy for reaching suitably objective conclusions regarding the health and/or disease status of various conditions.