Against the right to mutilation: an analogy ad absurdum

A particular repertoire of arguments against the legalization of euthanasia has been part of the philosophical debate for more than sixty years. It has been repeated and criticized many times over the years, but I try in this article to show that the arguments are flawed by way of a different argumentative strategy that I propose to call analogy ad absurdum. I thus argue that patients as well as the medical profession would be best served with a total prohibition on amputations. My arguments closely follow analogous well-established and well-reputed arguments in the debate over euthanasia. To the extent that those arguments establish that we ought not to accept killing as an integral part of the healing profession, we ought to be equally dismissive of the medical practice of amputations. Conversely, if we find that the worries about and objections to the practice of amputations could most probably be handled, we should be skeptical about the analogous arguments concerning euthanasia.