KIE Senior Research Scholar John Keown recently published two new works on issues surrounding euthanasia.

The first appears in the latest issue of the World Medical Journal entitled “Voluntary Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: Should the WMA Drop its Opposition?” The World Medical Association has long opposed the decriminalization of both, but there are those who argue it should drop its opposition and adopt a ‘neutral’ stance. Dr. Keown’s paper analyzes some of the main arguments for doing so and argues that they are unpersuasive.

The second was published in a recently-published festschrift. Titled “Debating Euthanasia: A Reply to Emily Jackson,” the work appears in Law, Ethics and Medicine: Essays in Honour of Peter Skegg, edited by Mark Henaghan and Jesse Wall.

“I was delighted to contribute an essay to his collection in his honour,” said Keown, “not only because of his eminence in the field, but also because I have known him since he supervised the first year of my doctoral research at Oxford.”

Peter Skegg, Emeritus Professor of law at the University of Otago in New Zealand, has been described as one of the ‘fathers’ of the discipline of medical law in the UK. After earning a DPhil at Oxford, he went on to become the Chair of the Oxford Law Faculty before returning to New Zealand. In 2012 he was made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in the Queen’s Birthday and Diamond Jubilee Honours List.

Dr. Keown’s essay in the collection is a response to Professor Emily Jackson’s case in favour of decriminalising voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, which she deployed in the book Emily Jackson and John Keown, Debating Euthanasia.