ABSTRACT
This chapter purposes to consider whether the increasingly influential view that physician-assisted suicide poses a special danger to "weak" classes, especially to the disabled, is similarly paternalistic. As a matter of public interest and policy, then, the other-regarding principle requiring protection of these "innocents" trumps the self-regarding principle of self-determination so decisively that the former justifies restricting opportunity to exercise the latter. The chapter will show, however, it is not physician-assisted suicide but rather the insistence that, as a class, people with disabilities need special protection from it that controverts the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA's) strategy for liberating people with disabilities from their historical oppression. As it have explained elsewhere, unlike protection from disability discrimination, group differentiated disability entitlements are not corollaries of the principles or values of democratic political morality, which focuses on the achievement of equality. The ADA establishes a generally applicable civil right rather than a group differentiated right.
