ABSTRACT
The chapter gives an overview of the issues to be addressed and an outline of the main argumentative structure of the book. It also explains that the arguments are supposed to be minimally revisionist: they don't appeal to any of the revisions of commonsense morality that people who defend the justifiability of ‘physician-assisted suicide’ and ‘euthanasia’ usually appeal to. On the whole my method is the usual one in bioethics. It starts from convictions that I suppose to be shared by almost everyone and argue for principles that are best suited to accommodate those shared convictions. But to this corpus of the ‘considered judgements of competent moral judges’ I add a number of views that are structural elements of all legal systems. Hence in my approach not only does ethics instruct the law, the law also informs ethics.
