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In Incognito: The Principle Of Double Effect In American Constitutional Law, Edward Lyons

Edward C. Lyons

In Vacco v. Quill, 521 U.S. 793 (1997), the Supreme Court for the first time in American case law explicitly applied the principle of double effect to reject an equal protection claim to physician-assisted suicide. Double effect, traced historically to Thomas Aquinas, proposes that under certain circumstances it is permissible unintentionally to cause foreseen evil effects that would not be permissible to cause intentionally. The court rejected the constitutional claim on the basis of a distinction marked out by the principle, i.e., between directly intending the death of a terminally ill patient as opposed to merely foreseeing that death as …