1 Anthropologies of Hope and Despair: Disability and the Assisted Suicide Debate Journal of Disability and Religion 22.1 (Fall 2018): 1-16 David Elliot, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., Research Associate, Von Hügel Institute St Edmund's College, University of Cambridge ABSTRACT The physical criteria which determine who is and who is not eligible for assisted suicide imply that some lives – such as lives with disability - are less ‘objectively’ worthwhile than others. Besides being degrading and discriminatory, this view is self-deceived. Aging makes both the nondisabled and disabled prone over time to experience increasingly serious disabilities, from impaired mobility to hearing loss. Anthropologies which undermine life with disability therefore undermine our humanity as such, risking self-hatred and misanthropy. As an alternative to this anthropology of despair, I consider hopeful models affirmed by disability rights activists and by Christian theology. KEYWORDS: disability, hope, assisted suicide, dying, end-of-life, misanthropy Introduction One of the remarkable features of physician-assisted suicide (PAS) bills in the Anglo- American context is their general uniformity. 1 From California to Colorado, from the United States to the United Kingdom, assisted dying bills have recycled the same basic formula pioneered in Oregon. 2 Two major criteria govern this model. First, the patient must be ‘aged 18 or over’ and have ‘a voluntary, clear, settled and informed wish to end his or her own life’. Second, the patient must suffer severe physical deterioration: specifically, a terminal illness from which he or she ‘is reasonable expected to die within six months’. 3 To avoid plodding circumlocutions, I will describe each by way of synecdoche: calling the first the ‘autonomy criterion’, and the second the ‘physical criterion’. The first builds autonomy safeguards to curb slippery slope fears of coercion, and the second prevents suicide on demand by limiting PAS to medically desperate cases. The autonomy criterion is therefore the necessary condition to which the physical is the sufficient condition for PAS. The consequence is that patients who want lethal drugs will only get them if the state decides that they are sick, incapacitated, or dying enough to