When Compassion Becomes Discrimination: Disability, Structural Injustice, and the Ethics of MAID for Mental Illness

Policy and public discourse surrounding Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) in Canada is often framed in terms of dignity, compassion, and respect for individual autonomy. As Canada currently grapples with the question of expanding eligibility for MAID to persons with a mental disorder as their sole underlying medical condition, new ethical concerns arise that cannot be addressed within the existing framework. The aim of project is to consider whether allowing MAID for mental illness might inadvertently reproduce existing structural injustices by transforming social abandonment into an apparent act of compassion – and whether what is presented as fairness and framed in terms of ‘equal access’ may actually mask deeper inequalities that arise from social conditions of exclusion, stigma, and inadequate provision of care and support.

The Ethics Exchange

The Ethics Exchange is an initiative that aims to integrate ethical reasoning and disciplinary expertise across the University of Lethbridge curriculum. 

Ethics education in many universities is relatively siloed. Philosophy departments offer courses in both ethical theory and applied ethics, yet these are often disconnected from the places where students actually encounter problems that call for ethical reasoning (e.g., labs, clinics, offices, field work). Meanwhile, non-philosophy faculty members often want to address ethics in their classes, but lack the time, training, or confidence to do so.

Ethics training without context thus risks being somewhat thin when it comes to current disciplinary knowledge, while ethics coverage in non-philosophy settings can result in students seeing ethics as a checklist, that is, a requirement to ‘get out of the way’. 

Drawing on the expertise that already exists at the university, the Ethics Exchange is conceived as a formal structure that connect ethicists with domain experts. Accordingly, it is conceive along two tracks:

Track A: Ethics in Context

Philosophers bring ethics into disciplinary courses

Track B: Context in Ethics

Domain experts bring their disciplinary knowledge into ethics courses