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Your argument makes a plausible case for suicide and euthanasia in general, but I think it fails to make a strong affirmative case for "non-voluntary" euthanasia. Nor does it really show that the initial secular-humanist sketch is inherently contradictory or wrong. Perhaps the most dangerous feature of your argument is that it risks introducing a post hoc intuition about what level of suffering is acceptable, relying on the benevolence and judgment of the individual decision-maker rather than establishing a stable social rule.
It also does not really explain why palliative care and the potential for future developments in medical care do not themselves weigh in favor of preserving life in the absence of an affirmative wish to die. Take, for example, spinal muscular atrophy in infants. Historically, this could involve extreme suffering, progressive loss of muscle function, and frequently death. But the arrival of onasemnogene abeparvovec produced a step change in our ability to treat the disease. Reasonable people might previously have concluded that such a condition was progressive, incurable, and perhaps rendered life not worth living. We now know that prognosis can be radically altered by treatment. Yet there remains an enormous social and financial cost to supplying such treatment. There would therefore be an obvious institutional incentive not to deploy a two-million-dollar-per-dose drug if we had already normalized euthanizing people with the disease.
It was perhaps a weakness in my initial sketch to use the term "net-positive moral utility," but once you invoke a Rawlsian-style transposition of positions, we can admit analysis from behind a veil of ignorance. It is not contradictory to emerge from that analysis with a framework that is liberal in nature and secular-humanist in outlook, but treats the relevant rights as ordered rather than fully commensurable. For example, you might conclude that the right to life has lexical or ordinal priority over the right to pursue the good life because revoking the right to life is irreversible, whereas suffering may be temporary and a person may later acquire greater opportunities to pursue the good life through developments in technology or medical care.
The key weakness in proposing that "fine-tuning" is the obvious method for resolving the tension in cases involving euthanasia of an incapacitated person is that the proposal still lacks an administrable surrogate-decision rule. It contains a projection problem, in which the preferences of a person with one set of capabilities are projected onto someone with another; it has not defined a stable limiting principle; it does not explain what evidentiary threshold should apply in cases of disagreement; and it does not explain the source or limits of the proxy's authority.
More generally, in this case, we have drawn lines around both incapacity and the age of the person to be euthanized. If I understand you correctly, you have already conceded that the infant is a person. If we allow rights to depend upon further distinctions within the category of persons, then we need some mechanism for protecting against institutional abuse and category expansion.
For an intentionally extreme example, consider the following. I do not endorse this view, and I am not claiming that your framework necessarily leads to it. I offer it as the sort of risk case from which we would presumably want a theory to protect us. A person seeks transition surgery from male to female. A central part of their conception of being female is the possibility of motherhood, but medical science cannot make that possible. The doctor understands this and believes that the patient will experience enormous and indefinite suffering even after surgery. While under anesthesia, the patient is incapacitated and unable to express a present preference for life. We would not therefore allow the doctor to substitute their own judgment about whether the patient's life is worth living for the judgment of the patient. Even if the doctor correctly predicts that the patient will suffer indefinitely, the doctor does not acquire the authority to conclude that the life is not worth living and then kill the patient.
The example is deliberately extreme, but analogous cases can be constructed around any number of classifications, a sort of general Lebensunwertes Leben. Once rights protection depends upon classifications and judgments of worth evaluated by third parties, the theory owes an account of which classifications are legitimate, who is entitled to make them, and why. The point of the coarse definition of personhood and the broad presumptions, such as a presumption in favor of continued life, in the original framework is precisely to protect the institution of human rights against those problems. Invoking "fine-tuning" therefore does not answer the original argument. It requires defeating the reason for adopting the coarse rule in the first place, rather than simply asserting that finer-grained balancing is obviously preferable.
Your argument against reasonable euthanasia is imagining unreasonable euthanasia. The same logic can be used to abolish the age of consent. If you can arrest someone for violating the age of consent, then in theory you could slippy slope into arresting someone for any deviant sexual interest. Therefore you could arrest trans people. Do you want trans people to not be in prison? If yes, do you want there to be an age of consent? If yes, you reject your own logic. So to own this logic you must either be for locking up trans people for being trans or for getting rid of the age of consent. Note that any special please that it's different can also be used equally as well against your thought experiment.
But rights already do depend on 3rd party evaluations ... think about courts and wars. Your argument only is fully consistent if you support something like abolishing most of the violent government and moving towards an absolute NAP society.
Age can be measured objectively, so age-based restrictions are much harder to slippery-slope than reasonable slipping to unreasonable.
Whether a patient can communicate their desire for or against suicide can also be measured objectively. Objective measures can be slipperly sloped at any rate, see the Nürnberger Gesetze, or just increasingly high and unreasonable age limits.
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No. My argument states that there must be some meaningful limiting principle if you want to argue affirmatively for non-voluntary euthanasia. No, I do not claim that you should abolish courts or wars under that theory. My claim, under that framework, is that those would be illegitimate without significant procedural safeguards.
Everyone agrees with that, no? I pointed towards some basic functional limiting principles here.
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