Relations Between the Father and the Daughter - Essay Example

Latimer Case In this case it was wrong for Latimer’s father to decide that his daughter deserved to die. Although the daughter wasgoing through pain and had trouble carrying out normal life’s processes, she still deserved to live. God is the only person who should decide whether a person continues living or not. Man has no power of foreseeing the future. It could be possible that the surgery Latimer was getting the day she died could have saved her some of the agonies that she was going through.

There is a reason why some of the laws exist. Preservation of the human life is the ultimate goal of any government system and should be observed at all times. For instance, a person may decide to commit suicide at some point in life because they feel that nothing is working out for them. However, they only make that decision in the context of the immediate events. They may not feel the same the following day and if they commit suicide, they miss out on life. Justifying euthanasia because a person is facing problems is wrong.

Every person has a life clock and God is the only one qualified to turn it off. If euthanasia was allowed to take place, then people would resort to committing suicide every time they felt that life was giving them a bitter lemon. Moreover, although Latimer may have been going through a lot of sufferings, maybe she was grateful that she was alive and had a mission to fulfill in life that the father cut short. Murder can never be justified and it is universally agreed that it is a crime. Moreover, if the father justified the murder of the daughter to ease suffering, people would come up with excuses to justify other forms of murder.

For instance, when one is caught for killing a robber, they may justify the act by saying that they have removed a major source of security in the neighborhood permanently. However, you find that some of the people involved in robbery are good people who have been led by circumstances to commit such crimes. If such people were rehabilitated, they would become good people in the society (Mackenzie 2005). Every [person deserves a second chance and nobody has the power to make the decision to end life.

It should occur naturally. I agree with Kant’s theory of formalism where there are laws that should be used to measure that whether one thing is wrong or not. If the morality of actions was measured by the outcomes or motives, this would create a lot of confusion. It is not always easy to know which motives lead a person. Moreover, one may have good motives and the outcomes are wrong. Would that person be said to have done an action that is morally incorrect? In this case, the judge reduced the term that Latimer’s father would serve in jail because he was described as a good man and only murdered his daughter to ease her suffering.

However, his motives cannot be verified. He could have killed his daughter for his own selfish reason. It is possible that he was tired of taking care of his daughter considering that she could not do anything by herself. The daughter had also gone through several surgeries and this could have had a financial toil on him. It is thus possible that the father did this to make life easy for himself. This is morally incorrect and can make ruling in other cases hard. It is not possible to know the true motives behind Latimer’s father action (Deigh 2010).

Trying to understand the motives only makes the law more complicated than it should be. The case should have been ruled on the basis that deliberately taking another person’s life is a violation of the law and should have been punished accordingly. If all cases were to be judged by looking at the motives, then the line between what is right and wrong would be blurred. Reduction of the punishment that the further received creates a loophole in the practice of law where the wrongdoers may go unpunished.

In this way, the legal system will have failed in ensuring a crime free society (Zamagni et al 2013). For instance, a single mother without a job may justify the act of murdering her children because she is not able to support them and believes that their future would be terrible. It can be concluded that when it comes to matter related to preservation of life, circumstances should not be used to justify the compromise of a life of a human being. Murder is wrong whether the person wants to die or not.

If it was right for people to quit in life when they felt that things were not going the way they wanted it to be, suicide would be common place and life would lose its meaning. You find that most people who get suicidal thoughts do so because they are facing some challenges in life but not because they want to die. Challenges are good in life because they are what make personality and it is not always possible for one to get what they want. ReferencesTop of FosBottom of Form Deigh, J. (2010).

An introduction to ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press. Mackenzie, J. S. (2005). A manual of ethics. New York: Cosimo Classics. Zamagni, S., In Bruni, L., & Ferrucci, A. (2013). Handbook on the economics of reciprocity and social enterprise.