Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide - Research Paper Example

Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide “Euthanasia is like a pimple. It’s not really such a big deal unless it’s on your own nose.”-Anonymous To be honest, I just made up the quote above. Although it may seem that it makes a mockery of a serious issue, I believe that it exactly represents how I feel about euthanasia or, as some people would euphemize it, assisted suicide. That is, I would never approve for any of my loved ones to go through it themselves, but I would definitely consider it an option to be performed on myself if it ever got to the point that maintaining my existence creates more burden than joy.

This paper will explain my position against euthanasia for moral and personal reasons. Susan Wolfe, in her article “Confronting Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: My Father’s Death,” details the account of the last days that she spent with her ailing father. Ironically, she held a strong position of opposing the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. In fact, she led the Hastings Center project that developed Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying.

However, she was faced with a serious dilemma when it was already her father who was a “candidate” of these two acts. Andersen and Taylor (2007) define euthanasia as “the act of killing a severely ill person as an act of mercy.” The said authors further classify euthanasia into passive euthanasia, which involves withholding treatment from the patient knowing that doing so will produce the death of the patient, such as may be stipulated in a living will, and positive euthanasia which involves killing the severely ill person who would otherwise live, though in constant pain, coma, or other extreme conditions, as an act of mercy.

Personally, I don’t think I could ever approve of performing euthanasia on any of my loved ones. My reason is two-fold in taking this position. First, I believe that euthanasia is not a moral act and secondly, I could never be emotionally prepared to cause the termination of the existence of a loved one. Consequentialists may argue against my first reason. As followers of the theory of consequentialism, consequentialists believe that morality depends on the consequences of any given act or of something related to that act, such as the motive behind the act or a general rule requiring acts of the same kind (Sinnott-Armstrong, 2006).

Consequentialists are utilitarian in nature, such that they consider the morality of particular acts based on the pleasure (utility) that can be derived from these acts. However, this cannot possibly count as morality for me. One cannot simply choose the more pleasurable way as the moral way. For me, morality is doing the right thing. As such, taking the life of another person, as in the case of euthanasia, is wrong. Thus, it is not the moral thing to do. Essentially, we do not hold our lives in our hand, nor do we hold another’s.

Thus, it is not in our place to decide whether a person gets to live or not. This view is somehow in relation to a deontological view. A deontological theory specifically tells us what we ought to do and what we are forbidden to do (LaFollette, 2002). The morality of choices is judged by deontological theories not on their consequences but on the basic criterion of whether that choice is right or wrong. Thus, actions that may produce positive and pleasurable results may still be taken as forbidden if that is what is dictated by the existing moral code.

Aside from the issue of morality, I also would rather spend the remaining moments with my loved ones for as long as I could. I think it is natural for us to hold on to something or someone that we love for as long as we could even if this holding on may also prove to be quite painful on both ends. Just like in the case of Wolf, even if these moments are littered with pain and a huge amount of discomfort, there are always ways to turn these pain and discomfort into something beautiful. For example, these moments of pain and discomfort can be transformed into opportunities to show how much we really care for the dying person.

The precious moments spent with a dying loved one may be very important in tying up loose ends and accomplishing the necessary things that were otherwise taken for granted. And of course, one can never discount the fact that life, no matter how miniscule, always brings a promise of hope. Thus, even if ordinary humans may judge a person to be “hopelessly ill,” the slimmest windows of possibilities may be exactly what are needed to reverse what may have been a “terminal” condition. In a similar manner as Wolf’s experience, this assignment has made me reconsider my initial views on euthanasia and assisted suicide.

But after going through this assignment, I have in fact further strengthened my views against euthanasia. A human’s life is precious. A greater power beyond what we can comprehend is responsible for this life. Thus, we can never be in a position to determine whether or not it is already time for that life to be terminated. References: Andersen, M., & Taylor, H. F. (2007). Sociology: Understanding a diverse society. Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning. LaFollette, H. (2002). Ethics in practice: An anthology.

Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2006, February 9). Consequentialism. Retrieved March 6, 2011, from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/ Wolf, Susan. (2008, Sep/Oct). Confronting Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: My Fathers Death. Hastings Center Report. 38(5), 23-26