Physicians Assistant in Suicide, the Point Of View of the Person Who Is Dying

Introduction

Euthanasia captivates medical ethics as a contentious issue of immense significance. Among the reasons accounting for this, foremost is that euthanasia entails an act of homicide, and its discussion will necessarily engage the most fundamental philosophical and theological principles. Some claim that the technological progress, which allows doctors to prolong human existence, has created the need for euthanizing acts. This claim seems specious since people have always potentially faced a prolonged and painful dying process, indeed much more painful than the nearly analgesic death that modern anesthesia can guarantee. Technology cannot account for the prominence of the euthanasia at this juncture of Western civilization. The issue of euthanasia has gained ascendancy in Western ethical debate primarily because of the increasing emphasis on personal autonomy. Western society embraces an expansive understanding of autonomy that endows individuals with an ever expanding moral and legal authority to enact personal and moral decisions. Society is re-examining all traditionally proscribed acts, including euthanasia, in light of this theory of personal autonomy. The various moral traditions approach euthanasia differently.

Discussion

History of Euthanasia

Most arguments employed to justify euthanasia, whether couched in terms of dignity, equality, rights, liberty, freedom, self-worth, or self-respect, reduce to the principle of autonomy. Even the preference utilitarian has to resort to this principle to distinguish the just killing of euthanasia from the unjust killing of murder. In contemporary liberal thought, killing a human being is moral if he wants to be killed and immoral if he does not. This dissertation will focus on the justification of euthanasia on utilitarian grounds. The principle of autonomy justifies murder as well as euthanasia, and therefore it must be rejected as a justification for euthanasia. Liberals attempt to apply coherently the principle of autonomy by circumscribing the acts that it justifies. Ronald explains that decisions about life and death are the most important and therefore it enjoys constitutional protection that other personal decisions lack. In Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Supreme Court similarly safe-guards personal decisions regarding marriage, procreation and education because of their relationship to personal dignity and autonomy, but how can Ronald and the Court uphold these personal decisions as essential to personal autonomy, and rebuff the autonomous choices to center one's life on thievery, obscene acts or bungee-jumping? In other words, they deny autonomy to citizens' choices by imposing values on the citizenry.

Acts of intentional killing of the innocent are unjust and illegal; the point is that such laws cannot be justified by appeals to autonomy. A jurist can claim that acts of murder are not protected by law because these are not acts of ordered liberty, but this rationale constrains a citizen from choosing the values around which he structures his life. By ordering liberty, a liberal polity abrogates it. Autonomy is at the heart of most arguments that support euthanasia. Dignity is denied when an agent is prevented from choosing his own destiny, including death; equality is denied when one agent's ...