Exam 10: Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide

In ________ euthanasia, the patient requests or agrees to have his or her death hastened.

It is the case that active euthanasia is legal in the United States and widely believed to be morally acceptable.

Consider this rule-utilitarian argument against legalizing euthanasia: Passing a law to permit active voluntary euthanasia would inevitably lead to abuses such as more frequent use of nonvoluntary euthanasia and unnecessary killing; therefore, no such law should be passed. Such an argument is characterized as

The obligation to ease the agony of another when we can do so without excessive cost to ourselves is called the duty of ________.

________ involves taking a direct action to kill someone (i.e., to carry out a mercy killing).

According to the doctrine of double effect, a doctor's giving a dying, pain-racked patient a large dose of morphine with the intention of easing her pain (while knowing the act has the side effect of expediting her death) is permissible.

It is likely that active euthanasia would be used at least occasionally in a hospice guided by act-utilitarianism.

The idea that an individual is dead when all brain functions permanently stop is called the vegetative notion of death.

In 2002, the eighty-six-year-old war hero Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Jr., in a suicide pact with his eighty-nine-year-old wife, ended his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. According to a news report, "Having lost 30 pounds from a stomach disorder, suffering from congestive heart failure and in constant back pain, the admiral had been determined to dictate the hour of his death. His wife, who suffered from osteoporosis so severe her bones were breaking, had gone blind. She had no desire to live without her husband." Assuming this is an accurate account of Admiral Nimitz's motivations, to what moral principle did he appeal to justify taking his own life?

If you believe that there is no moral difference between killing someone and letting someone die, you might reason that

In 2005 the Netherlands passed a law that allows parents to choose to intentionally end the lives of their newborns, provided that five criteria, including the presence of unbearable suffering, are met. If we assume that newborns are persons, such a law has its basis in natural law theory.

Imagine a situation in which a patient is not competent and has left no instructions regarding end-of-life preferences. Someone other than the patient then chooses euthanasia on the patient's behalf. This would be an instance of nonvoluntary euthanasia.

If you were an American physician who accepted the active-passive distinction, you would also likely believe that, whereas euthanasia is always wrong, in some cases physician-assisted suicide may be permissible.

Some opponents of active euthanasia argue that euthanasia is uncalled for; a dying patient in the grip of unimaginable pain, for example, does not have to be killed to escape her agony. Modern medicine offers dying patients unprecedented levels of pain relief. A common reply to this argument is

________ is allowing someone to die by NOT doing something (i.e., by withholding or withdrawing measures necessary for sustaining life).

Luann believes that the best definition of death says that an individual is dead when those brain functions that give rise to consciousness permanently stop. She advocates for the ________ definition of death.

According to the dominant reading of natural law theory, euthanasia is wrong primarily because

A ________ argument against euthanasia would assert that mercy killing involves treating persons as mere things of no more value than a beast and is therefore wrong.

Nowadays machines can keep an individual's heart and lungs functioning long after the brain permanently and completely shuts down. Thus, we can have an individual whose organs are mechanically operated while he is in a coma or persistent vegetative state. To some, these facts suggest that the

Involuntary euthanasia is mercy killing at the patient's request.