Philosophy Essay Research Paper Michelle DelloRusso073663337Trish McGee0202Question

Philosophy Essay, Research Paper

Michelle Dello-Russo

073-66-3337

Trish McGee

0202

Question 2

Legalize Active Euthanasia

I believe that the law should be changed to allow active euthanasia because it is a person.s freedom to determine their time of death if given the opportunity. This paper will discuss what it is like to lose a person through a painful death and how the good consequences of legalizing active euthanasia outweigh the bad consequences. It will further examine the moral permissibility and the question of adopting social policy that sanctions active euthanasia.

Watching a person suffer from a terminal, painful disease is one of the worst experiences I ever went through. My grandmother had stomach cancer and was diagnosed too late to even attempt to save her. She lay in a hospital bed for the last three months of her life not knowing when her last day would come, only waiting for the pain killers to take effect. She could not eat any food because the cancer would eat anything she put in her stomach, so along with dying of cancer she was starving to death. She died a week before my birthday after months of pain. I only went to visit her once because just looking at her frail frame hurt, she wasn.t the same grandma I had all my life and she just looked so tired and in so much pain. The night before she died she told one of her friends that she could not fight anymore, the next morning the fight ended.

If active euthanasia were an option then my grandma would not have had to suffer as much as she did. She would not have had to go all those weeks in extreme pain; she would have been able to take a lethal dose of medication and could have died peacefully and quietly with all her dignity in hand. There are so many good consequences to legalizing active euthanasia and in my opinion they outweigh the bad consequences.

Self-determination, or autonomy, plays a crucial role in one.s life. Self-determination provides people with the opportunity to make their own decisions based on their own values and beliefs. Self-determination further provides people with the chance to take responsibility for their lives (Brock 165). People think ahead about the last years of their lives. This thought can put a lot of fear in one.s mind, not only the fear of pain and suffering, but the fear of losing all one.s dignity to a dreadful disease. All that a person wants to do as death approaches is come up with a way that preserves the quality of life, allows dignity to be kept, and do all that is humanly possible to avoid a great amount of suffering (Brock 165). Self-determination is what gives them this chance, but without legalizing active euthanasia then they are not able to carry out their decision to end their life with the help of a physician. Every person has responsibility for their life and their life alone. If someone is dying and are in extreme pain then they have the choice to be hooked up to machines or to have a lethal dose of medication, no matter what, it is the patients decision, not the governments.

Another supporting factor to legalizing active euthanasia has to do with physicians and the legalities that they are restricted to. Is active euthanasia was legalized than physicians could provide them at a patient.s request. Providing active euthanasia to the American people would give them a sense of reassurance, sort of like a security blanket. It would assure them that if they were to get fatally ill and be in sufferable pain that there would be a way out. Even if a majority of the population choose not to exercise their right to active euthanasia at least the choice would be there if it were legalized. Active euthanasia would be particularly useful when a person is dying and there is not curable treatment then the doctor should have another option to present to the patient. Right now doctors are not legally allowed to offer euthanasia, no matter what condition the patients are in or no matter how bad the doctor feels for the patient, they cannot offer them the only escape. Physicians are the person that someone goes to if they were sick, so if a patient was dying and wanted to exercise euthanasia then the first person they would go to for help would be their physician. If someone is going to die then they would want their physician there because that would provide them with the guarantee that the suicide/euthanasia will not go wrong and that their wanted end result will happen. The physician can also provide them with a guaranteed, painless death.

The third and probably most powerful argument for legalizing active euthanasia would be the prevention of the pain and suffering that terminally ill patients go through. If a patient can take a medicine that would prolong their life and help with the pain then they should take it. But if there were nothing left then resulting to euthanasia would be the only way to escape from the suffering. It is an argument of mercy and is one of the strongest arguments for legalizing active euthanasia (Brock 170). People can say that there is always something that you can do to relieve pain but one will not really know until they are the patient and the one who is in pain.

There are bad consequences that come with legalizing active euthanasia. The biggest argument probably being the slippery slope saying that there will be a generalization