5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 5: Suffering and Euthanasia
Chair: John E Troyer
The Ethics of Physician Assisted Suicide: A New Approach
Lloyd
Steffen
Department of Religion Studies,
Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA
The direct involvement of physicians in helping patients die, either through euthanasia or assisted suicide, is rare both in practice and as a matter of legal authorization. Where it is authorized, it is heavily rule-governed. This paper will argue that the “rare and rule-governed” practice of limiting but not absolutely prohibiting such physician involvement invokes a commonplace and eminently practical approach to moral reflection and analysis, one that is perhaps most familiar in what is known as the just war tradition. This paper will argue that if we examine the just war tradition we can find embedded within it an actual ethic that the tradition itself has obscured. That ethic gives structure and normative value to a more general “rare but rule governed” approach to moral reflection; and that ethic is, I claim, as an ethic, applicable to any moral issue or ethical inquiry. By extracting this ethic, we gain access to a practical mode of ethical reasoning and analysis that avoids problems associated with Kantian absolutism and utilitarian “ends justify the means” susceptibility. The paper will look at how this ethic can be extracted and applied to the issue of physician assisted suicide. To bolster the case for the practicality of this ethical approach, I shall consider the Oregon “Death With Dignity Act” law, which, I argue, actually relied upon and implicitly appealed to this “just war”-related ethic in the development and presentation of the formal statute that functions today to guide an instance of legalized “rare but rule-governed” physician assisted suicide.
The Underlying Morality of the Dutch Euthanasia-law
Govert
den Hartogh
xx
No abstract is presently available
When People Choose to Die: Does it Matter What We
Call It?
Gavin
Fairbairn
Department of
Ethics and Language, Leeds Metropolitan University, Leeds, United Kingdom
The
ongoing debate about euthanasia has come to the forefront of public consciousness
increasingly frequently in the UK in recent years as stories about more
and more people have featured in the media, because they not only want
to have the opportunity to decide on the time of their dying, but want
to arrange their deaths with the blessing of the legal system. The wishes
of these people are important, because they concern the balance between
life and death; between suffering and release; between care and its lack;
between the public good and the private will, and between liberty and
constraint. Most of those who address the philosophical, legal and ethical
issues in this area focus on some of these points, and/or on related
points where disputes can arise between those who believe in the value
of life so much that they cannot conceive of a situation in which a life
could cease to have positive value, and those who believe that the value
of life must be determined by those living it (or dying it).
In this paper
I will discuss the use of the term ‘assisted
suicide’ to refer to occasions where people who are dying dreadful
deaths or anticipating doing so, wish to die and take steps to arrange
that they do, which has become fashionable in recent years. I think this
is unfortunate, because it blurs the distinction between occasions when
a person wants to arrange her death in order to avoid a life that she
does not wish to live, and occasions when she wants to arrange her death
in order to avoid a death that she does not wish to die. Among other
things it depends upon the somewhat simple idea that in suicide a person
is the one who performs the act that kills him, whereas in euthanasia
he is killed by someone else, when it is clear that whether an act is
a suicide or not, does not depend on who does the killing, while the
question of whether an act is euthanasia depends not on how the person
dies and on who kills them, but on why they die.
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