A difficult ethical decision... (Euthanasia)

Member Name: tairrie

Product:	Euthanasia
Date:	22/09/00 (39 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: may mean relief of suffering

Disadvantages: highly difficult ethical questions attached to it

The problem with euthanasia to my mind is where to draw the line. What life would we call not worth living or undignified?

Being German, euthanasia for me is a topic I would only touch with pliers, nothing I could make any short and easy statement about...after all, in our history people have been killed whose lives were deemed useless and undignified, many handicapped people were "eliminated". So a definite and clear yes on euthanasia means that all doors would be open to something like that happening again!

On the other hand, modern medicine confronts us with problems that comprise a challenge to our present ethics. Modern technology enables us to artificially keep people alive who would otherwise have died. Brain death, coma...these are problems modern medicine is faced with and it is not very easy to decide which measures to take.

From a religious point of view, God gives life and should be the only one to take it. But we have long proceeded from the stage where this is valid in all cases. He would have taken MY life a couple of times already if it wasn't for modern medicine and I'm very grateful to be alive. For example surgery has saved my life when I was a baby, nobody would call this "artificial" stretching of my lifespan unethical. Doctors do all they can to keep people alive but where do we stop? A respirator may maintain us breathing while our brain is dead. Is this still life? Questions modern medicine raises which our traditional ethics can't answer.

Suicide, however undesired, is not a criminal act whereas euthanasia is. Is the crucial point, that the one is an active decision I take and execute and the other a decision that is taken for me? Who would want to decide whether or not to terminate a life? I probably wouldn't. On the other hand, if you see people suffering and wishing for death, wouldn't you want to help them?

People like Peter Singer (e.g. Rethinking L
ife and Death - The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics) have challenged our traditional ethics with new, somewhat daring approaches. Of course I don't agree with Singer in everything he writes, only in that we have to find a new way of thinking in the way of ethics. How can we say: this life is worth living while that isn't? What can we actually say about the quality of life of a comatous person or the quality of life of a severely mentally and physically handicapped person? We can only see their lives in our relations. We basically don't know enough about consciousness and personality.

In summary, I cannot say YES or NO to euthanasia, it's always a back-of-the-knife decision. I can understand people who help relatives or friends to die because they can't bear to see their suffering or living in a vegetative state. I don't think they should be incriminated, on the other hand we should be wary of it, the line might be drawn to closely giving way to some kind of new social Darwinism, only the perfect and useful life is worth being preserved.

I'm sorry if there are any mistakes or so in this text, English is just not my mother tongue.

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