Ethics of Physician Assisted Suicide

Patrick Kimuyu

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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Medicine - Medical Frontiers and Special Areas, Egerton University, language: Eng...

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Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject Medicine - Medical Frontiers and Special Areas, Egerton University, language: English, abstract: Physician assisted suicide has become one of the most contentious ethical issues in the United States of America. The current debate over whether euthanasia (physician-assisted suicide) should be legalized or not has evoked unprecedented controversy in the society because in this practice seems to encompass some ethical problems. Interestingly, physician-assisted suicide seem to have been used as a useful medical approach over a long time, even before the emergence of the controversial debate that seems to be assuming divergent directions day-by-day. It is also amusing to learn that those who are involved in the physician-assisted debate are not the beneficiaries of the practice. Initially, the precepts of the physician-assisted suicide imply that a terminally ill individual can request for a painless termination of his or her life, solely out of the individual's wishes. In addition, relatives to the ailing individual can request for the termination of the life of their loved one to avoid unnecessary agony and suffering. Moreover, the decision to terminate the life of a terminally ill individual can be made by the physicians depending with the severity of the disease condition. All these precepts agree with the terms of euthanasia, which defines it as "easy death" according to the Greeks who called it euthanatos. Physician-assisted suicide issue has turned out to be an ethical dilemma among the U.S population because; there is no universal explanation which is provided by the popularly known normative theories. These theories address the issue of physician-assisted suicide from diverse perspectives, leading to the observed ethical conflict. The other aspect of the physician-assisted suicide lies within the medical ethics. Physicians seem to be tied up by the medical ethics especially through the Hippocratic Oath, and yet they are ought to facilitate the practice. Therefore, this critical paper discusses euthanasia and its ethics.