Argument Against Euthanasia A considerable size of society is in favor of Euthanasia mostly because they feel that as a democratic country, we as free individuals, have the right to decide for ourselves whether or not it is our right to determine when to terminate someone's life. The stronger and more widely held opinion is against Euthanasia primarily because society feels that it is god's task to determine when one of his creations time has come, and we as human beings are in no position to behave as god and end someone's life. When humans take it upon themselves to shorten their lives or to have others to do it for them by withdrawing life-sustaining apparatus, they play god. They usurp the divine function, and interfere with the divine plan. Euthanasia is the practice of painlessly putting to death persons who have incurable, painful, or distressing diseases or handicaps. It come from the Greek words for 'good' and 'death', and is commonly called mercy killing. Voluntary euthanasia may occur when incurably ill persons ask their physician, friend or relative, to put them to death. The patients or their relatives may ask a doctor to withhold treatment and let them die. Many critics of the medical profession contend that too often doctors play god on operating tables and in recovery rooms. They argue that no doctor should be allowed to decide who lives and who dies. The issue of euthanasia is having a tremendous impact on medicine in the United States today. It was only in the nineteenth century that the word came to be used in the sense of speeding up the process of dying and the destruction of so-called useless lives. Today it is defined as the deliberate ending of life of a person suffering from an incurable disease. A distinction is made between positive, or active, and negative, or passive, euthanasia. Positive euthanasia is the deliberate ending of life; an action taken to cause death in a person. Negative euthanasia is defined as the withholding of life preserving procedures and treatments that would prolong the life of one who is incurably and terminally ill and couldn't survive without them. The word euthanasia becomes a respectable part of our vocabulary in a subtle way, via the phrase ' death with dignity'. Tolerance of euthanasia is not limited to our own country. A court case in South Africa, s. v. Hatmann (1975), illustrates this quite well. A medical practitioner, seeing his eighty-seven year old father suffering from terminal cancer of the prostate, injected an overdose of Morphine and Thiopental, causing his father's death within seconds. The court charged the practitioner as guilty of murder because 'the law is clear that it nonetheless constitutes the crime of murder, even if all that an accused had done is to hasten the death of a human being who was due to die in any event'. In spite of this charge, the court simply imposed a nominal sentence; that is, imprisonment until the rising of the court. (Friedman 246) Once any group of human beings is considered unworthy of living, what is to stop our society from extending this cruelty to other groups? If the mongoloid is to be deprived of his right to life, what of the blind and deaf? and What about of the cripple, the retarded, and the senile? Courts and moral philosophers alike have long accepted the proposition that people have a right to refuse medical treatment they find painful or difficult to bear, even if that refusal means certain death. But an appellate court in California has gone one controversial step further. (Walter 176) It ruled that Elizabeth Bouvia, a cerebral palsy victim, had an absolute right to refuse a life-sustaining feeding tube as part of her privacy rights under the US and California constitutions. This was the nation's most sweeping decision in perhaps the most controversial realm of the rights explosion: the right to die... As individuals and as a society, we have the positive obligation to protect life. The second precept is that we have the negative obligation not to destroy or injure human life directly, especially the life of the innocent and invulnerable. It has been reasoned that the protection of innocent life- and therefore, opposition to abortion, murder, suicide, and euthanasia- pertains to the common good of society. Among the potential effects of a legalised practice of euthanasia are the following: "Reduced pressure to improve curative or symptomatic treatment". If euthanasia had been legal 40 years ago, it is quite possible that there would be no hospice movement today. The improvement in terminal care is a direct result of attempts made to minimize suffering. If that suffering had been extinguished by extinguishing the patients who bore it, then we may never have known the advances in the control of pain, nausea, breathlessness, and other terminal symptoms that the last twenty years have seen. Some diseases that were terminal a few decades ago are now routinely cured by newly developed treatments. Earlier acceptance of euthanasia might well have undercut the urgency of the research efforts which led to the discovery of those treatments. If we accept euthanasia now, we may well delay by decades the discovery of effective treatments for those diseases that are now terminal. (Brock 76) "Abandonment of Hope". Every doctor can tell stories of patients expected to die within days who surprise everyone with their extraordinary recoveries. Every doctor has experienced the wonderful embarrassment of being proven wrong in their pessimistic prognosis. To make euthanasia a legitimate option as soon as the prognosis is pessimistic enough is to reduce the probability of such extraordinary recoveries from low to zero. "Increased fear of hospitals and doctors". Despite all the efforts of health education, it seems there will always be a transference of the patient's fear of illness from the illness to the doctors and hospitals who treat it. This fear is still very real and leads to large numbers of late presentations of illnesses that might have been cured if only the patients had sought help earlier. To institutionalize euthanasia, however carefully, would undoubtedly magnify all the latent fear of doctors and hospitals harbored by the public. The inevitable result would be a rise in late presentations and, therefore, preventable deaths. "Difficulties of oversight and regulation". Both the Dutch and the California proposals list sets of precautions designed to prevent abuses. They acknowledge that such are a possibility. The history of legal "loopholes" is not a cheering one. Abuses might arise when the patient is wealthy and an inheritance is at stake, when the doctor has made mistakes in diagnosis and treatment and hopes to avoid detection, when insurance coverage for treatment costs is about to expire, and in a host of other circumstances. (Maguire 321) "Pressure on the Patient". Both sets of proposals seek to limit the influence of the patient's family on the decision, again acknowledging the risks posed by such influences. Families have all kinds of subtle ways, conscious and unconscious, of putting pressure on a patient to request euthanasia and relive them of the financial and social burden of care. Many patients already feel guilty for imposing burdens on those on those who care for them, even when the families are happy to bear the burden. To provide an avenue for the discharge of that guilt in a request for euthanasia is to risk putting to death a great many patients who do not wish to die. "Conflict with aims of medicine". The pro-euthanasia movement cheerfully hands the dirty work of the actual killing to the doctors who by and large , neither seek nor welcome the responsibility. There is little examination of the psychological stresses imposed on those whose training and professional outlook are geared to the saving of lives by asking them to start taking lives on a regular basis. Euthanasia advocates seem very confident that doctors can be relied on to make the enormous efforts sometimes necessary to save some lives, while at the same time assenting to requests to take other lives. Such confidence reflects, perhaps, a high opinion of doctor's psychic robustness, but it is a confidence seriously undermined by the shocking rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction, and marital discord consistently recorded among this group. "Dangers of Societal Acceptance". It must never be forgotten that doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators have personal lives, homes and families, or that they are something more than just doctors, nurses, or hospital administrators. They are citizens and a significant part of the society around them. We should be very worried about what the institutionalization of euthanasia will do to society, in general , how will we regard murderers? (Brody 89) "The Slippery Slope". How long after acceptance of voluntary euthanasia will we hear the calls for non-voluntary euthanasia? There are thousands of comatose or demented patients sustained by little more than good nursing care. They are an enormous financial and social burden. How long will the advocates of euthanasia be arguing that we should "assist them in dying". "Costs and Benefits". Perhaps the most disturbing risk of all is posed by the growing concern over medical costs. Euthanasia is, after all, a very cheap service. The cost of a dose of barbiturates and curare and the few hours in a hospital bed that it takes them to act is minute compared to the massive bills incurred by many patients in the last weeks and months of their lives. Already in Britain, There is a serious under- provision of expensive therapies like renal dialysis and intensive care, with the result that many otherwise preventable deaths occur. Legalizing euthanasia would save substantial financial resources which could be diverted to more "useful" treatments. These economic concerns already exert pressure to accept euthanasia, and, if accepted, they will inevitability tend to enlarge the category of patients for whom euthanasia is permitted... "Do not tolerate killing". Now is the time for the medical profession to rally in defense of its fundamental moral principles, to repudiate any and all acts of direct and intentional killing by physicians and their agents. We call on the profession and its leadership to obtain the best advice, regarding both theory and practice, about how to defend the profession's moral center and to resist growing pressures both from without and from within. We call on fellow physicians to say that we will not deliberately kill. We must say also to each of our fellow physicians that we will not tolerate killing of patients and that we shall take disciplinary action against doctors who kill. (Chapman 209) On the other hand some people strongly feel that euthanasia is not bad and should not be looked down upon. Are there no conditions when life is meaningless and should be quietly ended? If a person is subject to pain that won't stop as a result of a disease that can't be cured, must he or she suffer that pain as long as possible when there are gentle ways of putting an end to life? If a person suffers from a disease that deprives him or her of all memory and makes him or her a helpless lump of flesh that may live on for years. If euthanasia were legalized,it should be admitted that there might be some abuses of virtually every social practice. There is no absolute guarantee against that. But we do not normally think that a social practice should be precluded simply because it might sometimes be abused. The crucial issue is whether the evil of the abuses would be so great as to outweigh the benefit of the practice. In the case of euthanasia, the question is whether the abuses, or the consequences generally, would be so numerous as to outweigh the advantages of legalization. The choice is not between a present policy that is benign and an alternative that is potentially dangerous. The present policy had it's evils, too. We spend more than a billion dollars a day for health car while our teachers are underpaid, and our industrial plants are rusty. This should not continue. There is something fundamentally insustainable about a society that moves its basic value-producing industries overseas yet continues to manufacture artificial hearts at home. We have money to give smokers heart transplants but no money to retool out steel mills. We train more doctors and lawyers than we need but fewer teachers. On any given day, 30 to 40 percent of the hospital beds in America are empty, but our classrooms are overcrowded and our transportation systems are deteriorating. We are great at treating sick people, but we are not that great at treating a sick economy. And we are not succeeding in international trade. When you really look around and try to find industries the United States is succeeding in, you discover that they are very few and far between.(Lamm 133) There is no way we are going to come to grips with this problem until we also look at some of these areas that aren't going to go away . One of the toughest of these is what Victor Fuchs called "flat-of-the- curve medicine"- those medical procedures which are the highest in cost but achieve little or no improvement in health status. He says that they must be reduced or eliminated. We must demand that professional societies and licensing authorities establish some norms and standards for diagnostic and therapeutic practice that encompass both costs and medicine. Wer'e going to have to come up with some sort of concept of cost-effective medicine. Individuals have the right to decide about their own lives and deaths. What more basic right is there than to decide if you're going to live? There is none. A person under a death sentence who's being kept alive, through so called heroic measures certainly has a fundamental right to say, "Enough's enough. The treatment's worse than the disease. Leave me alone. Let me die!". Ironically, those who deny the terminally ill this right do so out of a sense of high morality. Don't they see that, in denying the gravely ill and suffering the right to release themselves from pain, they commit the greatest crime? The period of suffering can be shortened. If you have ever been in a terminal cancer ward, It's grim but enlightening. Anyone who's been there can know how much people can suffer before they die. And not just physically. The emotional, even spiritual, agony is often worse. Today our medical hardware is so sophisticated that the period of suffering can be extended beyond the limit of human endurance. What's the point of allowing someone a few more months or days or hours of so-called life when death is inevitable? There's no point. In fact, it's downright inhumane. When someone under such conditions asks to be allowed to die, it's far more humane to honor that request than to deny it.(Barry 405) People have a right to die with dignity. Nobody wants to end up plugged into machines and wired to tubes. Who wants to spend their last days lying in a hospital bed wasting away to something that's hardly recognizable as a human being, let alone his or her former self? Nobody. The very thought insults the whole concept of what it means to be human. People are entitled to dignity, in life and in death. Just as we respect people's right to live with dignity, so we must respect their right to die with dignity. In the case of the terminally ill, that means people have the right to refuse life-sustaining treatment when it's apparent to them that all the treatment is doing is destroying their dignity, and reducing them to some subhuman level of humanity. The reasons just stated in favor of euthanasia are often over looked due to the following arguments that are against euthanasia. The way you talk you'd think people have absolute right over their bodies and lives. But that is obviously just not true. No individual has absolute freedom. Even the patient's Bill of Rights, which was drawn up by the American Hospital Association, recognizes this. Although it acknowledges that patients have the right to refuse treatment, the document also realizes that they have this right and freedom only to the extent permitted by law. Maybe people should be allowed to die if they want to. But if so, it's not because they have an absolute right to dispose of themselves if they want to.(Brock 73) Only a fool would minimize the agony that many terminally ill patient endure. And there's no question that by letting them die on request we shorten the period of suffering. But we also shorten their lives. Can you seriously argue that the saving of pain is greater good than the saving of life? Or that presence of pain is worse than the loss of life? Of course, nobody likes to see a creature suffer, especially when the creature has requested a halt to the suffering. But we have to keep our priorities straight. Pro euthanasianists make it sound as though the superhuman efforts made to keep people alive are not worthy of human beings. What could be more respectful of human life, than to maintain life against all odds, and against all hope? All of life is a struggle and a gamble. At the gaming table of life, nobody ever knows what the outcome will be. " Indeed, humans are noblest when they persist in the face of the inevitable. Look at our literature. Reflect on our heroes. They are not those who have capitulated but those who have endured. No, there's nothing undignified against being hollowed out by a catastrophic disease, about writhing in pain, about wishing it would end. The indignity lies in capitulation".(Buchanan 208)
"Mending Wall"' is the opening poem of Frost's North of Boston. One of the dominating moods of this volume, forcefully established in such important poems as "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial, " "The Black Cottage," and "A Servant to Servants," and carried through some of the minor pieces, flows from the tension of having to maintain balance at the precipitous edge of hysteria. With "The Mountain" and with "A Hundred Collars," "Mending Wall" stands opposed to such visions of human existence; more precisely put, to existences that are fashioned by the neurotic visions of central characters like the wife in "Home Burial," the servant in "A Servant to Servants." "Mending Wall" dramatizes the redemptive imagination in its playful phase, guided surely and confidently by a man who has his world under full control, who in his serenity is riding his realities, not being shocked by them into traumatic response. The place of "Mending Wall" in the structure of North of Boston suggests, in its sharp contrasts to the dark tones of some of the major poems in the volume, the psychological necessities of sustaining supreme fictions.
Throughout the last books of The Odyssey Homer tells us how Odysseus restores his relationships with his friends and relatives at Ithaca. Perhaps one of the most revealing of these restoration episodes is Odysseus' re-encounter with his son, Telemachus. This re-encounter serves three main purposes. First, it serves to portray Telemachus' likeness to his father in the virtues of prudence, humility, patience, and planning. Secondly, it is Odysseus' chance to teach his son to be as great a ruler as Odysseus himself is. Lastly, Homer uses this re-encounter to emphasize the importance of a family structure to a society. To be able to understand the impact that this meeting had on Odysseus it is necessary to see that Telemachus has grown since his first appearances in the poem and obviously since his last contact with his father; Odysseus left Telemachus as an infant now their relationship is a man to man relationship rather than a man to child relationship.
John Tasioulas introduces the idea that human rights are explained by the morals that humans possess through understanding of human dignity. He explains that are three connections that human dignity has to human rights. The first connection presented is that human dignity and rights are rarely distinguished between due to having virtually the same standards in regards to them. The second that dignity is a starting point in moral grounds that human rights build off of. And last, that the idea that human rights are justified by dignity, saying dignity is the ideal basis for human rights. Tasioulas chooses to focus on the last point, that it is our morals that bring about human rights and that our morals come from humans having dignity. The key thing being that human dignity is something that all possess by simply being human beings there is no merit in achievement or by what legislation or social position can give us.
Many works of literature contain an aspect of writing in which the author relays a story to the reader directly in order to conceal a deeper hidden meaning or concept that the reader will later discover. Authors veil the messages they wish readers to uncover using literary devices such as metaphor. In “Mending Wall” Robert Frost uses the metaphor of the wall to reveal the literal and figurative distance between the speaker and his neighbor to present the question as to whether or not neighbors need walls. Beyond expressly stating the existence of the wall, Frost often constructs the individual lines of the poem to look like a wall to further create the illusion of walls in the poem. The poem’s form and content creates and reinforces the idea of the literal and figurative wall which exists between the two men in “Mending Wall”. Frost also uses metaphor to conceal his opinion on the necessity of walls through the character of the speaker.
In “Mending Wall”, Robert Frost made us aware that something doesn’t love the wall in the beginning of the poem, the wall that symbolizes boundary and obstacle between people. Although this restrictive wall gives protection and a feeling of safety for the people who are inside it, it also creates a huge barrier to the people who are on the outside. The only difference between a physical wall and an imaginary barrier is that a physical wall will eventually fall apart as time goes by, but the emotional one on the other hand will only get bigger. Does Frost agree with his neighbor on the perspective of relationship between people, or do they each hold a different idea?
What is so important about mending a wall? Robert frost a down to earth, phenomenon has used his supernatural skills to write a poem which may seem to be a simple, ordinary poem, yet what lays hidden behind the veils may be unraveled. That is the spiritual world that you and me may learn to understand the philosophical basis of human nature that provokes the human revolution. Believe it or not this poem was ingeniously devised by Robert Frost to articulately open up a world of ideas that acumen imagination and its complexities. That is what I will be elaborating on in terms of textual evidence.
Lee and George’s “The Nature and Basis of Human Dignity” argues that all human beings, regardless of anything other than their DNA, have rational nature, thus possessing equal moral dignity and deserving full moral respect from other humans. They argue that this rational nature humans have is what differentiates humans from other animals; all humans as a species have this capacity that is innate to their being. Their thesis is that all human beings are persons, which gives them the right to respect from all other persons.
The setting in "The Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" both deal the social environment of a couple's relationship. For example, "Story of an Hour" tells of a wife by the name of Mrs. Millard, who has heart disease, who discovers her husband had died in a railroad accident from the lips of her sister Josephine. But, Mrs. Millard reacts in a different manner most confusing. "When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" (Chopin 15). Instead of feeling sorrow for the death of her husband, she leaps into a state of joy because freedom steps in her life. Likewise, in "Popular Mechanics," the couple struggle through a relationship. "He was in the bedroom pushing clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door. I'm glad you're leaving! I'm glad you're leaving! She said. Do you hear?" (Carver 264). Though one never knows if the couple was married, the social environment in the relationship between the two individuals was argumentative which ends in the collapse of the relationship such as Mrs. Millard's relationship with her husband. In short, the settings in "The Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" demonstrate the similar collapse of each couple's relationship.
In Robert Frost’s poems “Love and a Question,” “Mending Wall,” and “Home Burial,” there is a significant barrier present between man and man or woman. Conflict between people is a major theme for these poems, and it alters the outcome of them. There is a great deal of tension present between the characters, causing unstable relationships, as well as a desire for no relationship at all. These three poems are based around knowing that conflict is inevitable, and it evidently causes a desire for little to no human interaction.
According to the formal perspective, human dignity operates as a legal concept through its legal form. The first step in this direction attempts to justify the function of dignity as a legal principle, rather than as the idea of right. This justification builds up on the legal theories that distinct the legal principle from other normative legal concepts, such as rules and
An innumerable amount of individuals believe that life is a beautiful, extraordinary, and overall amazing gift. So, why would a human being choose to have this remarkable gift taken away from him or her? The answer to this question is quite simple. All over the world people are in such immense pain and suffering, that their last wish is for their lives to be taken away in a peaceful approach. The solution to a painless death is euthanasia or physician-assisted suicide, commonly referred to as PAS. Active euthanasia is the process of inducing death upon a human being in a harmless, painless, and gentle way by an injection. Passive euthanasia is the removal of life-support or stopping treatments that may keep the patient alive for longer (Gale). Both forms of Euthanasia are done only with the consent of the patient who wishes to bring their life to an end. Death is the last chance of peace for many people, and euthanasia makes this possible.
ABSTRACT: In this paper I will defend a kind of human-centered perspective regarding ethical questions wherein the interests of humans and nonhumans alike are involved. Compared to other species, however, the idea that there is something special about being human is commonly vague. For example, it is unclear whether the thought is (1) being a human being is important in itself, or (2) it is important to be like a human being — that is, to have the capacities which a normal adult human being enjoys. I build my defense of human dignity on the claim that we regard a biological human being as a being of intrinsic importance, which is what (1) is about. However, I also consider the ethical implications of (2), which concerns the moral significance of personhood. I argue that the idea of a special intrinsic value of being a human is applicable only to cases where we deal with nonpersons. I claim that in spite of this qualification, we might defend a substantial principle of human dignity founded upon this generalization.
Human dignity, which is a person's self-worth, is a part of what makes humans want to live. It adds meaning to one’s life and without it, humans feel like nothing. As a result, humans all desire human dignity and want to keep it for as long as possible to feel valuable enough to keep on thriving. Developing human dignity begins by understanding how human worth works and the violations of human dignity.
One of the major themes of Frost's Mending Wall is the cycle of the seasons. Several phrases refer to the seasons, particularly in a repetitive, cyclic way: "spring mending-time," "frozen ground-swell," "once again," "spring is the mischief in me." Another theme is parallelism or the lack of it. Sometimes this parallelism takes a physical form, associated with the wall, as we imagine the two men walking parallel paths: "We meet to walk the line." "We keep the wall between us as we go." "One on a side." It is a mental wall, though, as well as a physical one, and I read the gaps as making possible a meeting of minds and attitudes as well as of lands and bodies. Closing the gaps in the wall means closing off points where the two men might meet physically or mentally. As the poet says, "If I could put a notion in his head," but he can't. The two men, the two minds, will remain parallel, on opposite sides of a wall.
their resolutions. They seem to ignore the fact, year after year, that nothing has changed in the