An Analysis Of James Rachel's Means Of Euthanasia

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James Rachels opinion on euthanasia is that he is for it, however only active euthanasia. Active euthanasia is defined as “taking any direct action designed to kill the patient.” While passive euthanasia is “withholding treatment and allow a patient to die.” (pg.203) Which makes sense into why Rachels and myself would be more into AE rather than PE because it is a more humane way for people to die. Nonetheless Rachels way of pursuing people into euthanasia is well represented but he seems to skew away from the actual meaning of euthanasia and the American Medical Association (AMA) guidelines. The AMA states that to have euthanasia you must have all the qualifications, in the AMA own words “The cessation of the employment of extraordinary …show more content…

The doctors have done all they can for the man and is now just keeping him alive even though he will die in a few days. Knowing this the man and his family has asked the doctors to end his treatment. In this case Rachels doesn’t state if this is euthanasia or not but from how he worded his sentences you can obviously tell that he pretty much is going for that the patient will have euthanasia death. Now for this particular patient what Rachels sees to be fitting for him would be to have a AE death because it would be much less painful for him. However this still doesn’t tell us if it actually is a euthanasia death or not. If we lay things out it would be the man having an incurable throat cancer, doctors didn’t hold treatment and patient asked to withhold treatment. This to me seems to be a euthanasia …show more content…

The reason for this is due to the fact that the child is curable, all the child would need is to have surgery to make them all better. So the AMA would never permit it because the child is not facing death. The main reason why the child would even have to die by the parents thinking is because they just have down syndrome. Which with the doctors say in the matter seems to be pushing the parents into making this decision. When in fact it should be up to the parents only. So if the parent’s decided to let the child die then they are intentionally killing the child which has nothing to do with euthanasia. When reading this I felt that Rachels is talking about morals and what is right and wrong thing to do. Like is it okay to just let a infant die from something that is curable just because they have down syndrome, or let them live like that for the rest of their

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