Death with Dignity or Murder?
In the movie You Don’t Know Jack, the protagonist Dr. Jack Kevorkian was tasked with the moral dilemma of assisting his patients to commit suicide. Dr. Kevorkian continuously provided his terminally ill patients with a choice many other doctors would not provide them with. He was scrutinized by the public and medical community alike for assisting his patients with suicide and earned the name Dr. Death. Throughout his career Dr. Kevorkian must fight to prove that what he was doing was not morally wrong because he was allowing his patients to die with dignity, and gave them free choice and he was working in the best interest of the patient. Dr. Kevorkian explains that his patients are not living they are slowly
…show more content…
Kevorkian must prove to everyone that what he is doing is not morally wrong is to prove that what he is doing is not murder and he is working in the best interest of the patient. Countless times Dr. Kevorkian is brought to court for the actions he committed but charges are dropped because assisting a suicide is not a crime. Dr. Kevorkian argues that what he is doing is not murder because it is not against the patients will; he is just providing his patients with the means and they are using their own free will to choose to go through with it. Dr. Kevorkian explains to his patients that it is illegal for him to administer the injections and that the patients will have to administer the medications to themselves. He always gives his patients the opportunity to not go through with it, stating that it will not hurt his feelings if they decide to stop but his patients use their power of free choice to decide what is best for themselves. Those that argued against Dr. Kevorkian could try to use ethical relativism by Loius Pojman to argue that they are right. Ethical Relativism states that there are no universal moral principles but there are moral principles based on culture and individual choice. Skeptics could argue that since most people in the United States believed that what Dr. Kevorkian was doing was unethical and not morally okay then he should be
The Death with Dignity Act was passed in Oregon in 1994, and it is another option for dying with those who have terminal diseases. These people that want to die with dignity have to be seen by at least two doctors and have six or less months to live. While making the decision to use this act, the patient must be in a safe mental state to be making this decision. Currently, Oregon, Washington, Vermont, and soon to be California are the only states to carry the Death with Dignity Act. (Death)
Dr. Kevorkian was seen differently by many people. Some people thought that he was a good person while other people saw him as a criminal for helping people end their life. Due to his actions many laws have been created against assisted suicide. Even though he was charged with murders and for breaking the law he still kept on helping people. This showed that he cared a lot about his patients. The Kevorkian that started as a quiet religious child grew up to be a highly debatable person.
In the article, Doctor Turns to Kevorkian: Oak Brook Man’s Suicide Enters Right to Die Debate, Kiernan and Gottesman, (1993) tells the story of Dr. Ali Khalili and probes the merits of his decision to end his own life, and his choice of asking Dr. Jack Kevorkian to assist him.
Jack Kevorkian was a doctor who assisted terminally ill patients to commit suicide. He believed that they had the right to die in an appropriate way; to die with dignity. He therefore invented a machine (called thanatron—a Greek word for death machine) which could take away his patients’ lives painlessly and efficiently, all they had to do was to push a button and their lives would be ended by either deadly injection or carbon monoxide poisoning. There had been at least one hundred patients who tried and died in this method. Dr. Kevorkian was charged several times with murder in these deaths. Lucky for him, a judge dismissed one of his charges because there was no evidence of murder. Jury did not find him guilty either. Nevertheless, he received numerous critics from medical professionals and media. Some people considered him as a hero while others saw him as an evil person. Not few questioned his intention; did he really care about ending his patients’ sufferings? Now that the “Dr. Death” died, all of this debate probably doesn’t matter anymore. But if it was up to me, I would most definitely not going to let him go with this easily because the way I see it, what he did was not right.
The ongoing controversy about Physician assisted suicides is an ongoing battle among physicians, patients and court systems. The question of whether or not individuals have the “right” to choose death over suffering in their final days or hours of life continues to be contested. On one side you have the physicians and the Hippocratic Oath they took to save lives; on the other you have the patients’ right to make life choices, even if that means to choose death to end suffering. The ultimate question “is it ethical for a physician to agree to assisted suicides and is it ethical for a patient to request assisted suicide?
In 1999 a well known physician, Jack Kevorkian, was convicted of second degree murder. One might think that Kevorkian committed the terrible crime of murdering someone, but that is actually far from the truth. Kevorkian was convicted because of something a little unusual; he helped a patient with assisted suicide. Alexander Stingl, a sociologist and science historian, and M. Lee, authors of “Assisted Suicide: An Overview,” define assisted suicide as “any case in which a doctor gives a patient (usually someone with a terminal illness) the means to carry out their own suicide by using a lethal dose of medication.” Kevorkian was convicted because as of right now, assisted suicide is illegal in the United States with the exceptions of Oregon, Montana, and Washington. Huge controversy rose over this case because some feel assisted suicide is a civil right whereas others feel it is unnecessary. Assisted suicide is a practice that has long been debated.
I am a nursing student at Penn State University. I study diseases, and what they do to the body. I make flash cards to help me memorize the symptoms. This year I started my clinical rounds at a local nursing home. I had never seen a nursing home before. In my head, I pictured a hotel-like place, with old people rolling around in wheelchairs saying “good morning” to the nurses. I pictured a big room where they would go to play checkers and watch black and white films. I pictured a nursing home like they are depicted in movies. It was not like that. Many of the residents are no longer able to communicate. Many need help eating. Many are confused. There, I saw those small, flimsy flash cards come to life. I live a happy, healthy life alongside my happy, healthy family. I knew that there were diseases, and that the diseases can be terrible. But until this year, I had
The deviant behavior that I chose to write about is Death with Dignity. It is where a person with a terminal illness who wants to end their life with dignity and no pain. They want to be able to choose the day and time of their death and not let the disease define them and take them. There are only four states in the United Sates that have a legal physician assisted suicide and that is Montana, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington. There are requirements that has to be meant before you can be considered for the assisted suicide. You have to be 18 years old, a resident of that state, capable of making and communicating your health care decisions on your own, and have to be diagnosed with a terminal illness that will lead to death within six months.
Schneider Keith, “DR. Jack Kevorkian Dies at 83; A Doctor who helped End Lives”. The New York Times. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. 3, June 2011. Online Newspaper 2014
Oftentimes when one hears the term Physician Assisted Suicide (hereafter PAS) the words cruel and unethical come to mind. On October 27, 1997 Oregon passed the Death with Dignity Act, this act would allow terminally ill Oregon residents to end their lives through a voluntary self-administered dose of lethal medications that are prescribed by a physician (Death with Dignity Act) . This has become a vital, medical and social movement. Having a choice should mean that a terminally ill patient is entitled to the choice to pursue PAS. If people have the right to refuse lifesaving treatments, such as chemo and palliative care, then the choice of ending life with PAS should be a choice that is allowed.
In 1972 the United States Senate held the first National Hearing on Death with Dignity. The outcome of the hearing “Death with Dignity: An Inquiry into Related Public Issues” was an overwhelming annoyance caused by the use of the term, “medical miracle”. They felt as though it was ironic, the process of dying was only delayed and extended by a medical miracle and takes away from the quality of their life (Dowbiggin, 2003). Because of the present annoyance about using “medical miracles” as an excuse to ignore the idea of Death with Dignity, not much was accomplished at this hearing, besides arguing about a simple phrase. There was no improvement or movement on the actual topic of Death with Dignity.
According to West’s Encyclopedia of American Law, between 1990 and 1999, a well-known advocate for physician assisted suicide, Jack Kevorkian helped 130 patients end their lives. He began the debate on assisted suicide by assisting a man with committing suicide on national television. According to Dr. Kevorkian, “The voluntary self-elimination of individual and mortally diseased or crippled lives taken collectively can only enhance the preservation of public health and welfare” (Kevorkian). In other words, Kevor...
“In 1999, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a Michigan physician known for openly advertising that he would perform assisted suicide despite the fact that it was illegal, was convicted of second-degree murder” (Lee). The fact of the matter is human being...
The Dr. Kevorkian case is important for medical ethics, because it brings up the issues of physician-assisted suicide and physician-assisted death. Physician-assisted suicide is where the doctor is assisting the patient in suicide, but the patient actually performs the act. Physician-assisted death, also known as euthanasia, is when the doctor does the act to bring about the patient’s death based on the patient’s request. This brings up the limitations of beneficence. Does a doctor have the right to end a patient’s life to relieve their suffering?
Mill’s utilitarianism, it is evident that absolute morality is necessary to understand Dr. Kevorkian’s actions. Utilitarianism would argue that terminally ill patients would inevitably die and in accordance to the Hippocratic Code, the patients’ welfare and financial state must be taken into consideration by the physician.(Cahn 575) They would argue using the Greatest Happiness Principle where morality is measured on the happiness it creates for the individual making the decision. Utilitarianism would focus on Dr. Kevorkian’s intentions as being moral by supporting his patients’ suicide. They would argue that he helped his patients avoid the financial burden and suffering of their illness through suicide. Although some validity is evident, they disregard the possibility that Dr. Kevorkian may have been wrong in his diagnosis and acted immorally in his failure to keep his patients alive through his decisions. If the utilitarianism decide to interpret the Hippocratic Oath as a reason for Dr. Kevorkian’s decision to kill his patients, they avoid questioning the implications of Dr. Kevorkian’s decisions on his role as a physician. By acting outside of good will, he violated his role as physician to keep his patients alive since “prevention is better than cure” by giving himself the power to play God. He did so by crossing the boundary that prevents healers from taking life from his/her patients and thus stepped into the realm of executioner rather than healer. (Lasagna) For Dr. Kevorkian to decide when his patients can die, he not only violated the Hippocratic Oath, but led to question the role of the physician whose job is to treat the sick and not determine when a person could die. Although he have granted his patients what they wanted and believed that he was acting in his role as a physician, the outcome reinforces Kant’s philosophy to act in an absolute