Section 2: The Case for Allowing Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide
J. Gay-Williams defines euthanasia as taking a human’s life, who is suffering from some disease that he cannot recover from, for either their own sake or for another’s persons sake. Williams will argue that euthanasia is wrong. He talks about how giving a person wrong medicine or too much of a medicine is not characterized as euthanasia if the patient dies. As well as the medicine that the patient received in order to treat the disease resulting in death is also not euthanasia. Williams talk about how our body is made to fight different types of diseases or to protect each other from bad things and that euthanasia is going against that because a person should be able to live. He argues that euthanasia is against our nature because our goal is to survive. The next argument that Williams take in consideration is of self-interest which is this case he argues that even though medicine and diagnosis reached a high peak, they are still sometimes wrong and a person could believe that he will die within two months but after those two month he can get healthy and still live a great live. If euthanasia was taking into consideration then the person would die and death is final, he would be able to come back alive if he knew that he would get better in a couple of months. He also argues that knowing that euthanasia could take a person’s life so quickly, the person could just give up to easily and not want to fight even though everyone around him thinks that he is dying there could be a chance and miracle that, that person would survive but if he takes his life away, there is no chance of finding out. Also that if a patient sees that the family and friends and suffering emotionally then he might want to die because he just doesn’t want to make them sad.
Daniel Callahan argues against euthanasia because he wrote that by euthanasia the world could add another whole different killing to the view. Callahan...