THE UNIVERSITY OF ZAMBIA

SCHOOL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY AND APPLIED ETHICS

NAME…………………………………… Chungu Kabamba

COMPUTER NUMBER………………... 2016140431

COURSE………………………………..... Health Care Ethics

COURSE CODE…………………………. PHI 9135

LECTURER…………………………........ Prof. Malone

ASSIGNMENT…………………………... Two (2)

DUE DATE……………………………….. 30TH June, 2020

TASK:

CRITICALLY DISCUSS THE PROBLEMS OF EUTHANASIA

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The horrible accident which happened at the Hillsborough football stadium in Britain in 1989 left
Tony Bland in a persistent vegetative state for nearly four years. It was reported that ‘his limbs
were contorted, eyes opened with only their reflex, and merely got sustained by a tube which
went through his nose and throat and into the gut. He lost contact with the outside world due to
the fluidity of most essential brain parts which provided him with consciousness. According to
his personal consultant, Tony Bland had absolutely no chance of recovery (Departmental reader,
pages. 127). Such are the kind of cases that have plunged a lot of people into dilemmas and have
instigated indescribable controversy among various disciplines. Philosophers have tended to
focus on meta-ethical questions. However, in recent years they have been turning their attention
more towards practical ethical problems such as the morality of euthanasia, abortion, embryo
research, animal experiments, and many other topics. Although, out there is a vast amount of
practical ethical problems, this current paper is merely going to look at euthanasia in its entirety
and its nefarious consequences. While disregarding the purported merits of euthanasia, this paper
is going to systematically discuss the demerits brought about by this problem. Tentatively, a
salient conclusion will be provided.

By definition, the concept of euthanasia refers to a manner of dying and it is literally translated
as an easy or good death. It has now come to include practices such as the removal or restraining
of medical treatment in order to give the patient a good death presumably for his own benefit
(Departmental reader, pages. 124). In contemporary societies, the current English version of this
concept applies to discussions of mercifully ending the life of a hopelessly suffering or defective
patient. However, one must appreciate that the Greek use of the term was broader in scope.
Hence, on the whole there were no rigidly followed rules which fixed the application of the term
euthanasia to contexts involving terminal illness or suicide alone, even though these situations
could be properly referred to in selected cases.
Though, irrelevant to this discussion, it is important to note the various forms in which
euthanasia has been broken down into. Moral philosophers have coined the terms active (killing)
and passive (letting die) euthanasia. The former is taken to refer to situations where someone
consciously ends their or someone else’s life either by intravenously injecting or orally ingesting
a destructive drug. Whereas, the latter applies to instances where someone is just neglected or
left to perish without making any efforts to sustain their life energy. In the other sense, the active

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form of euthanasia can be taken to refer to acts of commission whereas the passive form of
euthanasia holds in acts of omission (Departmental reader, pages. 130).
To deter people from misconstruing these concepts, more light has been shade on the micro
forms of euthanasia which are non-voluntary, voluntary, and involuntary. With reference to the
notion of voluntary euthanasia which is characteristic of situations in which having secured the
consent of the patient who has been judged on medical grounds as a victim of an untreatable,
painful terminal illness or disability, either the patient or someone else may bring about a
relatively quick and painless death. For non-voluntary euthanasia, the patient is explicitly
excluded from the decision making process by transferring it to his or her family, friends, and
sometimes to physicians. Finally, involuntary euthanasia is the immoral act of expunging
someone’s life irrespective of their desire not to be killed or failure to consent to being killed-it is
somehow paternal in nature (Departmental reader, pg. 124).

Undoubtedly, the tenor of this paper is tentative and explanatory. Therefore, this paper will begin
by looking at the dilemma between the doctor’s oath not to cause harm to the patient by acting as
the protector of life and the implementation of euthanasia. The principle of non-maleficence is
taken to be fundamentally vital whenever a doctor is treating a patient and is expected to apply it
to the latter. It prevents medical personnel from killing, causing pain, depriving others of good
while disregarding beneficence as a factor for their actions but admonishes them to take greater
risks for the benefit of the patient. Therefore, physicians defile and breach their oath whenever
they carry out acts of euthanasia (Departmental reader, pages. 126).
However, pressing the onus to prevent euthanasia solely on the medical personnel risks exposing
one to committing the fallacy of composition. With that in mind, it is worth to note that patients
also put a certain pressure on doctors to perform euthanasia. This particular problem of
euthanasia has to do with the principle of autonomy. Consider a patient who is terminally ill and
convinced that he or she has become a burden rather than an object of happiness to the family
members. Hence, asks the physician to help him or her die in order to provide relief to his
family. If the physician accepts then he or she will be going against the Hippocratic Oath and if
he or she refuses to kill the patient it will be an infringement of the patients’ autonomy as a
rational agent. So, if a physician respects the autonomy of the patient, cases such as those
recorded and reported by the court in Oregon which indicated that ‘ about 25 percent of deaths
were from the ingestion of harmful drugs by patients’, will proliferate (Oregon’s Death with

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Dignity Act 2010). Euthanasia as an option even when the terminally ill do not wish to die will
permit numerous people to commit physician-assisted suicide in the hope of lessening their
family’s burden while disregarding the prognosis of their diseases.
Moving forward, it is indubitable that in many circumstances the rich have invariably taken a
higher priority compared to the poor or vulnerable such as the elderly, disabled, terminally ill,
and mental patients. As an illustration, based on the physician’s selfish motives the vulnerable
may be enticed into opting for euthanasia in the hope of mitigating medical costs by the family.
Consider another example; were a poor man who is terminally ill but with a good prognosis,
however, because the physician is currently conducting some experiments or there is a rich man
who is in need of an organ transplant, the physician may perform involuntary euthanasia for
personal gains. This in the long run, implies that people who are vulnerable will be exploited
due to the unwarranted abuse of legal principles permitting euthanasia (Medical therapy and
research, pages. 13).

The other problem that has to do with euthanasia is the certainty of death. Still, even with various
sophisticated machines it is unlikely that the physician will be able to determine with certainty
that a given patient will die from their diseases they are suffering from. For example, the case of
Traci Messenger who had an emergency caesarian section leading to her son, Michael, being
delivered prematurely after only a 25 week of gestation period. The boy weighed 770 grams
which made it very likely for him to have serious brain damage with an estimated chance of 30
percent to 50 percent of survival. Before Traci Messenger’s surgery, Michael’s father, Dr.
Gregory Messenger, a dermatologist on the staff of the hospital, had spoken with his wife’s
physicians and requested that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong the child’s life.
However, after the child was born, the neonatologist, Dr. Padmoni Karna, insisted that the baby
be given respiratory support and diagnostic tests. About an hour after Michael was delivered, Dr.
Messenger (father to Michael) went into the child’s room and asked the nurses to leave. He then
disconnected the life support system and the child died (Death and Dying, pages. 9). There could
have been a possibility that the doctor the patient consulted was not completely correct in his or
her diagnosis or prognosis. Therefore, if a mistake is made in either the diagnosis or prognosis,
then the probability of ending the patient’s life untimely becomes high while ignoring possibility
of conquering the illness.

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In the Christian ethics, the contention is that ‘life is a gift from god and whenever someone
commits suicide or is killed that is deemed to be an act of rebellion. Religiously speaking, life is
a reflection of god’s image regardless of how diseased one is and needs to be treated with respect
by the owner including others who come in contact with that person (Departmental reader, pg.
123).’’ Instead of performing euthanasia, it is advisable to make use of palliative care where
patients will be taken care of until they die. They believe that euthanasia is not legal, ethical, and
religious in all forms or names. Further, every human being is considered to have duties such as
avoiding pain, respect for bodily integrity, and preservation of one’s life. For instance, Mike
Chovo and his wife, Carol had a son named Mike who was born in bad shape and his brain was
not enough brain for knowledge acquisition. Even when it meant that Mike was going to be
unconscious all his life and have numerous operations, the parents never gave up on him because
they were God fearing. Therefore, this ultimately leads to the rejection of euthanasia in all its
forms (Departmental reader, pg. 122).

Looking at how philosophers actually apply their theories to real rather than imagined moral
decisions will be of great significance to the current discussion of euthanasia. As it has been
cogently indicated, the decision between the rightness and wrongness of euthanasia normally
arises with those who are chronically sick and in great pain. For natural law proponents it is not
acceptable for anyone to take away the life of another person even under these circumstances
regardless of the consequences of mercy killing. Their widely held assertion is that “any act
which is contrary to the wellbeing of the individual is wrong and immoral and should be
avoided.” Therefore, euthanasia by virtual of it involving the killing of oneself or someone is
deemed to be wrong (Departmental reader, pages. 130).’’

There are times when physicians perform involuntary euthanasia. This kind of euthanasia has as
been shown above is carried out when the patient does not wish to die. While ignoring their
wish, one can rightly hold that there is no quandary when this is compared with homicide that
this is but murder. Involuntary euthanasia is tantamount to murder in many cases without
exception (Departmental reader, pages. 133). Therefore, the repercussions of performing a single
or more acts of euthanasia is that it will become easier for unscrupulous physicians to murder
their patients while hiding under the cloak of the patients wish. An example will suffice; looking
back in time tells one that Hitler’s extermination techniques were first tried out on victims of an

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involuntary euthanasia program and are still condemned hitherto. Every act of euthanasia makes
it easier for physicians and others to codify a policy which supports involuntary euthanasia. And
not only does euthanasia affect the patient (in the case of involuntary euthanasia) but also causes
great distress to the patient’s relatives. Besides, one who performs an act of euthanasia runs the
risk of being prosecuted because it involves breaking the law.
The scarcity of donor organs for transplantation is another major problem that arises as a direct
result of allowing and performing euthanasia. Due to these surgery advancements, many people
whose lives would have been lost a long ago are now able to live and fight for another day.
However, the shortage of these organs implies that there is and will be disproportions between
the total number of people with the prospect of receiving an organ and the number of actual
donations available at a given time. Additionally, organ transplants are extremely expensive
costing about U$60,000 for a kidney transplant, a heart transplant about U$125,000, and liver
transplant in the range of U$200,000 to U$300,000. Now, the problem with this is that many
physicians indubitably will act diabolically and selfishly because they have an objection of
making huge sums of money out of euthanasia in order to harvest some required organs. In the
long run, there will be more deaths by euthanasia, especially involuntary euthanasia (Acquiring
and allocating scarce medical resources, pages. 3-5). And some doctors due to these monetary
gains may give drugs to their patients whose prognosis is promising just to secure some organs
for transplantation. Euthanasia in its entirety borders on the desecration and denies the dignity of
the individual whose dead bodies are subjected to an invasive procedure without their prior
consent.
Due to various reasons, some patients may be mentally challenged and their decision making
hampered. In this case, it is not possible to know whether a given patient is giving a request for
euthanasia based on sound judgement or under a certain mental disorder. This means that
consent or voluntary wish to die will be difficult to determine and obtain thereby leading to
proliferation of unconsented deaths. However, some patients for reasons be known to them might
just wish to commit suicide because they believe life has nothing to offer them, therefore, the
option for euthanasia may be a way to accomplish that. For example, Bob Dent, a 66-year old
Australian and former carpenter who was suffering from prostate cancer, requested to use a
computer-delivered lethal injection after convincing doctors he had nothing to live for. He used a
computer programme called Deliverance (Death and Dying, pages. 16).

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The problem of dignity also arises from the practice of euthanasia. For example, the beneficent
euthanasians reports that a person’s dignity which he or she has by virtual of being a person is a
as result of the freedom to make moral choices and only becomes unavailable when one is unable
to reason properly or is undignified. It also gives one the freedom to take away their own lives
(Departmental reader, pg. 138).’’ Thus, in many cases euthanasia is carried out because some
lives are perceived as being undignified. This is counterintuitive because according to the
declaration on human rights ‘each and every person is equal and retains those rights even at the
point of death.’ However, killing in euthanasia is based on this conception that certain lives are
undignified and only become dignified in death. If who shall live or die depends solely on this
notion, it means that a wide range of instances will be promulgated in order to justify the killing
of someone especially those who are helpless. Should euthanasia be legalized, a lot of people
will be living in fear (departmental reader, pages. 139),
However, it is also worthy to take into consideration that fact that moral relativism still applies.
Hence, it is indisputably true that people in different societies have different customs and
different ideas about right and wrong. There is no world consensus on which actions are right
and wrong, even though there is a considerable overlap between views on this. There are no
absolute moral facts because morality is invariably relative to a given society.
This paper has been able to indicate lucidly the problems of euthanasia and where possible
clarification was made. Among the major problems of euthanasia was undermining of the most
vulnerable people in society, breaking of religious and institutional laws, harvesting of organs for
selfish gains, labelling of those who are terminally ill as being undignified, and many others.
This debate is still on-going such that even with the above problems posed by performing
euthanasia, its proponents will stop at nothing until they circumvent it. However, it is the hope of
the authors that other kind of measures (i.e. palliative care) will be put in place in order to help
those who are very sick thereby getting rid of euthanasia.

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