EuthanasiaEuthanasia

Part IVPart IVEthics

Dr. Jason M. Chang

David Velleman, “Against the Right to Die”

“The most important way in which the option of euthanasia may harm patients [..] is that it will deny them the possibility of staying alive by default.”

Ben Mattlin

“I’ve lived so close to death for so long that I know how thin and porous the border between coercion and free choice is, how easy it is for someone to inadvertently influence you to feel devalued and hopeless — to pressure you ever so slightly but decidedly into being ‘reasonable,’ to unburdening others, to ‘letting go’.”

Ben Mattlin

“[Forces of coercion] include that certain look of exhaustion in a loved one’s eyes, or the way nurses

and friends sigh in your presence while you’re zoned out in a hospital bed. All these can cast a dangerous

cloud of depression upon even the most cheery of optimists, a situation clinicians might misread since, to them, it seems perfectly rational. And in a sense,

it is rational, given the dearth of alternatives. If nobody wants you at the party, why should you

stay?”

Imposition on Doctors

“Different people, of different religious and ethical beliefs, embrace very different convictions about

which way of dying confirms and which contradicts the value of their lives […] None of these

dramatically different attitudes about the meaning of death can be dismissed as irrational. None should be

imposed, either by the pressure of doctors or relatives or by the fiat of government, on people who

reject it.”

(The Philosophers’ Brief, 1997)

American Medical Association

“The intentional termination of the life of one human being by another – mercy killing – is contrary to that

for which the medical profession stands and is contrary to the policy of the American Medical

Association.”

(AMA, Opinions of Judicial Council, 1973)

Willard Gaylin

“[I]f physicians become killers or are even licensed to kill, the profession – and, therewith, each physician – will never again be worthy of trust and

respect as healer and comforter and protector of life in all its frailty.”