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Physician-Assisted Death
| Article
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10817 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1993 |
1,422 Words |
| Author
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R.G. Frey
R.G. Frey is professor of philosophy at Bowling Green State
University, Bowling Green, Ohio, and senior research fellow at
the university's Social Philosophy and Policy Center. He is
author of The Nature of Suicide (Blackwell, forthcoming) and
Justice, Utility, and Scarce Medical Resources (Oxford
University Press, in progress). |
The point of intersection between the very interesting articles by Rosemarie Tong and Stephen Post is that the physician-assisted death, whether in the form of physicians assisted suicide (where the patient takes the final step) or active euthanasia (where the physician takes the final step). And this is as it should be, for, certainly today, the moral burdens being placed upon doctors by patients through their requests for assistance in dying are of central concern to the medical profession and to medical ethicists.
Physicians need help in thinking through the myriad issues that comprise these ethical burdens. Indeed, as the "death with dignity" movement links arms with the "patient autonomy" and "right to choose" movement, and as tragic cases under the rubric of all of these slogans play themselves out in the media, the need for such help becomes ever more pressing. Such articles as those by Tong and Post, therefore, are to be welcomed, both in the way they seek to lay out the conceptual territory of euthanasia and in the way they try to take note of the various social forces that bear upon contemporary discussions of euthanasia. This last is of no small importance, since it is evident that the cases that propel discussion today have passed beyond mere passive euthanasia to the active consideration of killing by physicians.
A large number of moral considerations, many of great complexity, bear upon this seemingly new predicaments for doctors. Here I have space for remarks on only one, though one that I think is fundamental to cases of physician-assisted death. I want to give just a sample of its complexity.
More than any duty to render aid and relieve suffering, some physicians and ethicist's claim, doctors are under a stringent moral obligation to do no harm. Killing, or assisting in killing, one's patient is intentionally to do harm. Therefore, it is forbidden doctors. In fact, to some ethicists, including Catholic moral theologians, to directly intend a patient's death--that is, to aim at that death by intention either as an end or as a means (to, say, relieve suffering) is to murder one's patient. And this, of course, is strictly prohibited. Numerous physicians embrace this line of reasoning or one very closely allied with it.
To the same moral theologians and ethicists, however, doctors are not always forbidden from knowingly bringing about a patient's death. In order to relieve severe pain, a doctor may (have to) administer a dosage of a drug that will, in fact, prove fatal or hasten death, provided he
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