patient is not able to present a desicision, whether he is unconscious or has other inabilities of communication or thought processes. Who then, if anybody, should make the decision between intervention preventing death or intervention causing death? Consent then, is the issue that I will base the moral permissibility of euthanasia on. Should euthanasia be morally okay with consent, without consent, both, or neither? First I will argue that euthanasia is morally permissible. Through the continuum, I have concluded that death is a choice. Accepting this viewpoint, you accept that someone should be able to decide to die. Accepting this, then you justify suicide. This argument is not based upon suffering because I have drawn no definition to the acceptable limit of suffering. If suicide is okay, then why not assisted suicide? Remember that just standing idle when you could prevent death is a decision to allow suicide. Arranging an injection with a push button so all the patient has to do is push a button to die would be considered suicide, which is morally acceptable. This would mean that it is acceptable for an individual to die if they were physically capable of doing it themselves. What logic would you deny the same right to those who were mentally competant but physically incapable? A person who is physically incapable of killing themselves must be killed by another if they choose to die. If a person has a right to die and cannot physically kill themselves, than euthanasia is the only way they could excersise their choice to death. If a person wants to die because they are in a unfavorable condition, whether the choice to die is implied by the patient at the present, or by instructions previously given, they have a right to chose to die and their choice should be honored. Therefore I believe that euthanasia with consent in one way or another is morally permissible in most circumstances. The moral permissibility of eut...
