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This case delves into the moral domain, within which it derives it’s relevance to the subject of Bioethics, Euthanasia is a popular subject that health care professionals, lawyers and theologians have dealt with for a long time. While it is an extreme and exceptional case to support and argue in favor of, euthanasia among health care professionals and lay public, it becomes more and more common to see supporters of this act especially among health care professionals. Leon R. Kass is trying is trying to convince people that the issues of Euthanasia connected to the concept of rights are incomprehensible. Leon R. Kass states that taken literally, a right to die would denote merely a right to the inevitable; the certainty of death for all the lives is the touchstone of fated inevitability. The reason that these issues have come about is because of the growing technological advances in the medical field. People fear that their lives will end undignified elongation of life, years of reduced far below ordinary standards of civilized life and conduct, of incompetence, and dependence. The people who claim this right believe that a human has the right to live, and that same human should have the right to die under specified conditions of course. Leon R. Kass states that a right to die is increasingly asserted and gaining poplar strength. Americans now believe that if life is miserable one has the right to get out, actively and with help if necessary. It has been fashionable for some time now and in many aspects of American public life for people to demand what they want or need as a matter of rights, hence the claim of the “right to die”. In defining the meaning of the word ‘right’ certain questions come up, and to clarify, define, explain, and decipher, these claims of validity Leon R. Kass laid down the law or ‘rights’ as it was, as to whether or not the right to die is feasible. What is the difference between right and wants? What does it mean to have a right to something? Why should the right to die be asserted? Is there a right to die? In order to understand the concepts that are brought up in succeeding arguments we need to clarify some of the language and setup a base from which we can go into this information. Beliefs cannot become moral standards simply because individuals so label them. American Idealism: which is that the individual is more important than the whole. Universal Precepts: are tell the truth, respect the privacy of others, protect confidential information, obtain consent before invading another person’s body, do not kill, do not cause pain, do not steal or otherwise deprived of goods, prevent harm from occurring to others. The Kantian categorical imperative is such that I ought never to act except in such a way that I can also will that my maxim should become a universal law. However a moral act is praiseworthy only if done neither for self-interested reasons nor as the result of a natural disposition, but rather from duty. That is, the person’s motive for acting must a be recognition for the act as resting on duty. Finally the meaning of autonomy, which is rooted in the liberal moral and political tradition of the importance of individual freedom and choice. In moral philosophy personal autonomy refers to personal self-governance; personal rule of the self by adequate understanding while remaining free from controlling interferences by others from personal limitations that prevent choice. Autonomy thus means freedom from external constraint and the presence of critical mental capacities such as understanding, intending, and voluntary decision making capacity. People demand what they want or need as a matter of rights consequently there is a right to health care, a right to education or employment, abort of enjoy pornography, or to commit suicide or sodomy. A right to dance naked, a right to be born, a right to have not been born, and most recently a right to die. A right whether legal or moral is not identical to a need or desire or an interests or capacity. I may have both a need and a desire for, and also an interest in, the possessions of another, and the capacity or power to take them by stealth or force yet I can hardly be said to have a right to them. Not everything we are free to do, morally or legally, do we have a right to do. Their mere assertion of a claim or demand, or the stipulation of a right, is insufficient to establish it; making a claim and actually having a rightful claim to make are not identical. In considering an alleged right to die, we must be careful to look for a justifiable liberty or claim and not merely a desire interest, power, or demand. People are in fear of the overpowering influence that medical technology has on a person’s ability to die. New concerns regarding the end of life have come into context. Due to the power of medicine to preserve and prolong life, many of us are fated to end our once flourishing lives in years of debility and disgrace. Machines like respirators and other powerful technologies can all by themselves, hold comatose and others that are severely debilitated on this side of life and death, many who would be dead are alive because for sustained mechanical intervention which brings up the issue of why should “the right to die” be asserted? 1. Fear of prolongation of dying due to medical intervention. 2. Fear of living too long without fatal illness to carry one off. 3. Fear of degradations of senility and dependence. 5. Fear of becoming a burden to my family financial, psychic, or social. In assessing these reasons for action, we look back to the Kantian Categorical imperative, and put them into maxim form. Lets take a look at one of the more personal issues like number 2. If I my fear of living too long without fatal illness to carry me off, then I reserve the right to commit suicide. To begin with this reason is selfish because your reason for death is personal desire possibly because you will be the only person left of your circle of friends. An action is morally praiseworthy only if done neither for self-interested reasons nor as the result of a natural disposition, but rather from duty. Which is why these reasons are immoral. John Locke states that rights are given to men by nature, but they are needed because men are also subject to nature’s improvidence. Since life in sin danger, men’s equal rights would be to life, to the liberty that protects life, and to the pursuit of happiness with which life, or tenuous life, is occupied. In practice, the pursuit of happiness will be the pursuit of property, for even though property, is less valuable that life or liberty, it serves as guard for them. Quite apart from the pleasures of being rich, having a secure property shows that one has liberty secure from invasion either by the government or by others, and secure liberty is the best sign of secure life. Which not only demonstrates the philosophical embodiment of the doctrine of natural rights but also the first instances of American Idealism, which is that the individual is more important than the whole. My right to secure my life against death that is, my rightful liberty to self-preservative conduct is the bedrock of all other rights and of all politically relevant morality. Every right ever argued, claimed, granted, or denied can be viewed as an extensions of this primary right to life, since every particular right concerns the exercise of some faculty of life, the access to some necessity of life, the satisfaction of some aspiration of life. It is obvious that one cannot found on this rock any right to die or right to become dead. Life love to life, and it needs all the help it can get. We cannot serve the patient’s good by deliberately eliminating the patient. And if we have no right to do this to another, we have no right to have others do this to ourselves. There is, when all is said and done no defensible right to die. The cause of this issue is the medical establishment’s exceedingly pervasive methods of sustaining life and the diminishing choice of how death is to come upon our earthly bodies. As Leon states with medical advances, the fear of death as such at the hands of unfriendly nature inspires a bolder approach, namely scientific medicine to wage war against disease even against death itself, ultimately with a promise of bodily immortality. From modest beginnings of political thinking namely natural rights of self-preservation, secured by moderate self-assertion, have given way to the liberal political modernity, which has me typing this paper today. Political modernity, which includes non-natural rights, such as “the right to die”, which have no connection to nature or reason. These rights are derived from the individualized American whose autonomy is to do as you please, which is compatible with self-indulgence. Leon states that our reliance on technology and government to satisfy our wants –demanded as rights have weakened our more natural human associations especially the family, on which we all nee dot rely when our simulated ideal of autonomy and mastery is eventually exposed by unavoidable decline. While aging and death have been taken out of the bosom of the family and turned over to the state supported nursing homes and hospitals. Not the clergyman but the doctor presides over the end of life, in sterile surroundings that make no concessions to our finitude. “Individuals cannot create their own morality by making their own rules, and morality cannot be purely a personal policy or code. The core parts of morality exist before their acceptance by individuals (Bioethics 1).” As Leon said in a CODA: About Rights; we distort our understanding of rights and weaken their respectability in their proper sphere by allowing them to be invented without ground in nature or reason-in response to moral questions that lie outside the limited domain or rights. We distort out understating of moral deliberation and the moral life by reducing all complicated questions of right and good to questions of individual rights. Making the “right to die” valid because of the demand of the populace on their government to provide this desire which goes against the context that was written by John Locke that states that all natural and constitutional rights are based on the right to life. Euthanasia is the termination by one means or another of a human, life the justification for it will always be questionable. One of the primary things that make euthanasia unacceptable is the involvement of a second party. Since life is inherently valuable, no one should play a part, directly or indirectly, in terminating a life. However I do believe in passive euthanasia when the person’s life is subjectively meaningless a person cannot possess, can no longer possess, or cannot achieve, any goals. The conviction that human life is of inestimable value and ought to be protected and cherished. The popularity of ‘good death’ is promoted by the fantasy that is displayed in its definition, which is mercy killing. My concern comes from the intuition that legalizing euthanasia might well be abused, with some person’s life being ended, against his or her consent, for a motive other than mercy. We also know that diagnosis and prognosis of a disease can be wrong. The “right to die may well become a “duty to die”. For instance, frail, disabled elderly people who are financial and emotional burdens on their families may feel some pressure to ask for euthanasia. Legalizing euthanasia has the potential to weaken and damage the relationship between patients and physicians. The relationship between the patient and the physician within the practice of medicine has been understood traditionally as a covenant or contract with rights on the part of the patient and duties on the part of the physician. The primary duty of the physician in this relationship is, in fact, negative duty to do no harm. It also follows from this, that the physician has the duty of beneficence. In or modernity the physicians duty of beneficence has succumb to the patient’s right to autonomy. Bibliography: Word Count: 2150
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