Monthly Archives: August 2024

Philosophy Paper 2

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Physician-assisted suicide and active voluntary euthanasia should be legal in the United States.

There has been a fierce debate among many stakeholders that include government and non-governmental agencies, religious leaders, healthcare professionals, researchers, activists and scholars on whether physician-assisted suicide and active voluntary euthanasia should get legalized or not. Physician-assisted suicide refers to the act where a licensed professional or doctor prescribes lethal drugs to a patient at their voluntary, informed and competent request with the aim of causing death. Voluntary Active Euthanasia refers to the action of a doctor or licensed professional to administer lethal medicine to a patient at their voluntary, informed as well as competent request with the aim of causing death. Various scholars and stakeholders argue that physician-assisted suicide and active voluntary euthanasia should get legalized in the United States. In this paper, I will argue that physician-assisted suicide should be illegal in the United States. I will also show that it’s wrong and unlawful for a licensed professional in the health care sector to undertake active voluntary euthanasia.

The proponents of these practices argue that their practices are necessary as they result in a benefit to the patient (Kamm, 1997). They claim that suffering is evil, and these actions eliminate the pain caused by suffering. They maintain that the patients suffering from terminal illnesses have a right to choose not to suffer by taking their lives. They argue that the principle of autonomy in healthcare gets adhered to, as the patient who is not well-trained in ending life procedures voluntarily requests for the services of a trained physician to assist them in ending their lives.

However, this argument fails greatly due to several reasons. First, the principle of autonomy has limitation. The disparity of knowledge as well as clinical judgment compromises the principle of autonomy. All health care professionals have a greater knowledge base that their patients and also have a responsibility to do good to their patients. The suffering caused by diseases such as terminal illness limits a patient’s right to autonomy. Suffering may be a severe and multifaceted challenge, however, is not insurmountable. It is treatable, and the use of certain powerful analgesics and pain management techniques can significantly relieve pain. Hence, these proponents are wrong by suggesting death as the only measure to deal with pain.

The nations that tolerate or legalize assisted suicide or active voluntary euthanasia do so under some set guidelines. For instance, “German where voluntary euthanasia gets prohibited and assisted suicide does not get considered as a violation of the law provided that the patient is tatherrschaftsfahig” (Battin, 2006). That is the patient is capable of exercising control over his or her actions and also acting out of freely responsible choice. In Netherlands, active euthanasia remains prohibited by statutory law and also gets protected by a series of lower and Supreme Court decisions. It broadly gets considered as legal as long as the healthcare professional meets several guidelines. The guidelines are; that the patient’s request be voluntary, that the patient is undergoing intolerable suffering, that the patient gets well informed, that all acceptable alternatives for relieving pain have got attempted and that the physician consults another healthcare professional.

The practice by the Netherlands fails significantly since its availability creates a disincentive for providing good terminal care. The practice also erodes into practicing less-than-voluntary euthanasia on patients whose problems are not irremediable and usually by moderate degrees develop into terminating the lives of individuals who are elderly, handicapped, chronically ill or mentally retarded. In the case of German, Physicians should understand that tehy6 involvement in assisted suicide results into more harm in the practice of medicine. The patients who are dying will have a fear that they are dying due to assisted suicide is allowed. This practice gets seen to distort the healing relationship between doctors and their patients. It is the responsibility of the physician to do what they can ethically so as to alleviate suffering and should in no circumstance involve themselves knowingly in the death of a patient.

As an objection, it may get argued that it is necessary to cause permissible death as a side effect if it leads to relieving pain, as sometimes it is a lesser evil and pain relief is a greater good. This argument allows a healthcare physician to treat pain in whatever manner so as to result in a patient’s greater good.

This objection is wrong since killing a person is not of any good to a patient. There are other alternatives for relieving pain other than death. Furthermore, it does not necessary require a healthcare professional to cause death. Numerous effective methodologies are available especially on the internet that does not necessarily involve a physician.

The paper states in what numerous ways physician-assisted suicide and active voluntary euthanasia are of more harm than good to a patient. The paper also argues why health care professionals should in not by any means get involved in any practices that aim at causing death as it destroys the patient and doctor relationship as well as is against the principles of medicine. Hence, physician-assisted suicide and active voluntary euthanasia should not get legalized in the United States.

Gross domestic product

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Gross domestic product encompasses the monetary value of all the goods and services that have attained completion, produced within the borders of a certain country and additionally should be within a defined timeline. The elements that make GDP distinctive is the fact that it encompasses all the public as well as private consumption, investments, government outlays as well as the exports, ignoring the imports that are occurring with the defined territory. In a nutshell, GPP presents a broad assessment of a country’s general economic activity (Higgs, 2015).

The HDI is a tool that the UN developed to assist in the assessment and consequently rank the levels of social as well as economic development in different countries through the application of the four set criteria. These include life expectancy at birth, the average years of schooling, and the expected number of schooling years as well as the gross national income per capita. Through the HDI, it is possible to track the variations in development levels over a certain course of time and additionally to offer comparison for the developments that are occurring in different countries. The creation of the HDI was meant to serve the objective of emphasizing that people along with their abilities need to be the decisive criteria for the assessment of the developments that are taking place in a country and not just the economic growth (Darvishan & Hakimzadeh, 2015). HDI are also applicable to the assessment of the national policy choices by asking the manner in which two countries that have a similar level of GNI per capita are ending up with dissimilar human development outcomes. These dissimilarities are applied in developing debates on the policy priorities by a government.

Inclusive wealth entails a monetary measure that is made if the summation of the natural, physical as well as the human assets. The natural capital encompasses the forests, land, fossil fuels as well as the minerals. The human capital is in reference to the population’s skills and education. The physical which represents the manufactured products encompass things as buildings, machinery as well as infrastructure. The reference point of the IWR is the fact that the productive base of a nation is dependent on the human capital, manufactured capital as well as the natural capital (Polasky, et al., 2015). The assessment of the human along with the natural produced capital that encompass the components of inclusive wealth provide a broader as well as a more comprehensive assessment of the performance of a country’s economy. Through the reliance on IWR as the economic measurement tool, countries will enjoy an innovative yardstick that will be offering them a new perspective relating to their economic performance in the recent decades. The measurement is better that the traditionally applied GDP in offering a reflection of the sustainable development of nations.

There are various attribute that make GDP a poor measure of a country’s economic progress. These challenges demerits include: GDP does not take into account the measurements of the quality of life in country. The quality is applied in the evaluation of the general wellbeing of individuals as well as societies in that it is wrong to confuse the quality of live with standards of living which relies on the primary income. Quality of life entails employment, wealth, physical as well as mental health and education among others Higgs, 2015). The fact that GDP fails to take the quality of life into consideration during its measurements makes it s limited measure of a nation’s progress. GDP ignores the impact that the informal markets have on an economy. It fails to address the activities of the black market where the money that is spent does not get regulated. The failure to comprehensively address the informal markets thus makes GDP a limited measure of economic progress of a nation. The fact that GDP has the tendency of overestimating the negative externalities which are the bad effects that third parties suffer following the production or consumption of a good or service makes it poor measures of economic progress. Whenever there is an increase in the GDP, there is also a concurrent increase in the adversarial externalities such as water and air pollution (Higgs, 2015). As GDP overestimates the negative externalities, it consequently limits it as a criteria for examining the welfare that between different countries.

Another measure that applies to assessing the progress of a nation is the genuine progress indicator (GPI). The advantages that come with GPI is the fact that it assists the policy makers to assess the well their citizen are doing both socially and economically (Hayashi, 2015). Human development index as an additional measure assesses the progress of a nation in three dimensions of human development. These include a healthy and long life attributed to the life expectancy at birth, knowledge attributed to the school enrollment rates and literacy levels as well as decent living standards seen via the GDP per capita. The ecological footprint as the additional measure assesses quantity of land as well as waters area that a human populations needs to be able to produce the resources they consume as well as to absorb its water via the available technologies.