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Active and Passive Euthanasia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Natalie Abrams
Natalie Abrams
Affiliation:
Brooklyn College
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Extract

This paper is divided into three sections. The first presents some examples of the killing/letting die distinction. The second draws a further distinction between what I call negative and positive cases of acting or refraining. Here I argue that the moral significance of the acting/refraining distinction is different for positive and for negative cases. In the third section I apply the above distinction to euthanasia, and argue that mercy killing should be regarded as analogous to positive rather than negative cases. On the basis of this, I then support active rather than passive euthanasia.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 53 , Issue 204 , April 1978 , pp. 257 - 263
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1978

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References

1 Thomson, Judith Jarvis, ‘Killing, Letting Die, and the Trolley Problem’, The Monist 59, 2 (04, 1976), p. 204.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

2 Rachels, James, ‘Active and Passive Euthanasia’, New England Journal of Medicine, 01 9, 1975, p. 79.Google ScholarPubMed

3 The qualifying phrase ‘in such situations’ is necessary to Judith Thomson's argument. Although she argues that there is no moral difference between killing and letting die in Bert and Alfred's cases, she maintains that there may be other kinds of cases in which the killing/letting die distinction is morally significant, Therefore, ‘the thesis that killing is worse than letting die cannot be used in any simple, mechanical way in order to yield conclusions about abortion, euthanasia, and the distribution of scarce medical resources. The cases have to be looked at individually’, op. cit., 217.

4 Here I am not referring to the possibility of a legal excuse but rather a moral one. It has been held that one might offer as a legal excuse the claim that he simply allowed someone to die but did not actually kill him. For an example of this see Becker, Lawrence C.'s paper, ‘Criminal Attempt and the Theory of the Law of Crimes’, in Philosophy and Public Affairs 3, No. 3 (Spring, 1974), especially the footnote on p. 274.Google Scholar

5 It should be noted that of the two people mentioned here, only Rachels specifically goes on to use his example in his discussion of euthanasia. Thomson's paper goes on to consider other examples of killing versus letting die but does not directly apply any of the examples to a situation of euthanasia. She is therefore not guilty of drawing what I shall argue is an incorrect analogy.

6 Rachels, , op. cit., 79.Google Scholar

7 For an interesting discussion of the moral significance of the killing/letting die distinction in terms of act evaluation, see Dinello, Daniel, ‘On Killing and Letting Die’, Analysis 31 (01 1971), 84–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 This is contrary to the assumption, usually made, that if there is a distinction to be maintained, passive euthanasia must be preferable to active euthanasia. ‘This difference between active and passive euthanasia is thought to be the difference between doing something to bring about someone's death, and not doing anything to bring about anyone's death. And (of course) if we conceive the matter in this way, passive euthanasia seems obviously preferable to active euthanasia, even though the outcome may be the same in both cases’ (Rachels, , op. cit., 80).Google Scholar