PHIL110B Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Assisted Suicide, Rationality, Voluntary Euthanasia
15 Apr 2017
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Passive euthanasia is legal, active euthanasia is illegal and considered murder. There are other things going on with most killings, and that in some cases that most killings are worse than letting die because some people want to purposely inflict pain onto people. Your intentions during a killing may indeed be worse than during letting someone die because during a killing, you may want to do bad things to someone along with killing them (ruin their reputation) But, in fact, the actual fact of it being killing does not make it worse than letting someone die. Legal analogy legally, murder is treated different than letting die: law recognizes killing as different from letting die. Callahan on rachels: the cause of death is the disease, not the physician"s action, in letting someone die, a person who lets someone die should not be seen as someone who actually carries out a killing.
