Active Euthanasia Argumentative Analysis

According to the BBC’s guide of Ethics, active euthanasia is when a medical professional purposely does something to cause the death of their patient. Passive euthanasia occurs when the patient dies due to the medical professional choosing not to continue doing things necessary to keep the patient alive. Some examples of this include turning off life-support, disconnecting a feeding tube or not distributing life-extending drugs. There is an argument about whether there is a moral difference between killing and letting someone die. Some believe that it is acceptable to withhold treatment but it is not acceptable to deliberately kill a patient. However, I argue there is no real distinction between the two.
In James Rachels’ article “Active and …show more content…
If there was a morally significant matter in the difference between killing and letting die, one could argue that Jones’s behavior was less wrong than Smith’s. He considers the situation in which Jones pleads his own defense in which he states he did not kill his cousin, he merely let him die. If letting someone die were actually less wrong than killing, his statement would maybe be morally okay. However, in today’s court, a defense like that would be considered as a “grotesque perversion of moral reasoning” (Rachels 4). Rachels argues that killing is not any worse than letting die and concludes that there is not a morally significant difference between Smith drowning the child and Jones watching the child drown. I also agree with Rachels that there is no moral difference between the two scenarios. The BBC’s guide to Ethics gives an example of a lazy doctor choosing to let a patient die. Brown is a man who is rushed to the hospital after being stabbed. Despite bleeding heavily, he can be saved if a doctor operates on him. The only doctor on duty knows that the operation will take about an hour but wants to go home. He decides to let Brown bleed to death and as a result, Brown dies a few minutes later. Once Brown’s mother arrives, she yells at the doctor saying that he killed her son. The doctor responds, that no he didn’t, he just let him die. In this example, no one would think that the doctor’s reply would excuse his behavior. Letting his patient die is just as bad as killing

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