Ethical Differences Between Active Euthanasia And Assisted Suicide

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1. According to Rachels active euthanasia may sometimes be preferred morally to passive euthanasia for several reasons. First, a patient may be in such immense pain that they no longer want to sustain their life; however, if the life-sustaining sources are merely removed the patient may continue to live in even greater agony as the wait to succumb to death. Thus, the patient would be put through greater suffering with passive euthanasia which is not the goal of physicians. Additionally, Rachels deduces that in multitudes of circumstances the difference between life and death and passive or active euthanasia stems from irrelevant grounds; hence, not an accurate representation of the realities of the situation at hand. So, the moral justification or lack of morality for either option of euthanasia does not inhibit active euthanasia as being a moral action.
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Beauchamp and Childress find that Rachels’ analysis is troubling and inaccurate because they see there being a genuine moral difference between active and passive euthanasia. Addtionally, they see Rachels’ comparisons as invalid due to his views and the treatment envisioned by AMA being immensely dissimilar; therefore, Rachels’ comparisons cannot be used as support. (The AMA does not focus on the morality difference between letting someone die and killing, but instead that justified actions in medicine limit procedures to being only passive.) Finally, Beauchamp and Childress, agree that morality may not be a deciding factor; nonetheless, they do not agree that this is always the case, some instances may exist when morality is an

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