Ethics and Experience by Steffen Lloyd;

Author:Steffen, Lloyd; [Steffen, Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

Experience

The Ethic beyond Just War

Chapter Five

The Ethics of Physician-Assisted Suicide

We have argued that an actual ethic lies behind just war thinking. We observed that in public discussions of just war ideas, exclusive focus on just war criteria has obscured that ethic, but the ethic can be extracted and put to work in constructive, prescriptive, and critical ways to assess moral meaning and guide action. We then illustrated how this ethic would work on the moral question at the heart of the just war tradition—the use of force. And to highlight how the ethic functions, we opted not to use a historical military example of war as our example of a use of force, but nonviolent resistance, which its most prominent twentieth-century advocates, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., both understood quite explicitly to be a use of force. We showed how both leaders observed our common moral agreement that force ordinarily ought not to be used to settle conflicts, but also how in the face of great injustice, both appealed implicitly to the ethic behind just war thinking to proceed to restrained but forceful action.

If an ethic lies behind just war thinking and it is truly an ethic, that is, if it focuses not on a particular issue but on a general system of principles or action guides that are themselves conformed to the moral point of view, then this ethic must have applicability beyond the particular issue of war or the use of force. The ethic at issue here is a hybrid ethic that takes into consideration duty, consequences, and virtue. It is extractable by a twofold consideration: first, the articulation of our common moral agreements as those are derived through the resources of natural law thinking and conformed to the moral point of view, and second, the identification of reasonable justice-related criteria that allow for the possibility of an exception to the common moral agreement when applied to particular situations of otherwise uncorrected injustices. We began by considering the ethic behind just war thinking. Our next move is to show how this common agreement ethic can be applied beyond just war thinking. Having begun this effort by examining the issue of using force to settle conflicts, we then examined how this ethic can be applied to so common a moral problem as lying. We now turn to some big life-and-death issues to show the practical applicability of this hybrid ethic as it functions to reconcile ethical thinking with our moral experience. The next several chapters will demonstrate how the hybrid ethic we have argued for, including the formal framework of this ethic as we know it best from just war thinking, can be used to approach ethical deliberation on a variety of troubling and difficult moral problems.

In this chapter and the next, the focus will be on medical ethics issues, first with physician-assisted suicide or physician assistance in dying, and next by a discussion of medical nontreatment of severely disabled newborns.

Introduction: Beyond Kevorkian

The controversial issue of physicians directly helping patients die came to heightened public awareness due to Dr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.