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Strange wonder about euthanasia

pinguis
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Posted 09/13/09 - 10:07 PM: Subject: Strange wonder about euthanasia	#1
My friends, right now, I do a report about Euthanasia and have a strange wonder, hope you consider this with me. Is there a difference between passive euthanasia and living our everyday life? Passive euthanasia, according to Google, is usually defined as withdrawing medical treatment with the intention of causing the patient's death. For example, if a patient requires kidney dialysis to survive, and the doctors disconnect the dialysis machine, the patient will presumably die fairly soon. The fact were this, if we don’t eat, sleep, etc., we will die fairly soon. Why is our everyday life treatment different from this medical one. I'm sure it’s not because of the notions of natural and unnatural. It is science; science is all about studying nature. This is an important element of my report so please help me. Edited by Caldwell on 09/14/09 - 12:13 AM. Reason: Edited for clarity.

Cuthbert
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Posted 09/14/09 - 12:08 AM:	#2
My everyday life is different from passive euthanasia because I do eat, sleep etc, and everyone so far has allowed me to eat, sleep etc. Consequently I stay alive. In the case of passive euthanasia, the means a person needs in order to stay alive are withdrawn and it is beyond his power to recover them by his own efforts. So passive euthanasia is about as different from my everyday life as one thing can be different from another. Perhaps your everyday life is different. If you cannot get food and are about to die, then your life is quite like passive euthanasia. But, if that is so, why are you spending time on the internet?

pinguis
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Posted 09/14/09 - 03:06 AM:	#3
I don’t clear with your words. What do you mean by using ‘it is beyond his power to recover them by his own efforts.’ If you mean the medical treatment is beyond his power to choose to use or not to, then it is about voluntary or not. In the case of voluntary euthanasia, I don’t see any different. Our bodies need food and rest. It can’t live without food. It can’t stay without sleep. Suppose the need of human being to be X and the need of this patient to be Y. I need X but the patient need X+Y and everyone so far has allowed him to X and Y. Consequently he stays alive. In order to have X, normal people need to work. Work for many people is something quite boring, painful but inevitable. The patient has different kind of this. They usually don’t have to work. They fight different war to get both X and Y. The question is what makes an ordinary treatment like eating or sleeping different from something such as …I don’t know how to call it, the machine that keep feeding food to you so you can live. We know that there are a lot of people who “cannot get food and are about to die”. We know but do nothing. What makes not give medical treatment to those who need it different from not give food to those who need it?

Cuthbert
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Posted 09/14/09 - 05:44 AM:	#4
We know that there are a lot of people who “cannot get food and are about to die”. We know but do nothing. What makes not give medical treatment to those who need it different from not give food to those who need it? That is why some people oppose passive euthanasia. Just as we owe it to the starving of the world to feed them, when we are able; so we owe it to patients to keep them alive, when we are able. But other people think that the need of a starving child or a terminally ill patient does not by itself create any obligation for us to meet their needs. So it's OK to let someone die (passive euthanasia), but not OK to kill them (active euthanasia.) I don’t clear with your words. What do you mean by using ‘it is beyond his power to recover them by his own efforts.’ If you mean the medical treatment is beyond his power to choose to use or not to, then it is about voluntary or not. In the case of voluntary euthanasia, I don’t see any different. Our bodies need food and rest. It can’t live without food. It can’t stay without sleep. Suppose the need of human being to be X and the need of this patient to be Y. I need X but the patient need X+Y and everyone so far has allowed him to X and Y. Consequently he stays alive. One difference between our food and the patient's life support machine is that, if someone steals our food, we can usually go and find some more. But if the patient's life support machine is taken away, he's too ill to find another one for himself. If we turn off the life support machine and the patient sits up and says "Hey! Turn that back on, you murderer!" then we know what to do. If he could turn the machine on by himself, then it does not matter whether we turn it off or leave it on, because he's in control of his own life and his means of life support. The moral problem arises because he hasn't got control of the means that he needs to live and if someone takes away his means then it's beyond his power to recover them - he can do nothing about it (unlike us). Equally, if someone decides to keep his life support machine going, even though it might be in his best interests to die, he can't do anything about that, either. But in either case it seems very different from the situation in which a person can clearly act and take or refuse his means of support.

Desidude666
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Posted 09/15/09 - 12:08 AM:	#5
It is still euthanasia if you are in knowledge of the result and it occurs. If you know about your actions and that the results of such actions lead to death, time of such an event isn't at all the matter then.
What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven. - Ludwig van Beethoven

SIR2U
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Posted 09/15/09 - 12:59 PM:	#6
So if I am sent to prison for life and life in prison is not worth living, then refusing to eat and refusing permission to be force fed until i die is euthanasia. Surely in the cases of passive euthanasia, the patient has made the disicion not to continue to live and has refused further treatment.
Unknown Alanic wiseman. "Ignorance and bad teeth have at least one thing in common. Keeping your mouth closed makes them both less obvious"

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