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Day 3
Published in Bertha Alvarez Manninen, Dialogues on the Ethics of Abortion, 2022
I think we’ve argued the significance of personhood enough. Regardless of who or what is a person, this quote applies to all human life. And then I also looked up this quote from Pope John Paul II on the value of fetal life: “Some people try to justify abortion by claiming that the result of conception, at least up to a certain number of days, cannot yet be considered a personal human life. But in fact, from the time that the ovum is fertilized, a life is begun which is neither that of the father nor the mother; it is rather the life of a new human being with his own growth. It would never be made human if it were not human already. This has always been clear, and … modern genetic science offers clear confirmation. It has demonstrated that from the first instant there is established the program of what this living being will be: a person, this individual person with his characteristic aspects already well determined. Right from fertilization the adventure of a human life begins …”1 And in another part of the book he also writes that human life has “sacred value … from its very beginning until its end, and can affirm the right of every human being to have this primary good respected to the highest degree.”2 So all human life is sacred and has value. Taking any human life is always morally wrong and an affront to that inherent value. These are called “sanctity of life” arguments.
End of life
Published in Gary Chan Kok Yew, Health Law and Medical Ethics in Singapore, 2020
Keown (1997) noted that the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of life holds that human life is created in the image of God and therefore, possessed an intrinsic dignity. The notion of sanctity of life is that “one ought never intentionally to kill an innocent human being” and that the “right to life” is essentially a right not to be intentionally killed.116 On the other hand, the argument based on “Quality of life” (with a capital “Q”) takes the view that where the life of certain patients falls below a certain threshold (a measure of the worthwhileness of life), it is right to terminate the life.117 Alternatively, assessments of “quality of life” (with a small “q”) can be used to determine the worthwhileness of a treatment for a patient based on the risks and benefits of the treatment which is less morally objectionable than to assess the worth of a patient’s life.
Decisions Without Choices
Published in Michael van Manen, The Birth of Ethics, 2020
Alternatively, a ‘sanctity of life’ doctrine, while recognizing the intrinsic worth of life no matter what form it takes, tends to make distinctions between actions which preserve compared to actions which end life. Those endorsing either a vitalistic or sanctity of life perspective would be against intentionally ending life (i.e. active euthanasia); but, limiting the use of medical interventions that have the possibility of prolonging life (i.e. passive euthanasia) would only be potentially supported by a sanctity of life perspective and not a vitalistic view. In other words, the critical theoretical bio-ethical difference between these perspectives inheres in the ‘inviolability of life’ rather than a ‘valuing of life’; and as a result, expresses different imperatives for action.
Normative account of Islamic bioethics in end-of-life care
Published in Global Bioethics, 2022
An optimal framework for Islamic bioethics in EoLC will consider the critical evaluation of existing positivist methodologies. For instance, it is not enough to rely on a posited rule stating that tadāwī is not obligatory and apply this rule to the complicated ethical situations of the EoLC environment. Also, more should be done to explain why it is possible, from an Islamic perspective, to skip the discussion on the sanctity of life as an overarching objective of Islamic morality and view EoLC through the prism of the consequentialist calculation of harm and benefit. There is room to develop a broad Islamic ethical framework to determine the good and the right conduct in EoLC. To do so, we need to start thinking of maṣlaḥa as a normative construct and ask, What is the maṣlaḥa that we are aiming to protect in EoLC? Human life is the locus classicus of EoLC ethics. This article argues that, as far as human life is concerned, there are at least two options for expressing and determining maṣlaḥa in the EoLC context. First, we have a deontological approach that would lead us to demonstrate unconditional respect for the intrinsic value of human life. On the other hand, we have a consequentialist approach that would enable us to tally considerations of pain, harm, costs, and risks. These two approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The right approach to Islamic EoLC bioethics may be found in some hybrid version that combines Islamic deontological and consequentialist thinking towards the moral value of human life.
Dispelling Medico-Legal Misconceptions Impeding Use of Advance Instructions to Shorten Immersion in Deep Dementia
Published in Journal of Legal Medicine, 2021
Stricken patients have long sought to manage medical interventions in order to abbreviate any period of languishing in a state deemed by the patient to be dismal and intolerable. Because such efforts to accelerate death are in tension both with medicine’s traditional life-preserving imperative and society’s concern with sanctity of life, figures in the medicolegal communities have sometimes sought to curb a patient’s prerogative to hasten her own demise. Recall the furor in 1975 when the loving parents of Karen Ann Quinlan sought to dictate removal of a respirator from their permanently unconscious 22-year-old daughter.1 Ms. Quinlan’s attending physicians refused to cooperate based on their perceived professional responsibilities to preserve their patient’s life. And New Jersey law enforcement officials—both the county prosecutor and the state attorney general—asserted that pulling the respirator plug would constitute an unlawful homicide.
Insiders and Outsiders: Lessons for Neuroethics from the History of Bioethics
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2020
Albert Jonsen’s The Birth of Bioethics (1998) describes a profound transformation in medical practice, which began in the United States and has since spread globally (Culliton and Waterfall 1978; Wilson 2014). Before World War II, discourse about ethics in medicine was almost exclusively the province of physicians, and it would have been considered impertinent for a philosopher or theologian (except in communicating doctrine to co-religionists) to tell physicians how to perform their duties. But in the postwar era, medical knowledge advanced in ways that aroused both public acclaim and fear. Interventions that initially seemed miraculous—such as dialysis, transplantation, mechanical ventilation, assisted reproduction, and genetic engineering—were quickly recognized to pose complex questions about the value and sanctity of life, and about tradeoffs between individual well-being and the common welfare. Many came to perceive that medical ethics, understood as a discourse limited to physicians, was not equipped to address these challenges. While physicians’ claims to physiological expertise were enhanced by their growing technical abilities, such expertise did not grant authority to decide on society’s behalf how scarce life-saving resources should be allocated, or what lives were worth living, or when some people’s interests could be sacrificed for the health of others (Rothman 1991).