Physician Assisted Suicide Case Study

After college I worked at a small local hospital as an EMT-Basic, and as a chemistry lab technician at a large corporate sand-mine. One afternoon, my mother (who was the head of safety at the sand-mine), came into my office and asked me to come talk to one of the workers (Joe, a family friend) who suddenly started feeling “weird”. Walking into the room where they had him sitting, I noticed that he looked very pale. I took his pulse and noticed that it was a little faint and that his skin was clammy. He kept insisting that it was food poisoning. I suggested that he should go to the hospital to get checked out. Quickly thereafter, he began slurring his words and failed to respond to my questions. His eyes started to glaze over and he was staring blankly into space. These were the textbook signs that lead up

Per Callaway (2017), consequentialist “framework considers the consequences or outcome of actions to determine if an action was right or wrong” (p. 2). After gathering evidence to indicate that waiting for an ambulance to arrive would have been more harmful for Joe than driving him to the hospital myself, the decision I made to break company policy was justified under the consequentialism framework. Furthermore, the criteria for a good or bad consequence in this scenario is life or death (respectively). According to the consequentialist framework, “once criteria are established, the consequentialist weigh the morality of a choice by determining which actions create the most happiness for all moral beings involved” (Callaway, 2017, p.2). Joe cried out for help during the drive to the hospital, indicating that the good consequence would be that of health and life. The decision was made to pursue the option that had a higher probability of a good consequence for Joe. If we had waited on the ambulance or life-flight helicopter, then it would have created a larger probability of the bad