When Self-Determination Runs Amok Summary

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Recommended: Controversy of euthanasia

Daniel Challahan attempts to argue that Euthanasia is always seriously morally wrong in his article, “When Self-Determination Runs Amok.” Callahan discusses several reasons depicting why he believes that Euthanasia is morally impermissible. John Lachs, however, does not see validity in several of Callahan’s points and responds to them in his article, “When Abstract Moralizing Runs Amok.” Two points from Callahan’s article Lachs challenges are the fundamental moral wrong view and the subjectiveness of suffering. As afore mentioned, Lachs criticizes Callahan’s classification of the power over life as a fundamental moral wrong. In his article, Callahan states, “it is a fundamental moral wrong for one person to give over his life and fate to another, whatever the good consequences, and no less a wrong for another person to have that kind of total, find power.” (659) Lachs disagrees with this statement and creates a scenario about kidney donation to ultimately show …show more content…

Three people can have the same condition, but only one will find the suffering unbearable. People suffer, but suffering is as much a function of the values of individuals as it is of the physical causes of that suffering. Inevitably in that circumstance, the doctor will in effect be treating the patient's values. To be responsible, the doctor would have to share those values. The doctor would have to decide, on her own, whether the patient's life was "no longer worth living."… The doctors present agreed that there is no objective way of measuring or judging the claims of patients that their suffering is unbearable. And if it is difficult to measure suffering, how much more difficult to determine the value of a patient's statement that her life is not worth living?

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