PMID: 29766727May 17, 2018Paper

Human life as goodness: why euthanasia is morally unacceptable

Vnitr̆ní lékar̆ství
David Černý

Abstract

The current discussion of the moral admissibility or inadmissibility of euthanasia should, in my opinion, consider the greatest possible number of the shared premises of the two opinion camps. That is why I followed a thesis in this paper that the question of the good life is the focus of ethical interest, as this is what connects the advocates and the opponents to euthanasia. In the first part of the paper I critically discuss the two main theories of the good life widely embraced among the advocates of euthanasia: hedonism and desire-fulfilment theory. My focus is to show that both of them are descriptively inadequate, not quite in agreement with the intuitions and ideas that we have about the good life. From this critique I proceed towards the objective theory of full-fledged human development known as the natural law theory. Within this framework I discuss in depth the nature of life as the objective goodness and go over to a brief criticism of utilitarianism, the theory dominating bioethics today; I derive several normative conclusions from the nature of the fundamental goods, leading to the conclusion that an innocent human life cannot be ended under any circumstances. The second part of this paper focuses on the current ...Continue Reading

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