Research Paper
Introduction:
Euthanasia: Euthanasia (from the Greek εὐθανασία meaning “good death”: εὖ, eu (well or good) + θάνατος, thanatos (death)) refers to the practice of ending a life in a manner which relieves pain and suffering. According to the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics, the precise definition of euthanasia is “a deliberate intervention undertaken with the express intention of ending a life, to relieve intractable suffering.”[1]
Euthanasia is categorized in different ways, which include voluntary, non-voluntary, or involuntary and active or passive. Euthanasia is usually used to refer to active euthanasia, and in this sense, euthanasia is usually considered to be criminal homicide, but voluntary, passive euthanasia is widely non-criminal.
The controversy surrounding euthanasia centers around a two-pronged argument by opponents which characterizes euthanasia as either voluntary “suicides“, or as involuntary murders. (Hence, opponents argue that a broad policy of “euthanasia” is tantamount to eugenics). Much hinges on whether a particular death was considered an “easy”, “painless”, or “happy” one, or whether it was a “wrongful death“. Proponents typically consider a death that increased suffering to be “wrongful”, while opponents typically consider any deliberate death as “wrongful”. “Euthanasia’s” original meaning introduced the idea of a “rightful death” beyond that only found in natural deaths.
Euthanasia is the most active area of research in contemporary bioethics.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthanasia
Body:
Like everything Euthanasia has it positive and negative sides.
Pros and Cons:
http://www.euthanasia.com/proscons.html
http://www.idebate.org/debatabase/topic_details.php?topicID=55
Pros
- It provides a way to relieve extreme pain
- It provides a way of relief when a person’s quality of life is low
- Frees up medical funds to help other people
- It is another case of freedom of choice
- The right to choose to die is implicit in the right to life.
Cons
- Euthanasia devalues human life
- Euthanasia can become a means of health care cost containment
- Physicians and other medical care people should not be involved in directly causing death
- There is a “slippery slope” effect that has occurred where euthanasia has been first been legalized for only the terminally ill and later laws are changed to allow it for other people or to be done non-voluntarily.
- Suicide is a lonely, desperate act, carried out in secrecy and often as a cry for help.
- There is no comparison between the right to life and other rights.
Some of the following case studies will hopefully help you understand the severity of some patients who ask for Euthanasia.
Case Studies:
http://www.rsrevision.com/Alevel/ethics/euthanasia/Euthanasia_Case_Studies.pdf
Several real case studies with what actions were taken along with comments and opinions.
-Case 1: Tony Bland, 1989: Euthanasia granted
When doctors at Airedale Hospital in Yorkshire asked the High Court for permission to withdraw artificial nutrition and hydration from Hillsborough victim Tony Bland, his family supported the application. After the Hillsborough stadium tragedy, Tony was left in a persistent vegetative state – and hence was not legally dead. His parents believed their son would not want to be kept alive in such a condition. They petitioned the court to sanction the withdrawal of hydration and artificial nutrition, which it did
-Case 2: Dr Nigel Cox, 1992: Doctor not sentenced for mercy killing
Dr Nigel Cox remains the only doctor ever to be convicted in the UK of attempting to perform a mercy killing. A consultant rheumatologist from Hampshire, he was found guilty of attempted murder after injecting 70-year-oldLillian Boyes with a lethal drug. Dr Cox’s act was discovered by a nurse who read Miss Boyes medical notes. She realised that the potassium chloride he had used would not alleviate pain, but instead stop Ms Boyes’ heart. The charge of attempted murder was brought because it could not be proved conclusively that the injection had killed her. Despite the verdict, Winchester Crown Court imposed a suspended sentence, while the General Medical Council let him off with a reprimand. He is still practising medicine in Hampshire. During Dr Cox’s court case and subsequent appearance before the General Medical Council, Ms Boyes’ family never wavered in their support for the doctor’s actions.
-Case 3: Mary Ormerod, 1995: Doctor suspended for attempted Euthanasia
Mary Ormerod was starved of food and fluids. Her doctor, with the support of her daughters, had taken a conscious decision to withhold a nutritional supplement called Fresubin from the 85-year-old after she ceased to communicate with the outside world. But Dr Ken Taylor, the GP who took the decision, was suspended by the General Medical Council, the regulatory body for doctors, after nurses at the home complained about his actions. His six-month suspension was not directly because of his treatment of Mrs Ormerod, but because he failed to listen to nurses and consult colleagues. In fact, he had done nothing legally wrong in starving Mrs Ormerod. This is because, under the ruling of Tony Bland’s case, artificial nutrition and hydration is regarded as medical treatment
-Case 4: Annie Lindsell, 1997: Case withdrawn and died of natural causes
Annie Lindsell died of motor neurone disease in December 1997. Her greatest fear was the prospect of suffocating or choking to death when breathing and swallowing became difficult. With only weeks to live, she asked the High Court to rule that if this happened, her doctor could intervene and administer diamorphine – without fear of prosecution – even if it might shorten her life. She withdrew the case in October 1997 after she established the principle that doctors could legally administer lifeshortening drugs for the relief of mental as well as physical distress. She was assured that her doctor would not allow her to suffer unneccesarily and a treatment plan was agreed which followed best medical practice. She died without recourse to the treatment plan. She had only been diagnosed in 1992
-Case 5: Dr Moor, 1998: Doctor was charged with murder for performing mercy killing
Dr Moor was charged with the murder of George Liddell, an 85-year-old terminally ill cancer patient. However, while he admitted giving Mr Liddell a dose of diamorphine, Dr Moor said he had only done so to relieve pain, not to kill him. What made the case unusual was that not only did Dr Moor admit in the media to administering a lethal dose of drugs to many patients, he also admitted that he had done so within days of giving the interview. After his acquittal in May 1999, he said he would do it all over again. The verdict established once and for all that d
-Case 6: Miss B, 2002: Euthanasia granted
A woman known as “Miss B”, who was paralysed from the neck down, died peacefully in her sleep on 29 April 2002 after winning the legal right to have medical treatment withdrawn. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss, President of the High Court family division, ruled last month that Miss B had the “necessary mental capacity to give consent or to refuse consent to life-sustaining medical treatment”. It was the 43-year-old former social care professional’s case that it was her decision, not her doctors’, whether the ventilator which kept her alive should be switched off. In a landmark ruling, Dame Elizabeth gave Miss B the right to be transferred to another hospital and be treated in accordance with her wishes, including drug treatment and care to “ease her suffering and permit her life to end peacefully and with dignity”.
Places where its legal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Euthanasia_and_the_Legality.png
There are only a very provinces in the world where Euthanasia is legally practiced.
Final thoughts:
-Legal issues
Someone else being held responsible for attempted murder in order to help someone commit Euthanasia.
-Personal opinion based on facts
Should someone else’s religious beliefs and ethics be the judge of whether or not an individual should be allowed to partake Euthanasia?
-Etc
Works Cited Page
Powerpoint presentation:
Slide 1: Euthanasia – explanation
Slide 2: Pros
Slide 3: Cons
Slide 4: Few case examples
Slide 5: Religious beliefes vs. Euthanasia
Slide 6: Legality vs. Euthanasia
Slide 7: Ethics vs. Euthanasia
Slide 8: Personal beliefs
Slide 9: Conclusion
Slide 10: Q & A
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Homework 5: Ethics in Application Sectors
To further explore Ethics in Applications Sectors I decided to do my case study over P2P file sharing programs.
Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application. They are said to form a peer-to-peer network of nodes.
Peers make a portion of their resources, such as processing power, disk storage or network bandwidth, directly available to other network participants, without the need for central coordination by servers or stable hosts.[1] Peers are both suppliers and consumers of resources, in contrast to the traditional client–server model where only servers supply, and clients consume.
The peer-to-peer application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster. The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. Peer-to-peer networking is not restricted to technology, but covers also social processes with a peer-to-peer dynamic. In such context, social peer-to-peer processes are currently emerging throughout society.
Some popular P2P programs:
http://compnetworking.about.com/od/p2ppeertopeer/tp/p2pfilesharing.htm
UALR has blocked all P2P access to students. This is unfortunate since even though majority of the P2P users use it for music, movies, etc downloads there are still legitimate uses for it for educational purposes. Like everything else P2P has its advantages and disadvantages, although in this case the disadvantages of its usage far outweigh the prior and thus its in everyone best interest that certain facilities block such activity.
Tremaine
Ever since the invention of the internet, people have used it to share files. Be it music, movies, video games, and other copyrighted and non-copyrighted electronic material. This has raised some interesting ethical issues. The debate over whether file sharing is legal and right is one of the most important issues dealing with the internet right now, and has sparked many lawsuits. Some of these lawsuits have even reached the United States Supreme Court. Tremaine’s case is very similar to mine, just as I stated above file sharing and such things have it advantages but many people tend to abuse this and in the end certain facilities are better off blocking and prohibiting it.
Noah
Feds at DefCon Alarmed After RFIDs Scanned
But despite the fact that attendees know they should take precautions to protect their data, federal agents at the conference got a scare on Friday when they were told they might have been caught in the sights of an RFID reader.
The reader, connected to a web camera, sniffed data from RFID-enabled ID cards and other documents carried by attendees in pockets and backpacks as they passed a table where the equipment was stationed in full view.
But an attacker wouldn’t need the name of a card holder to cause harm. In the case of employee access cards, a chip that contained only the employee’s card number could still be cloned to allow someone to impersonate the employee and gain access to his company or government office without knowing the employee’s name.
Patrick
Store data in your body without cyborg modification
Transferring files from one computer to another is a major pain. Even cloud-based storage like Dropbox is still irritatingly complicated. Now Pranav Mistry of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has the solution. He gets that what we really want is to just pick up stuff from one machine and put in the other, as we do with a physical object.
Mistry has designed a system to make this as simple as it could possibly be. “The user touches a data item they wish to copy from a device, conceptually saving it in the user’s body,” he says. “Next, the user touches the other device to which they want to paste the saved content.” The topic of the case study here was very misleading, although no ethical situations arise from this study the idea is very interesting and I hope one day such technology becomes real.
Jody
Pending blog update.
Zach
Pending blog update.
Ben
Pending blog update.
Brandon
Pending blog update.
Chris
Pending blog update.
hkpethics 
