The questions on whether or not States should legalize abortion has been a debatable issue among policymakers, scholars, and theorists as well, the same applies to the notion of mercy-killing or Euthanasia. Evidently, religious doctrines and existing codes of ethics forbid the ending of human life, from the point of conception to that of old age. To that end, States endorse laws that dictate the ideal punishments for murder; by that logic, even those who opt for suicide break the law but the fact that they are dead makes it impossible to have them serve a jail term. Thus said, this paper presents a rule-based and a virtue-based argument that argues for communities to consider the context of every dilemma before determining if cases of abortion and mercy killing are morally permissible.
First, it is imperative to understand that the question of whether or not a person ought to have the right to end the life of an unborn child or the one of an individual who has opted to die for one reason or another can beget two significant responses. On one hand, the pro-life forces base their arguments on religion which happen to be the foundations on which societies build their cultural norm; hence, a pro-life stand is permissible because it is acceptable within the existing confines of morality. On the other, the pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia agents reckon that when aborting, the woman is exercising her rights over her person and the fetus that is growing inside her body, the case of euthanasia is less complicated because the individual who dies makes the necessary choices.
Extensively, the first defense on the pro-abortion faction is apparent in the rule-based ethics that Phillipa Foot’s presents in The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect. According to the author, there is no guarantee that what communities consider as good deeds will beget results of the same quality; on the contrary, the results of good can be bad. Hence, while one may know the short-term outcomes of his or her actions, the long-term effects remain impossible to determine and for that reason, Foot provides an alternative solution. Apparently, both good and bad actions are morally permissible if they were the right thing to do at the point of execution and when any immoral result was beyond the control of the one responsible (Foot par.1). Expectedly, the Double Effect philosophy is applicable in the dilemmas posed by this paper as the actions are no longer the problem; instead, the questions of morality emerge in the conditions under which an action takes place. For instance, if a woman discovers that she has ovarian cancer, abortion would prove essential to save her life and in that sense, the conditions make the pregnancy termination acceptable. Similarly, if a man or woman is terminally ill and is in severe pain, euthanasia would become permissible. For anyone who argues that such an assertion lacks merit, does it make sense to put down an animal that is in constant pain only to leave a fellow human being to suffer? Of course not as the humans are predominantly superior to dogs, horses, and every other animal, and any form of consideration has to extend to men and women before passing down to animals. When the act of killing does not end at the point of death, where the terminally ill patient gets peace and the woman who terminates a pregnancy lives a fulfilling life, then abortion and euthanasia are permissible.
Another defense takes the form of the virtue-based ethics available in Hursthouse’s Normative Virtue Ethics. While the Doctrine of the Double Effect insists on the relevance of the results an action begets, Hursthouse’s answer to the ethical conundrum of abortion and euthanasia focuses on the morality of the act itself. In the views of the theorist, “an action is right if it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances”; hence, the solution lies in the path a righteous person would opt for when dealing with the dilemma (Hursthouse 646). Hence, if a moral individual would let a woman who has ovarian cancer carry a pregnancy to term despite the high chances of her death, then abortion becomes immoral. Similarly, is the virtuous man or woman would put down a horse after it breaks a leg but refuse to let a fellow human being out of his or her misery, then euthanasia is ethically impermissible. Now, in Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill defines a virtuous action as one that “brings the “greatest amount of good over bad for everyone affected by the act” (417). Hence, the given scenarios are flawed because there is no greater merit in forcing a cancerous woman to carry a pregnancy and it would be barbaric to subject a terminally ill patient to more pain.
In conclusion, the question of morality applies to both abortion and euthanasia because they deal with human life, albeit at different points of development. Thus, it is possible to determine if killing is justifiable by focusing on the morality of both the action[s] and the results of the same. In other words, if the context makes abortion and euthanasia morally permissible, then the results would be of the same nature. At the same time, in case the outcomes fail to meet the criteria set for virtue, the action remains permissible as long as the undesirable results were not intentional. Hence, if a woman dies while procuring an abortion and a terminally ill individual experiences pain because of a botched euthanasia, the actions remain moral since such results were unintentional.
Works Cited
Foot, Philippa. "Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect." n.d. <http://www2.econ.iastate.edu/classes/econ362/hallam/Readings/FootDoubleEffect.pdf>.
Hursthouse, Rosalind. "Normative Virtue Ethics." Ethical Theory An Anthology. Ed. Russ Shafer-Landau. 2nd. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013. 645-652. Print.
Mill, John Stuart. "Utilitarianism." Shafer-Landau, Russ. Ethical Theory An Anthology. Ed. Russ Shafer-Landau. 2nd. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2013. 417-422. Print.
