Assisted Suicide - 6

Assisted Suicide
Terry Morgan
PHI200
Amy Glidewell
December 6, 2011

ASSISTED SUICIDE
Philosophers are always trying to get a grip on death and always failing. Anthropologists and social historians are likely to better than philosophers in their efforts to characterize death, insofar as they can investigate the many faces of death in different culture contexts. Death in battle may be heroic; death in youth may be tragic; death in old age benign. In different times and different cultures death means very different things. Yet all these so call meanings of death are more precisely identified as different social practices and associations surrounding death. Death itself is an event that exceeds our human capacity to wrest meaning from occurrences in the world. Strangely in our world death is also elusively yet absolutely not of our world. Every one of us fears the image of a dying love one stripped of dignity and trapped in a suffering body. To end the agonizing discomfort, of the love one in excruciating pain, we might second guest our ethical beliefs or question the religious aspects of life. In the article, “Confronting Physician Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia: My Father’s Death” written by Susan M. Wolf, she is face with this life changing dilemma.
People all over the world pled to be allowed to die because of their illness. Sometime they ask for help or beseech others to end their existence. Much is said in our day regarding one’s independence or freedom as of the will or one’s actions and the right of every individual to be master of his or her own destiny (Battin, Rhodes, Silvers 1998). No person enjoys the rights over another person life including doctors. Our religious heritage teaches us that God is the creator of man and that he is the author of life and death. It is extremely easy to lose sight of that verity, since, in the ordinary course of events, a person is in grueling pain and or terminally ill or involved in decision making of the love one... [continues]

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