Should Pas Be Legalized - 3599 Words

Introduction In this essay I will try to show why PAS should be legalized. I will do this by first analyzing the value we place in human lives in order to show why in some cases, â€Å"ending someone’s life† should be considered a right action. If it is the case that some cases â€Å"ending someone’s life† is the right action, we would have a positive reason to believe that PAS should be legalized. However, there are some who believe that PAS should not be legalized, even if in some cases assisted suicide might be the right course of action, because legalizing PAS would lead to many unpleasant consequences. In the second section of this essay, I will attempt to respond to these concerns by providing empirical data which seems to show that many†¦show more content†¦Even if in such cases it seems obvious that this person’s life will contain more evil than good if saved, we would not say that someone who saves this person’s life is doing no service by recuing him from death (Foot 1977). This hypothetical situation seems to show that we still regard a live with more evil than good as valuable, indicating that there is an aspect of life that we regard as a good in and of itself. However, we should not be inclined to conclude the fact that life is good in of itself implies that it is always better to live than to die in any circumstance. In the next section I will try to show how it can be the case that in some circumstance it is better to die than to live, even if life is good in and of itself. b) Are all lives good? Although life is good in and of itself, there are circumstances where we justifiably believe that it is better for one to die than to live. Suppose, for instance, that a man were being tortured to death, but he is given a drug to delay his death and prolong his suffering. In such cases we seem to justifiably believe that it is better for him to die early than his life to be prolonged with more suffering. â€Å"It seemed that life was a good in its own right; yet pain seems to be an evil with equal status and could therefore make life not a good after all† (Foot 1977). In other words, although life is good in and of itself, a substantial amount of pain as a result of