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Letters
Letters
Euthanasia and Taboos • Nietzsche’s Madness • Logic is Above Gender • Stoics and Gladiators • Boxers & Philosophers • Boxers & Philosophers • Sports and Deviance • Change or Progress in Sport • Cheat to Win?
Euthanasia and Taboos
DEAR EDITOR: Joachim Jung (PN March 03) and Richard Taylor (PN May 03) have both missed the point.
The central argument made by my original article against euthanasia (PN March 03) was that killing cannot be a form of medical therapy, because being alive is not, in itself, a form of medical problem. Therefore, I argued, it can’t ever be right to aim at the patient’s death directly, even if it sometimes permissible to allow the patient’s death indirectly. And so we shouldn’t allow ourselves to become morbidly obsessed with the option of killing terminal patients, like so much of the present rather unsavoury debate about euthanasia (including, I have to say, Dr Jung’s own ghoulish piece). Instead, we should attend to the wide variety of other options that are more genuinely in the interests of terminal patients, most of which go under the name of palliative care.
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