1. ETH501 Ethical Controversies on Life and Death

2. Meaning of Controversy
A controversial issue is one that generates disagreement. People often have different opinions on a matter. Eg: Rugby is a better sport than football. A controversial ethical issue is one that generates disagreement over what is right, wrong, or morally permissible. Eg: Testing cosmetics on animals.

3. Controversy on life and death
Controversies are divisive, and often hotly disputed in public. Regarding controversial ethical issues, arguably it is the issues of life and death that are the most disagreed upon and fiercely debated:
Why?
Mystery of and ignorance about life
Importance of the topic – “Thou shalt not kill”
Freedom from violence
They’re matters of LIFE and DEATH!!!!!!

4. Controversial Issues of Life and Death
This lecture will look at,
Ethical issues about life:
Abortion
Ethical issues about death:
Euthanasia
Capital Punishment
Other life/death issues include stem cell research, cloning, surrogate pregnancy and eugenics.

5. The big questions about life and death?
When does life start?
What is it that makes life sacred? Does it trump everything else?
Is all life to be valued equally?
Who has authority on matters of life and death: the individual, the family, the doctor, the state, or none of the above?

6. Issues about life - Abortion
The termination of a foetus before the pregnancy is carried to term. Those that argue for allowing abortion are called ‘pro-choice’, those against it, ‘pro-life’.

7. Issues about life - Abortion
The abortion debate is full of points to consider, and whether it is right or wrong can often rely on the details of each case. Abortion is presently illegal in Fiji , however it is legal in cases of: Incest Rape Threat to mother’s life

8. Abortion in Fiji – A historical view
Extract from Dr Robert Nicole’s thesis:
Abortion was not a new phenomenon and had been the subject of debate at the Bose Vakaturaga since In an 1880 report on the census, the Reverend Rooney (residing Wesleyan minister at Rewa) testified that abortion was common among Fijian women and could account for the low birth rate in the colony. Women, he claimed, procured abortion repeatedly and in succession. However, if many women were seeking abortion, only few were prosecuted.
There were many reasons other than resistance for women to procure abortion. Foremost among them was the fear, humiliation, and ostracism that mothers of illegitimate children faced from the village pious. The Bose of 1896 heard that some women who became pregnant outside marriage were much ashamed and desired to conceal their condition from their relatives. Frightened of being taken to court and punished, they resorted to different methods to procure abortion, or they arranged for the child to be born secretly in the bush, with the usual result that the child died. Women who had children outside marriage also automatically lost their membership of the Church. It was forbidden in some provinces for those who were in church fellowship to assist at the birth and in the nurturing of children born out of wedlock.

9. Early Pro-Life Quotes
“Now the word of the Lord came to me saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you: I appointed you a prophet of nations.’” Jeremiah – 1:5 But is this about abortion, or Jeremiah’s authority to speak with the Word of God?

10. (Letter of Barnabas (Circa 5AD-Circa 61AD)
Early Pro-life quotes
‘You shall not kill either the fetus by abortion or the new born’
(Letter of Barnabas (Circa 5AD-Circa 61AD)

11. Early Pro-Life Quotes
“Whpe off, O Pushan [Lord], the sins of him that practiseth abortion.“ (Sacred Books of the East, 42:165) - Vedas "As for induced abortion, the Hindu scriptures from the Vedic age down to the Smritis (100 B.C. to 100 A.D.) called it bhrunahatya ("foetus murder") or farbhahatya ("pregnancy destruction) and condemn it as a serious sin… According to Vishnu Smriti (c. 100 B.C. to 100 A.D.), 'The destruction of an embryo is tantamount to killing of holy or learned person.'" (Abortion in a Crowded World, p.44)
Kali the Goddess of time, change and destruction had aborted
foetuses as ear-rings – a grisly condemnation of abortion

12. What are the pro-life arguments?
The life of the foetus is sacred and must not be taken away. It is innocent and has a right to life.
Allowing abortion opens the door to questionable population control, selective breeding and compulsory euthanasia.
Abortion encourages casual sex outside of marriage.
Abortions being legalized put doctors in morally compromising positions
(The Doctor’s Hippocratic oath – “Do no harm”)

13. Sanctity of the foetus: The Religious Perspective
P1. What God forbids is always wrong. P2. God forbids the killing of anything with a soul. P3. All unborn children have souls. P4 Abortion involves the killing of unborn children (who have souls). C Abortion is always wrong

14. Sanctity of the foetus
Do we truly know when a soul enters into the body. Do people say “at conception” because that is actually when the soul becomes embodied, or is it because that’s the earliest it could happen? “Best make sure!” In a world of secular (non-religious) law, must we say life begins ‘here’ without talk of the soul?

15. When does human life start?
Aristotle: 3 types of being (vegetable, animal & human with soul)
At conception (when the ovum is fertilized)?
60-80 days after conception: ‘The Quickening’ (when ancients believed the soul enters the foetus)?
After 24 weeks (foetus is independent of mother)
At birth?
Have a look at this video – how does it try to convince us when life begins?

16. How to value human life? Against the Sanctity of life – Peter Singer
P 1: A person is given rights because of their reason, self-awareness, moral autonomy or capacity for certain pleasures or pains (human friendship)
P 2: A human foetus does not possess reason, self-awareness, moral autonomy or such capacities.
P 3: Therefore a foetus does not possess the same rights as a person.
“We should accord the life of a foetus no greater value that the life of a non-human animal i.e. similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness and capacity to feel. Not an autonomous being, cannot make choices.
Since no foetus is a person, no foetus has the same claim to life as a person.”
The extent to which a foetus can experience life is weighed against the freedom of the mother. This is a utilitarian argument!

17. Sanctity of foetus
One rebuttal often given to Singer’s valuing persons on capacity is that a foetus is a ‘potential’ human being. How far does this go back? Why simply back to fertilisation! How long must we be respectful of life? Womb to the Tomb? Sperm to the Worm? Erection to the Resurrection?!!!

18. First step in the wrong direction?
A worry for Pro-Lifers is that abortion, in devaluing life to a matter of choice, means that increasingly people can put anything above the life of the foetus. For example, we may choose to abort in order to select the gender, to get a university education, keep one’s figure, to go have sex without a condom, or indeed population control.

19. Case-Study – China One child policy
In China, due to population controls, one couple is only allowed one child – unless they pay an additional fine.
Feng Jianmei (picture above) and her husband could not pay $6,000 in fines for violating China's one-child policy. In June, when she was seven months pregnant, local officials abducted her and forced her to have an abortion, her family says. The case has provoked widespread outrage.
Source:

20. Problems with the slippery slope
This argument is a slippery slope argument.
It says “if we let A happen, B is more likely to happen too, and as B is bad, we must not do A”.
The problem with this is that we are not judging issues on their own merits.
Furthermore, where do we stop? Driving a car is more likely to lead to car accidents. Should we then not drive?!

21. Pro-life stance
In a world properly set up to help potential mothers in difficult
circumstances, would we still need abortion?

22. Pro-life stance – Final recap
The foetus is a human person at the time of conception; killing an innocent human being is wrong
A foetus is entitled to fundamental human rights (the right to live); we must protect it
The state should override a woman's decision to have an abortion and require her to continue her pregnancy to childbirth
A human life should not be taken (against religious teachings)

23. The pro-freedom/choice argument
The State should not interfere
A woman should be free to decide whether or not to have an abortion on two grounds:
1) The foetus is part of a woman’s body until it is capable of independent life
2) That giving birth to children should be seen in terms of the overall situation in which a woman finds herself

24. Abortion and the Violinist
“You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist's circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. [If he is unplugged from you now, he will die; but] in nine months he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”. J.J Thompson, “A Defense of Abortion” (1971) Right to Life or Right to use another’s body for 9 months in order to live.

25. US Supreme Court: Roe vrs Wade
In nearly any article on abortion, you may hear about Roe Vrs. Wade. This was a pivotal moment in 1973 where the US Supreme Court ruled in favour of abortion rights for women in the United States. The United States went from the strongest laws against abortion in the modern world, to the most liberal at the fall of a judge’s hammer.

26. Roe Versus Wade
The ruling came after a 25-year-old single woman, Norma McCorvey under the pseudonym "Jane Roe", challenged the criminal abortion laws in Texas that forbade abortion as unconstitutional except in cases where the mother's life was in danger.
Ms McCorvey first filed the case in She was pregnant with her third child and claimed that she had been raped. But the case was rejected and she was forced to give birth.
The ruling came after a 25-year-old single woman, Norma McCorvey under the pseudonym "Jane Roe", challenged the criminal abortion laws in Texas that forbade abortion as unconstitutional except in cases where the mother's life was in danger.
Ms McCorvey first filed the case in She was pregnant with her third child and claimed that she had been raped. But the case was rejected and she was forced to give birth.

27. Is it a choice versus life matter?
Abortions occur in many different situations, is the choice/life, or religious framing of the issue or constructive?
The pro-choice clergyman– situation ethics
Severe disabilities (child or mother)
Instances of rape or incest
Born into an abusive household
Poverty, education, the criminalization of women.
Dangers of the extremist point of view
Do we need to re-think the entire way this debate is framed? What’s wrong with speaking about ‘rights’?

28. The problem with a ‘rights’ discourse
Often when people get trapped in an argument with either side using “rights” to
defend their position we simply get deadlock, and no one side willing to compromise
or even listen reasonably to the other side of the argument.

29. A feminist perspective – What if men got pregnant?
Do you think we would have different laws regarding abortion if it was men who became pregnant instead of women? How may we view the controls placed on women in other parts of society as informing government policy regarding access to abortion for women?
Arnold Schwarzneggar as a mum, in the
film, Junior ( 1994).

30. Think questions:
Do women have the right to abort unwanted pregnancies?
Or, is the state entitled (or ethically required) to prohibit deliberate abortion?
Should some abortions be permitted & others not?
Should abortion be legal, even if it is sometimes, or always, morally wrong?

31. Issues of Death - Euthanasia
Greek (eu) good & (thantos) death, mercy killing.
‘Where one person, A, ends the life of another person, B, for the sake of B’ (Kuhse, 294)

32. Euthanasia Chantal Sebire(1955-2008)

33. ArunaShaunbaug
7 March India's Supreme Court has rejected a plea to end the life of a woman who has been in a vegetative state since 1973.
ArunaShanbaug suffered severe brain damage and has been paralysed since a brutal rape in 1973.
But the court said the medical evidence suggested that she should live.
"Her teeth had decayed causing her immense pain. Food was completely mashed and given in semi-solid form. She choked on liquids."
But hospital authorities told the court that Ms Shanbaug "accepts food in normal course and responds by facial expressions" and responds to "commands intermittently by making sounds".

34. Some types of Euthanasia:
1.Voluntary euthanasia:
when the patient freely chooses to die at the time of the illness or by signing a ‘living will’ before (giving consent)
2. Non-voluntary euthanasia:
when the patient cannot choose & the decision is made by someone else

35. 1. Active/positive euthanasia
where a lethal injection is administered by A to end B’s life (physician-assisted suicide)

36. 2. Passive/negative euthanasia
Withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, (medication, respirator) - allowing death to occur, letting nature take its course)
Giving a patient large doses of morphine to control pain

37. Think question:
Is passive euthanasia less controversial (or more acceptable) than active euthanasia?
Is killing actively worse than letting die?
If a doctor lets a patient die, for humane reasons, he is in the same moral position as if he had given the patient a lethal injection for humane reasons

38. Dilemma? Dr Jack Kervokian – American Pathologist
claims to have assisted at least 130 patients to that end.
He famously said that "dying is not a crime."[4]
Between 1999 and 2007, Kevorkian served eight years of a 10-to-25-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. He was released on parole on June 1, 2006, due to good behavior.

39. Arguments for euthanasia
1. Choice: freedom/right to choose
2. Quality of life: physical pain & emotional pain to patient &family
3. Economic costs & human resources: shortage of hospital beds & staff – burden to keep terminally ill patients alive, better to use these resources for curable aliments

40. Tang Siu-pun, also known as Ah Bun, wants the right to decide whether he might live or die.
But he has never talked it over with his family - showing how strong the taboo is on talking about death, and individual choice, in Chinese and most other Asian cultures
Between every few words, he takes a breath, thanks to a machine strapped to his body.
It gives his strong views on life and death an added poignancy, each phrase interjected by a breath.
"I could not do what I want. I must be helped to live. Even going to toilet. I was ashamed, shame on my life. I was very confused. But I was conscious.
"If I was still alive I must, I must be helped by others. Until I die. I didn't want to have this life. What can I do. Only euthanasia.
23 September 2009, Hong Kong

41. Dying with dignity?

42. Debate Against Euthanasia
What the supporters of euthanasia are really arguing for is not the right to die with dignity, but the right to be killed. They are demanding of doctors that they become killers. Archbishop Peter Smith (Daily Telegraph: 19/12/2004) Euthanasia is a grave violation of the law of God, since it is the deliberate and morally unacceptable killing of a human person. Pope John Paul II: Evangelium Vitae, 1995

44. Arguments against euthanasia
1. It is murder or suicide!
2. It is morally unacceptable; Euthanasia weakens society's respect for the sanctity of life
3. Sometimes people consent under pressure (to release their families of financial burden) but don’t really want to die; leads to killing of people who are thought to be undesirable
4. It is against religious teachings
5. Real-life stories

45. Real life stories
Polish man Jan Grzebski, who was diagnosed with a coma but 'woke up' after 19 years. Photograph: Monika Kaczynska/EPA
In 1988 Jan Grzebski, a Polish railway worker, fell in front of a train and was diagnosed as being in a coma. In 2007, he "woke up" to learn the iron curtain had fallen and he had gained 11 grandchildren. Doctors discovered he had been conscious throughout.

46. Think questions: 1) Should euthanasia be legalized?
2) If yes, can legalized euthanasia open the door for elderly people to be quietly disposed of against their will?
3) And may an older person feel pressured to die because they are a burden to their relatives?
4) What would a utilitarian say? What would a deontologist do?

47. Issues of death: Capital punishment
Death sentences for capital offences (for example, murder); putting a condemned person to death.
Still legal in some countries, e.g. Singapore, China, United States
Some methods: hanging, firing squad, electric chair, lethal injection.
This next video shows author Dennis Prager giving his ‘irrefutable’ argument for Capital Punishment. Do you agree?

48. Capital Punishment – Case Studies
Troy Davis: International Outrage (2011)
Amid angry protests, Georgia inmate Troy Davis was put to death on Sept. 21, 2011 for the 1989 shooting of a police officer.
Davis' case received national and international attention because of concerns about witness testimony. Seven of nine eyewitnesses who implicated Davis in the shooting later recanted their testimony, and others say that the man who originally implicated Davis was actually the killer. Public figures as diverse as death penalty opponent former President Jimmy Carter and conservative U.S. representative Bob Barr of Georgia called for reconsideration of Davis' sentence, but on Sept. 20, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to grant him clemency. The next day, a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court failed

49. Capital Punishment – Case Studies
Teresa Lewis: A Woman on Death Row (2010)
The first woman to die by lethal injection in the state of Virginia, Teresa Lewis was convicted of paying to have her husband and stepson murdered in Her case drew outcry, because testing had pegged Lewis' IQ at 72, just two points above that classified as intellectually disabled. Lewis' attorneys advised her to plead guilty in hopes of leniency, but she instead received the death penalty. The two hitmen who killed her husband and stepson received life sentences.
Her supporters, among them legal novelist John Grisham, sent thousands of appeals for clemency to Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, to no avail. Lewis was executed on Sept. 23, 2010

50. Hanging & firing squad

51. Electric chair & lethal injection

52. Since 1976, 22 juvenile offenders have been executed in America

53. The execution of Sadam Hussein took place on December 30, 2006.
He was sentenced to death by hanging, after being found guilty and convicted of crimes against humanity by the Iraqi Special Tribunal for the murder of 148 Iraqi Shi'ites in the town of Dujail in 1982, in retaliation for an assassination attempt against him
How may the execution of Saddam Hussein
differ from the execution of normal murderers?

54. Deaths of Dictators
Saddam was tried and executed. Gaddafi was beaten to death on the streets. However dead is dead, and they both paid for their crimes with their lives. Is there an ethical difference between these two instances of killing?

55. Arguments for capital punishment
1) Incapacitation of the criminal: capital punishment permanently removes the worst criminals from society making the world a safer place for the rest of us.
2) Retribution: execution is a very real punishment rather than some form of ‘rehabilitative’ treatment; the criminal is made to suffer in proportion to the offence (an eye for an eye)

56. Arguments for capital punishment
Philosopher and theologian Thomas Aquinas ca – 7 March 1274) was a Italian monk of the Catholic Church and has contributed a great deal modern day philosophy and theology.
Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting [undermining] it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good… it may be justifiable to kill a sinner just as it is to kill a beast, for, as Aristotle points out, an evil man is worse than a beast and more harmful.
Thomas Aquinas

57. Arguments against capital punishment
An innocent person may be condemned to death (action not reversible)
Effect upon family of sentenced person leading up to the date of death
Criminals have feelings too (Singapore hung two 18 year-old girls for drug-trafficking in 1995 & China shot a girl for the same offence in 1998)
There is no humane way of putting a person to death
The effect on the executioner?
Does killing people, regardless of their crimes, set a bad example to society?
Is it not against our fundamental Human Rights?!

58. Is capital punishment ethically/morally acceptable?
Think questions:
Is capital punishment ethically/morally acceptable?
Which would you support: capital punishment or life without parole?

59. The Utilitarian approach?
Prem 1: The practice of capital punishment, involves the suffering of one murderer, and a wider benefit to society – free from paying for a life spent in prison. Prem 2: The right thing is that which provides the greatest happiness for the greatest number. Prem 3: On balance, its appears that the greatest net happiness is provided by killing the murderer. Conc: The right thing to do is to kill the criminal. Problems: Quality of happiness (life vrs. money), the long term consequences of killing prisoners on society?

60. A Deontological approach?
Prem 1: No matter what, we have a moral duty not to treat people as means-to-an-ends. Prem 2: In killing murderers, we are using their deaths as a means to not paying the costs of their prison time. Prem 3: We have a duty not to kill murderers simply to save money for wider society. Conc: Capital punishment is wrong. Problems: In thinking of moral autonomy (why we must respect others) and the categorical imperative – has not the murderer in fact asked for his own execution by virtue of his deed?

61. A Virtue Theory approach?
Prem 1: In matters of delivering justice, the relevant virtues are fairness, moral leadership and consistency with the law. Prem 2: Capital punishment may be fair, but offers no moral leadership, and is inconsistent with a law based on human rights. Prem 3: The right act is the act that involves the same virtues as those possessed by the person of good character when performing that act. Prem 4: The act of capital punishment does not hold the virtues of a person of good character delivering justice. Conc. Therefore capital punishment is wrong. Problems – Have I been to selective in my virtues. Are all situations the same? Are not all these approaches (utilitarian/deontology/virtue theory to broad given the many different scenarios this issues refer too?: