Euthanasia is the practice of ending the life of a patient to limit the patient’s suffering. The patient in question would typically be terminally ill or experiencing great pain and suffering.

DNR for any untreatable or incurable condition before an established death process is a form of passive euthanasia.

In situations regarding euthanasia, act-utilitarianism argues that the action of ending a patient’s life would be permissible if, and only if, the positive outcomes of the situation outweigh the negative consequences.

If there were a way to improve their physical well being, Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics would support this. A patient contemplating euthanasia could consider the implications of Aristotle’s virtue of courage – the ‘Golden Mean’ between cowardice and foolhardiness.

Ethical problems of euthanasia

• Why euthanasia should be allowed. Those in favour of euthanasia argue that a civilised society should allow people to die in dignity and without pain, and should allow others to help them do so if they cannot manage it on their own.
• Why euthanasia should be forbidden.
• The legal position.
• Changing attitudes.

Virtue ethics is person rather than action based: it looks at the virtue or moral character of the person carrying out an action, rather than at ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of particular actions. A good person is someone who lives virtuously – who possesses and lives the virtues.

situational ethics

In situation ethics, right and wrong depend upon the situation. So a person who practices situation ethics approaches ethical problems with some general moral principles rather than a rigorous set of ethical laws and is prepared to give up even those principles if doing so will lead to a greater good.

These then are his “four working principles”: pragmatism, relativism, positivism and personalism.

Moral absolutism is the belief there are universal ethical standards that apply to every situation. It argues that there are universal moral truths relevant across all contexts and all people. These truths can be grounded in sources like law, rationality, human nature, or religion.

Theoretical ethics—or ethical theory—is the systematic effort to understand moral concepts and justify moral principles and theories. Applied ethics deals with controversial moral problems, such as questions about the morality of abortion, premarital sex, capital punishment, euthanasia, and animal rights.

Ethical relativism is the theory that holds that morality is relative to the norms of one’s culture. That is, whether an action is right or wrong depends on the moral norms of the society in which it is practiced. The same action may be morally right in one society but be morally wrong in another.

The problem with individual moral relativism is that it lacks a concept of guiding principles of right or wrong. “One of the points of morality is to guide our lives, tell us what to do, what to desire, what to object to, what character qualities to develop and which ones not to develop,” said Jensen.

The disadvantage of ethical relativism is that truth, right and wrong, and justice are all relative. Just because a group of people think that something is right does not make it so. Slavery is a good example of this. In this, relativism would be inconsistent, since it would deny beliefs of absolute values.

Ethical (Moral) Relativism There are two general forms of Ethical Relativism: Subjectivism – holds that each individual moral agent is the arbiter of obligation. Conventionalism – holds that moral assessment is determined by the agreement of a society (however that is constured).

Since the opposite of “relative” is “absolute,” the opposite of “relativism” seems to be “absolutism”, a word that usually connotes “authoritarianism” or “dogmatism”.

roughly put

Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that facts in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism.

Relativists often do claim that an action/judgment etc. is morally required of a person. For example, if a person believes that abortion is morally wrong, then it IS wrong — for her. In other words, it would be morally wrong for Susan to have an abortion if Susan believed that abortion is always morally wrong.

Relativism is Self-Refuting. A doctrine is self-refuting if its truth implies its falsehood. Relativism asserts that the truth-value of a statement is always relative to some particular standpoint. This implies that the same statement can be both true and false.

What is ontological relativism? Ontology is that part of philosophy which investigates the fundamental structures of the world and the fundamental kinds of things that exist. His suggestion was that ontology has to do with articulating the nature of reality as known to human cognition, not as it is in itself.

But unlike ethical non-cognitivism, moral relativism does not deny that moral claims can be true; it only denies that they can be made true by some objective, trans-cultural moral order. It allows them to be true in the humbler, relativistic sense of being rationally acceptable from a particular cultural vantage point.

Cultural Relativism says, in effect, that there is no such thing as universal truth in ethics; there are only the various cultural codes, and nothing more. Cultural Relativism challenges our belief in the objectivity and universality of moral truth.

Only Human Beings Can Act Morally. Another reason for giving stronger preference to the interests of human beings is that only human beings can act morally. This is considered to be important because beings that can act morally are required to sacrifice their interests for the sake of others.