Question

QUESTION 4

1. Discuss the sanctity of life versus the quality of life debate as presented by Peter Singer. Your answer should demonstrate a solid awareness of the information presented in the text. Be as clear and specific as you can.

Answer 1

sanctity-of-life”has played an important ideological role in public controversy about abortion and euthanasia in the United States of America. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan proclaimed January 22—the anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade”(1973) decision as the first “National Sanctity of Human Life Day. philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer (1994,1999), and his colleague Helga Kuhse (1987) led the opposition against so-called “sanctity-of-life ethics”and predicted the rise of the new quality-of-life ethic with regard to questions of abortion and end-of-life decision- making. In response, the Roman Catholic theologian Donald Demarco has called Singer an “Architect of the Culture of Death”(2003),A second blow to the sanctity-of-life view has been the revelation that it is standard practice in many major public hospitals to refrain from providing necessary life-saving treatment to certain patients. Although this practice applies to geriatric patients and those suffering from terminal illness, the most publicized and al'so the potentially most significant cases have been severely defective newborns. In Britain, Dr John Lorber1 has quite candidly described his method of selecting which babies suffering from spina bifida should be given active treatment, and he has indicated, with equal candor, that in his view the best possible outcome for those not selected is an early deathThe decision not to treat an infant with Down's syndrome has also been publicized. In April 1982, in Bloomington, Indiana, the parents of an infant with Down's syndrome and in need of corrective surgery refused permission for the surgery to be performed. Few details are available because the court ordered the records sealed, but the court refused to intervene or to take the child out of his parents' custody.2 Although many doctors would sharply distinguish the active termination of life from a decisionnot to treat a patient for whom the foreseen outcome of this decision is the death of the patient, the distinction is a tenuous one, and the claim that it carries moral weight has been rejected by several academic philosophers. Hence, the acceptance of nontreatment in these situations is rightly perceived as a further threat to the sanctity-of-life view. Some respond to this situation with a sense of alarm at the erosion of our traditional ethical standards. We already have, these people tell us, one foot on the slippery slope that will lead to active euthanasia, then to the elimination of the mentally feeble and of the socially undesirable, and finally to all the atrocities of the Nazi era. To pull back from this abyss, we must renew our commitment to the most scrupulous respect for all human life, irrespective of its quality.

“It is absolutely prohibited either intentionally to kill a patient or intentionally to let a patient die, and to base decisions relating to the prolongation or shortening of human life on considerations of its quality or kind.Then she argues that medical practitioners and also the Vatican’s Declaration of Euthanasia make implicit use of quality-of-life considerations and deny any difference between killing and letting die when proposing “to refrain from preventing death”. In consequence, says Kuhse, they do not assert the “absolute,”but only a “modified”type of the “sanctity-of-life doctrine”which leads, however, to its complete theoretical inconsistency. Thus the focus of her book questions the distinction between killing and letting die, and tries to show that thelatter is an intentional act, which implicitly relies on quality-of-life judgments. Since her study on the “sanctity-of-life doctrine,”she has, with other bioethicists such as Peter Singer,promoted the program of “unsanctifying human life in order to drop “the ‘sanctity-of-life’doctrine and work out a quality-of-life ethic instead—a contradistinction which Warren Reich early critized as “a misleading dichotomy”. Before examining sanctity-of-life versus quality-of-life with regard to end-of-life decision-making issues, it is necessary to understand how far the idea of sanctity-of-life is actually correctly determined to mean absolute inviolability of physical human life. To resolve some of this confusion, the meaning of the theological idea sanctity-of-life needs to be illuminated in order to get rid of naturalistic misunderstandings. Otherwise endless lamentations about the ”extreme vagueness of the sanctity-of-life doctrine already and fruitless “straw man”-debates will continue burdening bioethical considerations. Is there, then, a plausible non-naturalistic history of the idea of sanctity-of-life.