Kindness and the Ethics of Physician-Assisted Suicide

In this paper I explain four features of kindness by examining how four artworks depict them: Giotto di Bondone’s painting of St. Francis of Assisi giving his robe to a beggar, the character Bishop Charles-Francois Myriel in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, the person Adam in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It, and the role of Sonya Semyonovna Marmeladov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. These four examples describe kindness as supererogatory, altruistic, a belief about how the world ought to be, and the possibility of unction. With this understanding of kindness, I examine the most likely moral motives of the physician in physician-assisted suicide and find that the practice does not display the four characteristics of kindness but rather displays the emotion (though it may be sincere) of condescending pity towards the unfortunate people who deem their lives are devoid of the value to live.

Overlooked Costs of Legalizing Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia

Human beings are naturally inhibited with regard to intentionally ending their lives and those of innocent others; human beings naturally love their lives and those of others, and human beings naturally regard human lives as having inalienable worth that is not diminished by or lost by an individual’s circumstances or condition. What do all these natural human proclivities have in common?

Doctors and the Gillick Case

In April this year a letter to the Prime Minister was handed in at 10, Downing Street from some of Britain’s top ‘agony aunts’. Signatories included Katie Boyle, Claire Rayner, Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn. They urged the Government not to accede to pressure to rescind the existing guidelines published by the Department of Health and Social Security whereby doctors can provide contraceptive a device without the knowledge of the parents to girls under 16.