End of Life Medical Issues (Week One)

• Do people have a right to end their lives whenever they choose to?
• Can people be mistaken about whether their life has value and ought to be ended?
• Does the answer to this question affect the answer to the first question?
• Can we set polices that determine in each case what the value of a human life is and when it should or should not be ended?
• Does the answer to this question affect the answer to the first question?
• Does it make a difference whether a person's life is ended by an act of active killing, or whether it is simply allowed to expire?
• Does it make a difference whether the agent (i.e., the person causing the death), in either case, is the person himself or herself or someone else (such as a doctor)?
• Is there a limit to the amount of resources we should allocate toward the preservation of a life in the face of limited resources for other healthcare needs?
• Considering lives that are on the brink of death, under what circumstances (if any) would it be ethically wrong to prolong that life?

• Under what circumstances (if any) would it be ethically required to prolong that life?
• Under what circumstances (if any) would it be ethically required to end that life?

req.

The exercise must be at least 400 words in length (excluding title and reference pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. Be sure to including a title page and reference page as necessary. Your exercise must be organized to address each of the five parts below. Number each part accordingly.

1. Part One: Thesis Statement Use the Thesis Generator in the Ashford Writing Center to construct a thesis statement that articulates your position on the question as you have defined it. This will likely be the last thing you do in this exercise, but your thesis should be placed at the top of the first page after the title page.
   Your thesis should clearly state your position and provide a concise statement of the primary reason(s) drawn from the three issues you raise in Part Two. For example, having identified three important issues that need to be considered, you may find that two of them support your view, and while one may present a challenge to it, that challenge can be overcome.
2. Part Two: Provide a Brief Introduction to the Topic Your introduction must make clear to the reader exactly what ethical problem or question you are addressing within this topic, and what you consider to be the boundaries of the question.
   For example, a paper on criminal punishment might consider whether capital punishment should be used as punishment for certain types of crime, or it might consider the broader question of whether the criminal justice system should favor retribution over rehabilitation. If you were writing on this topic, you would need to specify which of these (or some other) specific question you intend to discuss. (Note: You may not write on criminal punishment, this is just an example. More examples are given in the "Notes and Advice" section.) You should aim to focus your question as narrowly as possible.
   The final sentence of this paragraph should provide a brief summary of the three ethically significant issues pertaining to this question that you intend to address.
3. Parts Three, Four, and Five: Explain Three Ethically Significant Issues Pertaining to This Question An "ethically significant issue" is a feature of the topic and circumstances that must be taken into account when reasoning about the question. For example, if you were writing on criminal punishment and focusing on the question of whether drug users should be imprisoned, ethically significant issues might include the monetary costs, the social costs, the impact on the person, the effect on the drug trade, and so on. And each of these, in turn, would have sub-issues, negative and positive sides, etc. Your task is to be as specific as you can in explaining the ethically significant issue. See the Instructor Guidance for further information.
   The first sentence of each paragraph must be a topic sentence that clearly states what issue you will be considering. The remainder of the paragraph should address the relevance and import of the ethically significant feature of the situation. Each paragraph should be focused on a distinct issue.