PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning: End of Life Medical Issues

End of Life Medical Issues
Student’s Name
PHI 208 Ethics and Moral Reasoning
Prof. Heraclitus of Ephesus
April 8, 2017
Introduction
When making end of life decisions who should have more authority over the decision making process, the person dying or his or her family members? When a person reaches that stage where he or she is aware that the last days are numbered, important decisions are inevitable. As is usually the case these decisions must be made not only by the person terminally ill but also by the people who care for them. These questions may include anything from the most minute of details to the highly complex. Of these questions, probably the most challenging would have to be the medical end of life decisions or medical decisions that usually have convoluted psychosocial aspects, developments and costs to both the person dying and to those people who care about them. With no doubt all these end of life questions ideally are for the liberation of suffering with special consideration to the values and beliefs of both the terminally ill person and his or her family. In this regard, we see a possible conflict because more often than not values and priorities may clash among individuals concerned, to make things more complicated, values and beliefs may change especially in the emotionally, mentally, physically stressful situation of pending death. Ultimately, my position is that the decision for addressing end of life issues should come from the person who is facing near the end of his or her life journey, unless there is evidence to show that the person is in no way capable of making sound, psychologically healthy decisions. This should always be the case, because even –or especially so- at the end of an individual’s life the person should feel that he or she has the control over his or her life. The overall aim and goal of this paper is to tackle to possible moral and ethical conflict when making end of life medical decisions, primarily focusing on who should get the most impact when it comes to making final decisions. In this paper, the moral challenges of the situation will be presented and confronted in the virtue ethics perspective with references made on the utilitarian perspective, Kant’s moral ethics and the idea of making decisions because it will make the best outcome or consequence.
Explanation and Demonstration of Moral Reasoning
In normative ethics, the virtue ethics perspective is different from the views of deontology where the emphasis is on an individual’s roles or duties, and virtue ethics is also distinguished from the teachings of moral perspective of consequentialism that favors the consequences of one’s actions. Virtue ethics’ main focus is on the virtue and moral character of an individual, which I think would best address the question as to who should have the most impact in end of life decision making.
Virtue comes from the core being of an individual and is a temperament or a character of an individual that is well-welded into his humanity. To be able to have virtue is to be able to be in touch with your inner being and the ability to make decisions based on not only what is dictated by society or consequences of actions but by having t...