Chapter 43 Chapter Summary

Rachels argues that once the decision has been made to cease treatment of a terminally ill patient, active euthanasia (mercy killing) is often more consistent than is passive euthanasia (allowing the patient to die) with the humanitarian impulse not to prolong the patient’s life. It is a “patently cruel” doctrine that says a doctor must stand by as someone suffers a slow and painful death when it would be possible to end that person’s life quickly and painlessly. The distinction between active and passive euthanasia seems to be rooted in the belief that it is morally worse to kill someone than to let him die. Rachels attempts to show that this belief is mistaken by imagining a situation in which letting a child die would be just as reprehensible as actively killing him. In itself, killing someone is not any worse than letting him die, which means that, contrary to the official 1973 statement of the American Medical Association on medical ethics, active euthanasia is not any worse than passive euthanasia.