The Role of the Profession in End-Life Decisions: between patient?s autonomy and state regulation

EDUARDO RIVERA LÓPEZ

Edinburgo

Congreso; 13th World Congress of the International Association of Bioethics; 2016

International Association of Bioethics

The discussion on medically assisted death (active euthanasia and assisted suicide) (MAD) has mostly been carried out at two levels: the purely moral and the ethical-legal one. From the first perspective, the question is about the moral justification of the act of killing (or assisting the death of) a terminally ill patient. From the second, the question is whether such kind of act should (or should not) be legally allowed. The role of the medical profession and its ethical duties as collective agent has been less discussed in connection to MAD, except to argue against legalization with arguments such as that professional ethics, since Hippocrates, prohibits doctors to kill, that the medical profession is not in the business of killing, and similar ones. My purpose in this paper is to argue that, in many cases of terminally ill patients, there are ethical reasons to legalize MAD, which are based on professional duties toward those patients. I want to explore the idea that medicine (as an institutional agent) bears a specific kind of responsibility for harms related to medical treatment. Once medical treatment has exhausted its capacity to cure, doctors are (at least in many cases) not entitled to just ?withdraw? from a patient?s life and reaffirm the sacred principle of not killing. Terminally ill patients have a right to MAD against doctors, not only because their condition is, all things considered, harmful for them, but also because it is medicine that, to some extent, has contributed (even if not intentionally) to place them in this particular and unfortunate situation. MAD may, at least in many cases, be the only way to stop an ongoing harm for which the medical profession bears a kind of ?moral strict liability?.