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Double Effect And Ethical End-Of-Life Care: Assessing The Benefits And Burdens Of Lethal Treatment (Or Lack Thereof), Heidi Giebel
Double Effect And Ethical End-Of-Life Care: Assessing The Benefits And Burdens Of Lethal Treatment (Or Lack Thereof), Heidi Giebel
Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics
Given the wide the range of legally available options for end-of-life care in recent decades: from aggressive, even experimental, treatment to active euthanasia, our ethical analysis struggles to keep pace with technology and law. In this essay I show that the principle of double effect (PDE) remains, and will continue to be, a useful tool for ethical analysis of end-of-life care. According to PDE, an agent may ethically perform an act that s/he foresees will have a significant bad effect (e.g., death) in addition to a good effect (e.g., pain relief) only if s/he does not intend the bad effect, …