The Ethics of Life and Death Argument 2022

The Ethics of Life and Death
1. Please define in several sentences each and your own words, what you believe to be a
central moral issue within each of these ethical issues: bioethics, abortion,
euthanasia and capital punishment.
Bioethics can be defined as the study of ethical issues that arise from advancements in
medicine and biology; this advancement includes specific biological and medical procedures
treatments and technologies, for instance, genetic engineering and organ transplant.
Abortion can be defined to mean the act of ending a pregnancy by removing the fetus or
the embryo from the uterus so that it does not result in the birth of a child.
Euthanasia can be explained as merciful killing or putting to death a person through a
painless method and allowing them to die by withholding some medical care because of the
conditions they are in, which could be very painful or they have an incurable disease.
Capital punishment is a practice where a person is killed by the state or the country as a
punishment for a crime when the court has convicted the person for the death penalty. Capital
punishment denotes the most severe punishment that could be carried out on people who
committed crimes the community considered deserving of the punishment, such as murder,
sedition or breaking moral codes of the religion. Its most significant outcome is meant to be the
deterrent of crime by inflicting punishments that will serve as a lesson to the perpetrators and the
society.
2. State which of these issues is MOST interesting to you AND what your own position
on it is, and explain which ethics theory (from our first two discussions) would most
support your position and why.