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It is absolutely not ethical. Doctors are instructed by the AMA that medical euthanasia is an act in which one must never partake. Those who do lose their license.

For the most part, I agree with Eli. However, what about those patients suffering from a debilitating disease, waiting to die? They are suffering endlessly…If they are mentally competent to request death, why not put them out of their suffering?

Ok, Dr. Kevorkian.

Jared’s comment is very strong. Who is to determine mental competency? Those severely ill are often speaking from the pain.

Doctors take an oath to "do no harm". As for end of life decisions, soon it may be determined by your Congressman.
What a country! Save the whales… Euthanize the elderly…

If someone wants to die they should have the right. Now I'm not talking about a teenager here, I'm talking about someone with terminal illness. If part of a doctors creed is to do no harm then we must reshape the definition of harm. It is harmful for someone with terminal bone cancer to not have the legal option to end their own suffering. That's wrong. Again morality seems to trump reality.

You believe suicide is a sin. That doesn't make it so. Even if I were to believe sin were a real thing why shouldn't I have the right to sin so long as it doesn't harm anyone else? Why can't other people live their own lives according to their own rules? You say someone being tortured by their own rotting body doesn't have the right to end their life because of a belief in God having some divine unknowable reason for that suffering?

What if that pain will never subside? We're not talking cries of passion or something like that. We're talking about endless suffering until death. Why should someone not have the right to end their life comfortably and under their own terms? How is this wrong?

Youre using the word euthanize as if it is manditory. Why shouldn't someone have the right to die? And you did not worm out of my point that forcing someone to live through unimaginable pain and suffering for moral reasons is actual harm, something doctors swear not to do.

hmm so a sin determines if its ethical you need to put religion aside

Anytime you are discussing ethics, you are discussing what you call "religion". Trace every single act you personally believe to be wrong back to where it originated and you have found yourself at the existence of an imminent morality. -just a thought

Not looking hard enough if that's where the trace goes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma

If my statement is so far fetched, then would you be so kind as to tell me where morals DO come from? I have actually always wanted to ask that question, in hopes that I will get a really good answer.

We make them up to justify the social organisations that are necessary for human beings to live. We need to be social animals. It's sort of hard to do that when people are randomly killed. Or to create and gain trust when people can just walk off with your stuff. The use of an authority figure, ie, a god, is merely to frighten people into behaving, just as the law is used in civil society.

The only thing stopping you or anyone else from killing another person at our whimsy is the idea that if you can do it, someone else could do it to you later on. And we sort of don't like that idea. More generally, most of our moral decisions and ethical activities relate to the possibility that we might harm or provide gain to others beyond ourselves. In some cases, the sorts of things which are held to be unethical by many religious faiths are often very subjective things, dependent on circumstances, cultural traditions, or are simply irrelevant morally. It's still very easy to arrive at the conclusions that murder or theft are wrongs all or most of the time (property theft for survival needs or murder in self defence or war are considered exceptions by most, with some exceptions finding even these to be categorically wrong) by this logic that the harms would be self-evident if these behaviors were permitted in a more universal way (someone could just shoot me if I could go around doing the same). It's also still very easy to arrive at the conclusion that torture or rape are always and categorically wrong because all they do is inflict harm on someone else for little purpose or gain (you can't rape or torture someone in self-defence for example). Though many people have a rough go of it trying to determine what "torture" or "rape" constitutes in an ethical debate. For some reason. Probably because they don't want to think about either circumstance very much.

As far as ethics more generally somehow being equated to religion, there are a ton of ethical fields that are un-discussed and often non-existent in the theological canon. Medical ethics, scientific research ethics, animal rights, and so on. There are portions of these that could be considered to be guided by religious faith, just as someone's general ethical outlooks could be, but this is not required. Religion, as with other social customs, may inform our moral outlook and behavior, but it doesn't create it and in many cases, has served as an impediment to something like ethical human behavior. For example, if people can do something wrong and get off lighter or with the impression that their faith absolves their errors, it's pretty hard to get it into their heads at times that they should probably stop doing things which are wrong. This is why you end up with suicide bombers, people killing abortion doctors, and politicians running on "family issues" who cheat on their wives, and why you get societies that repress women, homosexuals, or other minorities under the cloak of religious creed justifying these bigotries and subjective forms of intolerance.

There are positives for the use of religion as well of course. Most people don't sit down and think through their ethics, and must have something to fear to protect society from their stupidity or in-curiousness or selfishness. Some fear of a watchful deity works pretty well when people don't care enough about others to apply their own rules with some consistency on others. But it's not actually necessary to use this method to impose order and it's only applicable to the nature of human societies that we need these rules in the first place.

Nice answer, you really have a way with words.

Not really. I observe people and compare them to other social creatures. And then I have to use a lot of words to explain it.