Why Is Assisted Suicide Wrong

Assisted suicide or the right to die is an extremely controversial topic that has been talked about for decades. Assisted suicide is for terminally ill patients that know they will never win their battle and want to pick when and how they die, which is often used before their disease becomes intolerable. Over the last couple years this controversy has had a lot more media coverage because of people working to give it the attention that it needs. In the United States more people have been on the side of passing laws so that people who do assist do not get charged for the crime. One major story that was in the news that seemed to bring back more coverage of this topic was a young woman having to move to a different state just to have an assisted …show more content…
This is the one question no one can really answer, it does not have one clear answer. The rightness or wrongness of an action is decided on based on the person who is looking at it and their culture, how they were raised. If we look at it from the utilitarianism viewpoint, then we can argue that it is right. Utilitarianism is the greatest happiness principle, so something is right if it makes the most people happy and wrong if it makes most people unhappy or hurts them (Rachels, 30). When considering it this way we look at the people involved, not the whole world, someone is not going to be affected by it if they do not even know it took place. Only the people involved are affected, the doctors and nurses, and the family of the one seeking assisted …show more content…
For everyone immediately involved with the terminally ill patient, it seems the most happiness would come from helping them and doing whatever is needed to make sure they are no longer suffering. The family and friends would know they are no longer suffering, same with the nurses and doctors. They would also know this is what they wanted, they either wanted it because they wanted to die with dignity, they wanted to go on their own terms, not the diseases, or they could not deal with the pain and or not being able to care for themselves at all. But an argument for the wrongness is that the doctors and nurses fight to keep their patients alive, not to assist them in suicide and although we could all understand this there is more to look at when talking about them. Doctors and nurses main goal might be to save lives, but it is also to make sure that their patient is comfortable and living out the rest of their life no matter how short or long the best way they can. This might mean assisting them to die, which is the only way they can be comfortable and therefore reaching the goal of the doctors and nurses happy, making it right and not wrong as some people