안락사 논쟁에 대한 윤리적 접근방식과 그 한계에 관한 연구

Abstract

On Nov. 8, 2008, Seoul West District Court issued a sentence admitting the request of the family members of a 76-year-old female patient who remained persistent vegetative state for 8 months to remove meaningless life prolonging device under strict conditions. Later on about the appeal by the hospital, Seoul High Court rejected the appeal of the hospital in support of the judgment of first trial. After this judgment, the hospital appealed to the Supreme Court again, but the court issued final sentence admitting the removal of meaningless life prolonging device on May 21, 2009. Through this judgment, stopping of life prolonging treatment on terminal patients became a social issue along with ‘Boramae Medical Center Incident’ of 1997, and the issue of euthanasia has surfaced in the field of public arguments. Ranging from the objecting standpoint that death by medical action is an act of damaging the life and an inhumane act away from the principle of ethical hazard inhibition to the forward-looking viewpoint that the acts of terminal patients suffering from un-recoverable disease to admit death by preserving the respect as human should be respected, the arguments of euthanasia span so broad a spectrum. However, despite such diverse approaches and arguments, the contemporary discussions of euthanasia are nearly almost are biased to analyses of phenomena in structure, and cannot reach up to the dimension of true understanding of human by falling in overheated arguments on agreement or disagreement in reality. Also, the discussions are only stuck in simple unilateral approaches toward the problem of pain the premise of argument on euthanasia, and instead of being discussed in cross-referenced manner or stereoscopic perspective, they are only producing the same talks within the same scope. As such, the contemporary arguments on euthanasia discloses many limitations. Therefore, in this paper, the limitations of the contemporary views on euthanasia were discussed specifically after the ethical standpoints and approaches of euthanasia were identified through the opinions of various scholars.