Philosophers have spent decades trying to pin down exactly what euthanasia means
The Greek roots simply mean good death, and the Roman historian Suetonius used the word for Augustus dying swiftly and peacefully in his wife Livia's arms. Turning that phrase into a precise legal and ethical definition has proved remarkably hard, because each attempt either includes cases nobody would accept or leaves out ones it should cover.
A 1974 definition called it the painless inducement of a quick death. Critics pointed out that this would cover a painless killing for personal gain, or even a quick accidental death. Adding suffering helped, as in the Oxford English Dictionary's reference to patients with incurable, painful disease or irreversible coma, yet it still let in someone killing a sick relative to collect an inheritance, which Tom Beauchamp and Arnold Davidson called plain murder. So many writers made motive central. Michael Wreen argued that what separates it from other killing is that the agent acts for the good of the person who dies, and Heather Draper proposed four required elements: an agent and a subject, an intention, a direct causal link, and an outcome.
Consent divides the field. Beauchamp, Davidson and Wreen left it out of their definitions, though Wreen insisted that involuntary cases are a great wrong. A European palliative care ethics task force went further in 2003, stating that any medicalised killing without consent is simply murder. Legal systems commonly separate voluntary, non-voluntary and involuntary forms, and further divide them into passive, meaning withholding treatment, and active. Involuntary euthanasia is illegal everywhere.
Laws differ widely. Active voluntary euthanasia is permitted in Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, while Switzerland and several American states, including Oregon and California, allow assisted suicide. Passive voluntary forms are lawful across the United States following the Cruzan case.
The medical sense dates to Francis Bacon in the 17th century, who described an easy death as partly a physician's duty to relieve bodily suffering. By 2006 it had become the most active research area in bioethics.
Source: Euthanasia
