Law and Ethics: Are All Laws Ethical?

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One important consideration from a simple ethical standpoint is that doctors have moral responsibility to keep their patients alive, in addition to their duties under the Hippocratic Oath (Velleman). Another point of slippery reasoning with physician –assisted suicide is in evaluating and correctly defining “rationality”, and judging which patients are “rational enough to justifiably end their lives, and which are not. Legalizing assisted suicide essentially gives government, corporate authorities, and (not necessarily invested) doctors, the license to judge which lives are worth saving and living. But no one is qualified to say which lives are or are not worth living. Even the lives of those with developmental disability, injury, or illness, hold promise that we cannot foresee.

Ultimately, physician-assisted suicide violates the Kantian theory of ethics, as it blurs our perception of the value of a human life, and uses humans as means rather than ends. If the United States values the sanctity of human life, how can we have a law that easily provides patients the means to destroy their lives? Only in theory are we respecting patients’ right to choice. In reality, physician –assisted suicide becomes the end of all choice, and that is the utmost violation of a human’s dignity and worth.

Even if PAD gives patients the choice, it still violates deontology, in that it allows a person to choose to kill himself, which Kant would consider unethical. Deciding to kill ourselves is one way in which we treat our lives as means rather than ends, and we rob ourselves of our own human dignity. It is contradictory to our duties and would be unacceptable if it were right for everyone to universally commit suicide. For all these reasons, physician-assisted suicide is unethical and should be made illegal.

Another unethical law is Affirmative Action. In 1961, President Kennedy issued Affirmative Action as an executive order to make sure that all minorities would have equal opportunities in education and employment. Affirmative Action “intend(s) to provide equal opportunities for members of minority groups and women in education and employment” (Affirmative Action Overview). Originally, Affirmative Action emphasized with regard to African Americans, because they were the most racially discriminated group during the Civil rights Movement when Affirmative Action was established. At the time, “only five percent of undergraduate students, one percent of law students, and two percent of medical students in the country were African American” (Affirmative Action Overview). And for this reason, President Johnson took the law even further in 1965, by requiring that all government contractors use Affirmative Action when hiring new employees. Since then, several universities and many employers have adopted Affirmative Action within their recruitment, hiring, and acceptance processes.

Universities and workplaces are only considered as abiding fully by laws of Affirmative Action when they have a certain race ratio and minority percentage. Essentially, this means that they will hire employees and accept students from minority groups until they have the ratio required by Affirmative Action. So although the purpose of Affirmative Action is to minimize racism, the law’s policies are slightly out of bounds. Requiring colleges and jobs to fill a certain amount of positions with people from minority groups gives those minorities an unfair advantage. Asians, Latinos, Blacks, and people of other minority groups might be hired or accepted to universities just because they come from those groups and will give the workplace or university the legal fulfillment that it needs. For instance, if there are two applicants for a position, who are both perfectly and exactly equally qualified, it very well may be that the one whose ethnic or racial background constitutes the Affirmative Action policies will be chose over the White or Caucasian applicant. Is this kind of selection truly fair?

In this way, Affirmative Action intrudes on the process of selection of applicants for such positions, which should be purely academic or competence –related, by imposing certain legal requirements, which may override obvious objective superiority between applicants during the decision-making process. When we look at it this way, Affirmative Action is essentially a law that tells universities and workplaces who to hire, when the decision is between a minority and a majority. Such dictations from the government seem a bit excessive, considering that the government does not actually evaluate applicants and compare them to each other the way that employers and admissions committees do, based on their qualifications and competence.

Ultimately, while trying to discourage racism, Affirmative Action encourages reverse racism. Especially in Jennifer Gratz’s case, a student with exceptional credentials who was rejected from the University of Michigan. Her lawyer argued that she was not given a position at the University because their Affirmative Action policies gave preference to minorities. In 2003, The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Jennifer and stated that the University of Michigan exercised unconstitutional policies in their acceptance and rejection processes (Affirmative Action Overview). Their acceptance process involved a unique point system, in which students “from an underrepresented group automatically receives 20 points towards his/her overall score” (casebriefs.com). This is an obvious case of reverse racism, where the harm of discrimination actually falls upon the majority groups.

Affirmative Action wishes to fulfill a legal requirement within universities and workplaces that would theoretically balance out inequality posed by racial discrimination. By guiding employers and admissions committees to select people based on ethnic or racial identity, the government devalues the objective value and worth of each human being, thereby treating them as means towards the end of a legal requirement. In addition to violating Deontology—Immanuel Kant’s theory of ethics— by using people as means rather then ends, Affirmative Action goes against utilitarian principles (Halbert and Ingulli 1). Utilitarianism values the greatest good for the greatest number of people, but Affirmative Action values the good of minorities over the good of majorities. It benefits some, but harms the many majorities who are not protected by this minority-preferential law. Because it is only beneficial to a certain group of people rather than the majority of American citizens, Affirmative Action violates utilitarianism.

Hard work, experience, and qualification should be the sole objective deciding factors in such decisions. For all these reasons, Affirmative Action is considered