Word: ramsey
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Against such swift developments in the growing euthanasia campaign, there is also the beginning of a countermovement. In fact, one of the men who first spoke out against excessive medical care for the dying, Princeton Ethicist Paul Ramsey, is now worried because so many people have taken up the cause...
Writing in the current issue of the Hastings Center Studies, Ramsey argues that the idea of death with dignity is now being too readily promoted and death itself too easily accepted. To suggest, as many proponents of euthanasia are doing, that death is an occurrence as natural as birth smacks of "whistling before the darkness descends" and denotes a "very feeble philosophy." It is "soap-opera stuff' to say that "death can be beautiful." Indeed, says Ramsey, death is "the ultimate indignity...
...Ramsey, a Methodist, cites St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans in supporting the traditional Christian view that death entered the world as "the wages of sin" -the punishment for Adam's fall.* Ever since, Ramsey insists, death has been "the enemy." Jesus' death on the cross redeemed man for immortality, but did nothing to prevent death from being a shattering separation of soul and body. Christians, argues Ramsey, thus properly dread death, and in their care for the sick wisely laid the foundations of Western medicine. Nowadays, Ramsey says, "true humanism" still depends on a "dread...
...Ramsey receives both support and strong criticism in the same issue of the Hastings Center Studies from Dr. Leon Kass, a physician and molecular biologist who works in biomedical ethics. Kass takes issue with Ramsey's view of death as an "indignity," insisting instead that "to live is to be mortal." Jewish, if not Christian teaching has generally held that view, Kass says; evolutionary biology confirms and strengthens...
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark says that during his term of office he resolved the dilemma by distinguishing between policy and legal matters. The President, says Clark, "can use discretion with respect to policy, but he cannot interpret the law to suit his own needs, politics, even judgments. The power of the President in legal matters is the power of dismissal, not the power of superseding his legal judgment for that of the Attorney General." That power could thus be used to fire Jaworski if the President were willing to face the consequences...