Natural Law – “right reason in agreement with nature”

In the OCR specification, natural law and situation ethics are applied to euthanasia (and in the Year 2 part of the specification all moral theories including natural law are applied to issues in sexual ethics – premarital sex, extramarital sex and homosexuality).

Euthanasia

Natural law holds that human beings by nature “do good and avoid evil” (called the synderesis rule) and these goods are observable goals that we pursue. There are five general goals, called primary precepts (acronym POWER where the O stands for Ordered society), although these are not quite as absolute as is sometimes suggested – for example, the papal encyclical Veritatis Splendor (1995) has changed “worship of God” to “appreciation of beauty”. These five general goals are then applied in the secondary precepts, but Aquinas makes clear that these are not absolute and may change as circumstances change. Euthanasia seems to violate the primary precept preservation of life (P) which, especially from a religious perspective, has been taken to mean a strong view of the sanctity of life. According to divine law (the Bible) we are created in God’s image and knit together by God in the womb (Psalm 139:6), so no-one should ever choose to end their own life or be killed against their will. The Declaration on Euthanasia (1980) states “intentionally causing one’s own death, or suicide, is therefore equally as wrong as murder; such an action on the part of a person is to be considered as a rejection of God’s sovereignty and loving plan”.

http://www.euthanasia.com/vatican.html