Infliction of Unnecessary Pain

     KIE: After clarifying the concepts of "pain", "suffering", "pain of body", and "pain of soul", the author presents a humanistic ethic of pain management based on the premise that the patient has a strong "prima facie" right to freedom from unnecessary pain.

     This premise imposes two moral obligations upon medical professionals:

(1) the duty not to inflict unnecessary pain and suffering upon the patient, and

(2) the duty to do whatever is possible to alleviate pain and suffering.

     Both the questions of informed consent to treatment of pain and the right to refuse pain relief are addressed.

     One of the moral duties that humans are under ethically is to avoid inflicting unnecessary pain on sentient creatures. Notice that the operative word here is unnecessary since there is a time when the infliction of pain is a moral responsibility. For example, the pain that is inflicted by a surgeon to save a person's life by removal of a cancerous tumor.  Or the infliction of pain to protect oneself from an attack.  In those cases the pain inflicted can be morally justified.

     In contrast, infliction of pain in order to derive psychological pleasure from it such as is the case with sadism. Or the infliction of physical pain as punishment for the sake of causing suffering before the person dies,  or during a medical procedure simply to cause the patient to suffer, is considered unjustifiable.

     Now, the reason I bring this up is because a man just set himself on fire out site the courthouse where Trump was undergoing trial, after being on for what seemed like several minutes, the fire was extinguished and his charred body was swiftly placed on a gurney, and transported to the ER and he was placed on life support.   

    Now, if that had been a animal, such as a dog or a horse, they would have,  have immediately put the animal to sleep  Why? Well, according to them, it is to in prevent unnecessary further suffering. In fact, they often do that with pets that have reached an extremely old age and are suffering age-related maladies such as arthritis. They consider it their moral duty in order to prevent unnecessary suffering. 

     However, since in this case a human being is involved, they choose to be "merciful" and force him to endure indescribable agonies with the morbid future of being in constant pain, and being grotesquely physically deformed?  How in God's Holy name is that being merciful? How is that not clearly violating the ethical principle of not inflicting unnecessary pain?

     If indeed the man chose to die, then have the decency of respecting his wishes, and let him go in peace. Otherwise, you will resemble those demons in the mythical hell who mercilessly inflict agonies on all within their foul, demonic reach.