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Section A

1. Ethics and Religious help us to investigate questions of meaning, value and purpose in
life. It helps us to extend our insights, ability for moral and spiritual life and
individual autonomy. These traits help in building the life into meaningful in the
social, cultural, and political contexts of the pluralistic world. Religion and ethics are
apparently entangled as there exist innumerable studies of Christian ethics, Islamic
ethics, and Hinduism ethics and so on. Some believes that the moral systems may well
be confined to the standards of a society ‘s religion. Traditionally, the ethical values
of cultures have resided within religious traditions. The main characters and the
champions of virtue and character are the faith traditions, whether you think of
Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, the ancient Greek, and Romans. In these
civilizations, set of laws about acceptable and unacceptable behaviors are intimately
united with religious beliefs. Morality is closely attached up with religious beliefs
about the authority of deceased kin, the whims of impulsive gods and goddesses, the
will of a solitary omnipotent deity, or the authority of the Karma of one ‘s past
volitions. As religion also teaches moral rules and provides impetus for adhering to
them, as religion proves to be a close neighbor to ethics, and we sometimes find it
difficult to distinguish between them. But as compared to ethics, religion working in a
dominating way. The value of sin and moral transgression is not only the sanction of
God but also the disapproval of one ‘s religious community. Christian ethics is the
ethics of living for Christians based on the word of God. The foundation of God's
Word is the Bible as a guide for Christians living in the order of God's Kingdom. But
in Islam, etymologically, according to Endang Syaifuddin Ansari, ethics means
actions, and has something to do with the words Khuliq (creator) and Makhluq
(created). However, it is also found that the notion of ethics comes from the plural in
Arabic "Akhlaq". The word mufrad is khulqu, which means: sajiyyah: temperament,
mur'iiah: mind, thab'in: character, and adab: adab (politeness)1. Ethics is generally
identified with morals (morality). Although the same is related to the good and bad of
human actions, ethics and morals have different meanings. In short, if morals are
more inclined to the notion of "good and bad values of every human action, ethics
studies about good and bad". So, it can be said, ethics functions as a theory and good
and bad deeds (ethics or 'ilm al-akhlaq) and morals (akklaq) are practices. Often what
is meant by ethics is all actions that are born on the impulse of the soul in the form of
good or bad deeds. In Buddhism, the presence of Buddha is shown symbolically with
a tree (enlightenment), with a wheel (dharma) or with footprints, because he fears that
after death people will worship a personal image. Which will make human behavior
more likely to do wrong things, so they are more likely to teach an ethics to their
followers. Buddhists always make a living with good things and forbid doing wrong
things in a lowly way that is predicting, there will be heavy rain, less rain, the harvest
will be good or bad, there will be peace, there will be chaos, Gautama Buddha did not
do divination without adding up quickly (Tripitaka Scripture, 1988: 13). In Buddhist
thought, following the Aryan Eightfold Path is the best way to ensure one's happiness.
Someone should spread the truth to his parents, if they don't know about it. In the Suta
filial piety, the Buddha asked his listeners whether providing parents with all the
comforts of the world and carrying them for life is the essence of filial piety to parents
(Soon, 2006: 175). Western ethics are dominated by ethical theories such
as deontology and utilitarianism. The first emphasizes the use of reason and logic to
find what is believed to be the right answer to ethical problems, and then demands
adherence to moral decisions irrespective of the consequences.
2. 2. Islam regulates all aspects of the life of its ummah, both related to the affairs of the
hereafter such as in the context of basic worship such as prayer, fasting, zakat, hajj. to
other human beings, both in social relations and in terms of the distribution of welfare
(wealth) such as the order of zakat, infaq, shadaqah, and waqf. There are many things
in the Christian's life that are unturned bread. There are people who pay too much
attention to personal (individual) spirituality, and ignore shared (corporate)
spirituality, such people are the same as bread that is not turned over. There are
people who pay too much attention to justice, without the slightest grace, such people
are like bread that is not turned over. Being just, that's true, but only paying attention
to the aspect of justice and forgetting the aspect of grace, this is the same as bread that
is not turned over. There are special people who are good people, treat people very
well, but do not have the slightest principle of justice, do not want to
educate/discipline people at all, this means that they place too much emphasis on
grace, do not pay attention to the aspect of justice, this person is also the same as the
bread that not reversed. Here, we all need to pay attention to that: we must be “four-
faceted” Christians, not unturned bread. If it is said that Buddhism is concerned only
with personal liberation, that is, with the spiritual life, and that all it can do is
encourage people to completely disengage themselves from involvement in the world
of life, live in monasteries or other places of seclusion, without regard for others and
without If you do something that is good and beneficial for the general public, then
such a view is a wrong view or a wrong and one-sided view. Human personal
interaction with one another in public life is very important and mutually supportive
because personal progress cannot be separated from the presence of other people.

Section B

1. Now consider now the second variation of this dilemma. Imagine you are standing on
a footbridge above the tram tracks. You can see the runaway trolley hurtling towards
the five unsuspecting workers, but there’s no lever to divert it. However, there is large
man standing next to you on the footbridge. You’re confident that his bulk would stop
the tram in its tracks. The outcome of this scenario is identical to the one with the lever
diverting the trolley onto another track: one person dies; five people live. The interesting
thing is that, while most people would throw the lever, very few would approve of pushing
the fat man off the footbridge. Thompson and other philosophers have given us other
variations on the trolley dilemma that are also scarily entertaining. Some don’t even
include trolleys. Imagine you are a doctor, and you have five patients who all need
transplants to live. Two each require one lung; another two each require a kidney and
the fifth needs a heart. In the next ward is another individual recovering from a broken
leg. But other than their knitting bones, they’re perfectly healthy. So, would you kill
the healthy patient and harvest their organs to save five others? Again, the
consequences are the same as the first dilemma, but most people would utterly reject
the notion of killing the healthy patient. If all the dilemmas above have the same
consequence, yet most people would only be willing to throw the lever, but not push
the fat man or kill the healthy patient, does that mean our moral intuitions are not
always reliable, logical, or consistent? Perhaps there’s another factor beyond the
consequences that influences our moral intuitions? Foot argued that there’s a
distinction between killing and letting die. The former is active while the latter is
passive. In the first trolley dilemma, the person who pulls the lever is saving the life
of the five workers and letting the one person die. After all, pulling the lever does not
inflict direct harm on the person on the side track. But in the footbridge scenario,
pushing the fat man over the side is in intentional act of killing. This is sometimes
described as the principle of double effect, which states that it’s permissible to
indirectly cause harm (as a side or “double” effect) if the action promotes an even
greater good. However, it’s not permissible to directly cause harm, even in the pursuit
of a greater good. Thompson offered a different perspective. She argued that moral
theories that judge the permissibility of an action based on its consequences alone,
such as consequentialism or utilitarianism, cannot explain why some actions that
cause killings are permissible while others are not. If we consider that everyone has
equal rights, then we would be doing something wrong in sacrificing one even if our
intention was to save five. Research done by neuroscientists has investigated which
parts of the brain were activated when people considered the first two variations of the
trolley dilemma. They noted that the first version activates our logical, rational mind
and thus if we decided to pull the lever it was because we intended to save a larger
number of lives. However, when we consider pushing the bystander, our emotional
reasoning becomes involved, and we therefore feel differently about killing one to
save five. The trolley dilemma and its variations demonstrate that most people
approve of some actions that cause harm, yet other actions with the same outcome are
not considered permissible. Not everyone answers the dilemmas in the same way, and
even when people agree, they may vary in their justification of the action they defend.
These thought experiments have been used to stimulate discussion about the
difference between killing versus letting die, and have even appeared, in one form or
another, in popular culture, such as the film Eye In The Sky.
2. Whether or not society should pass laws sanctioning "assisted suicide" has generated
intense moral controversy. Supporters of legislation legalizing assisted suicide claim
that all persons have a moral right to choose freely what they will do with their lives if
they inflict no harm on others. This right of free choice includes the right to end one's
life when we choose. For most people, the right to end one's life is a right they can
easily exercise but there are many who want to die, but whose disease, handicap, or
condition renders them unable to end their lives in a dignified manner. When such
people ask for assistance in exercising their right to die, their wishes should be
respected. Furthermore, it is argued, we ourselves have an obligation to relieve the
suffering of our fellow human beings and to respect their dignity. Lying in our
hospitals today are people afflicted with excruciatingly painful and terminal
conditions and diseases that have left them permanently incapable of functioning in
any dignified human fashion. They can only look forward to lives filled with yet more
suffering, degradation, and deterioration. When such people beg for a merciful end to
their pain and indignity, it is cruel and inhumane to refuse their pleas. Compassion
demands that we comply and cooperate. Those who oppose any measures permitting
assisted suicide argue that society has a moral duty to protect and to preserve all life.
To allow people to assist others in destroying their lives violates a fundamental duty
we have to respect human life. A society committed to preserving and protecting life
should not commission people to destroy it. Further, opponents of assisted suicide
claim that society has a duty to oppose legislation that poses a threat to the lives of
innocent persons. And laws that sanction assisted suicide inevitably will pose such a
threat. If assisted suicide is allowed based on mercy or compassion, what will keep us
from "assisting in" and perhaps actively urging, the death of anyone whose life we
deem worthless or undesirable? What will keep the inconvenienced relatives of a
patient from persuading him or her to "voluntarily" ask for death? What will become
of people who, once having signed a request to die, later change their minds, but,
because of their conditions, are unable to make their wishes known? And, once we
accept that only life of a certain quality is worth living, where will we stop? When we
devalue one life, we devalue all lives. Who will speak for the severely handicapped
infant or the senile woman? Finally, it is argued that sanctioning assisted suicide
would violate the rights of others. Doctors and nurses might find themselves
"pressured" to cooperate in a patient's suicide. To satisfy the desires of a patient
wanting to die, it's unjust to demand that others go against their own deeply held
convictions. The case for assisted suicide is a powerful one--appealing to our capacity
for compassion and an obligation to support individual choice and self-determination.
But the case against assisted suicide is also powerful for it speaks to us of a
fundamental reverence for life and the risk of hurling down a slippery slope toward a
diminished respect for life. With legislation in the offing, we're compelled to choose
which values are most important and to cast our vote.

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