ABSTRACT
Law is the major tool by which society translates its ethical value structure into action. In general correspondence to the value system currently prevailing within the society, a society’s legal order allocates resources among its members, distributes powers, privileges, and immunities among them, and accommodates the competing claims of its members. The legal order of organized society has achieved a degree of success in translating into action the ethical prescription against homicide. A deep premise, or assumption, has always underlain the development of the ethical injunction, “Thou shalt not kill,” and the corpus of legal principles based upon it. The work of the doctors in the termination of care, in the allocation of death, will press hard not only upon man’s resistance to change, but also upon his single most sensitive nerve—his instinct for self-preservation and his well-founded distrust of the homicidal proclivities of his fellow man.
