I know this sounds dreadful but I am quite sincere. For the life of me I can’t understand actively starving someone to death but:
Years ago I removed my newborn son from life support. I knew that he couldn’t live but didn’t know when he would die. As it happened he died before we could get him home. It never occurred to me that I should help him die by denying him sustenance. He was no different to undamaged newborns in that regard - unable to feed himself. If he had been able to breath and his body had kept functioning I would have, as his father, had to ensure his wellbeing.
I have often expressed the opinion that I would prefer to die rather than live in a vegetative state but hadn’t foreseen circumstances like Terry Schiavo’s. Had I done so and if I lived in a civilised society, I would have specified a nice quick OD but certainly not “starve me to death”.
Now given that you know I don’t want to “live” like this but you can’t have me ethically euthanised, what is the legal/moral difference between starving me to death and beating me to death with baseball bats?
one’s “passive euthanasia” and the other is “active euthanasia” I believe. It has been discussed in several recent threads about Terry Schiavo in the terms of medical ethics.
Short answer is that the feeding tube is life support and is medically no different from a ventilator.
Long answer is that there’s a spectrum of intervention. At one end you’ve got intervention to cause life in a patient that would otherwise die, ie life support. At the other end, you’ve got intervention to cause death in a patient that would otherwise live, ie beating someone to death with a baseball bat. In the middle, you’ve got not intervening at all, either way. Everything on the deliberately causing death side of the spectrum is absolutely illegal and in terms of codified medical ethics, pretty much unethical. Everything from the middle on up to the causing life end of the spetrum may or may not be legal and/or ethical, depending on the situation.
If you beat up a homeless person and kill them your are legaly and morally responsible for their death. If a homeless person dies of lack of food, you are legally innocent of their death. Morally though it could be argued that you are in part morally culpable. If you believe that society has a duty to feed its members then the society as a whole has a moral obligation that could be considered to be shared amongst societies members.
If you have taken responsability for a person, then you have a moral (and probably legal) requirement to feed that person or else release responsibility for that person over to others or the authorities. A parent must feed their children or give them over to others to feed. To allow the child to die of hunger is a tragedy and quite possibly murder by neglect. If someone wishes to starve themselves to death, then society has the duty to ensure the person so wishing is in a sane mental state capable of making such a decision. But if the person is in a mentally fit state, I don’t believe society has any right to force feed such a person but is also under no obligation to help the person achieve their self-starvation.
Just out of curiosity, how long could we maintain life of support…i.e. if we gave someone a pacemaker, stuck them into an iron lung, fed them through a tube and put them on dialysis… how long could we maintain necessary functions artifically? What couldn’t we maintain? I’d assume that infection would probably take them eventually, even if we used aggressive treatment?