That would be a different question. It is about the decision of an individual regarding their potentially conflicting roles as Serviceman and Nurse and the conflicting codes of conduct.
This is about the human rights of the individuals experiencing the intervention.
As a nurse I believe that our universal moral duty is to do the patient no harm against their will, whether by act or omission.
As a human being I believe that we should respect individual human rights.
It would be possible to hold those views independently; I happen to hold them together.
So, you are already backing off of the assertion that:
So, it went from outside the US everyone is ‘civilised’ to as far as you know the US is the only western country that force feeds hunger strike prisoners. Ok, I’d like to see some cites that other countries let their prisoners die on hunger strikes. A quick Google search turns up lots of examples in countries like France having a lot of hunger strikes, so lets see some cites by you backing up your assertion that the US is the only ‘western country’ that keeps the prisoners from committing suicide by starvation.
My original statement is entirely compatible with my later one. Read exactly what they say.
I cannot easily search for a negative. I suggest that you search for force feeding being administered against a patient’s will.
I can give you a head start- All EU countries would ban force feeding as it is against the ECHR right to refuse medical treatment. Add to that common law countries deriving their law from England and Wales- Australia, New Zealand, Canada and so on which tend to share a common view on forced treatment.
Wikipedia only refers to the USA being currently involved in Force Feeding.
The first ten pages of a Google search for force feeding prisoners only lists examples from the USA and emergency legislation last year in Israel to allow it for Palestinian detainees (a touch racist?). Nice company.
I have posted this before, but, I do not see hunger strikes as a moral action; I see them as a form of hostage-taking. The fact that the hostage-taker is the hostage is irrelevant.
Well for starters, I don’t forced feeding unethical, at least not anymore than stopping a prisoner from hanging himself in order to make a statement. That said, since you are referring to the situation of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, do you think force feeding is only unjustified when a prisoner has a legitimate cause?
The public outcry over force-feeding has been nothing like the one that broke out over our torture of prisoners. Also I don’t see being on death row is “torture” in and of itself.
Its the same reason why if a prisoner chokes on a chicken bone in his last meal, the guards will do everything to try and save him.
How would you feel if an American Pilot shot down over a country that imprisoned her rather than burned her alive, was held in prison, and went on hunger strike in protest at being denied Geneva convention provisions?
There is certainly a moral argument to offer life saving treatment and first aid to people awaiting state sanctioned killing. There is no argument for forcing them to endure an intervention that is as close to the definition of torture as waterboarding.
Abolishing the death penalty does not necessarily mean one thinks its torture and/or a cruel and unusual punishment. I would prefer we abolish the death penalty than maintain the status quo for pragmatic reasons (ie costs, racial disparities in sentencing, and potential of executing an innocent person) but I see no moral problem with the death penalty theoretically speaking.
Most civilised nations disagree with you. The USA and Japan are the only western democracies that still kill their prisoners. You are very isolated.
It has a running sore effect on your reputation as a humane society. We know little about Georgia but there is current daily coverage in British papers about the fact that they are going to kill a woman next week. Every US judicial killing makes the news and comment pages in many papers and on TV news here.
“On December 6, 2006, the UN War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague approved the use of force-feeding of Serbian politician Vojislav Šešelj. They decided it was not “torture, inhuman or degrading treatment if there is a medical necessity to do so…and if the manner in which the detainee is force-fed is not inhuman or degrading”.[11]”
Thereby it’s hardly the "whole of the rest of the Western World " or “rest of the civilised (sic) world” if the UN accepts it, and has declared it’s not torture, inhuman or degrading treatment.
The point isn’t “Should we or should we not have the death penalty?”, its whether the death penalty is always “torture” (to use your own words). This evidentally isn’t the case since even the most ardent leftists aren’t demanding that every American prosecutor and judge involved in giving out death sentences be arrested for such unlike the “Bush Six”.
Simply put I see no reason why we should keep Anders Behring Breivik or Jared Lee Loughner or Robert Bales alive.
But that’s because if you check the wiki page there are have been only two major long term hunger strikes in the last couple of decades:
And those were Gitmo and Israel.
The only other one was in 1981 where the IRA went on a hunger strike and Thatcher refused to give in, thus ten men died. There were mass protests and Thatcher was condemned by many for allowing them to die.
So- if you allow them to die- you are wrong. If you force feed them- you are wrong.
Maybe you are working on partial information. British prisoners have the absolute right to go on hunger strike; it is clearly stated in prison rules. In fact a detained criminal in a psychiatric hospital who is being force fed for medical reasons under the provisions of the Mental Health Act which removes rights to refuse medical treatment from people with mental illness lacking capacity. He has petitioned (unsuccessfully) to be moved to a prison where he would be allowed to starve himself.
The reason that you do not hear too much is that death by starvation is not as newsworthy as prison staff force feeding prisoners.
I can remember hunger strokes in Indian and Pakistani jails in the last couple of decades.