[Epaphras]

Last night's 20/20 inspired this pondering. Specifically, it featured a family who provides foster-care for children with medical challenges. One infant girl suffered from seizures and was basically in hospice care. She is essentially catatonic, with eyes and mouth open.

Medically speaking, if technology allows us to artificially sustain life (meaning without the technology they would die), is it wrong to not utilize that technology to artificially sustain a life that, naturally, wouldn't continue? It's the other side of the question, "Just because we can do something, does it mean we should?"

In other words: Is it morally wrong or unethical to not artificially sustain life (if it is possible to do so - the technology exists) and instead let nature take its course? If so, why?

Let me know if this is not clear: I'm having a hard time formulating it.

[Sean]

To say that it's unethical to not artificially sustain life, that means that we're morally obligated to pay for every possible treatment for every single sick person no matter what.

As someone who's had to make a medical choice regarding artificially sustaining life, I don't see anything wrong letting nature take it's course.

[H.M. Murdock]

Typically speaking, acceptable situations for allowing someone to die are as follows:
1) Incurable disease
2) Lack of brain activity (the "person" is dead even while the body can be sustained indefinitely)
3) DNR orders

[Epaphras]

So a family with an infant in hospice care would not be unethical in taking the child off artificial life-support, which would undoubtedly lead to natural death? The key is hospice care - the child will die eventually by some cause. "Pulling the plug" will simply "speed up" (a relative term given the artificial support) the death-process.

[jthomas1600]

I used to work for a company that provided the medical equipment needed for in-home health care and we had the contract with hospice. It may vary from area to area, but what hospice meant there was that no medical treatment was being provided to prolong life. The patients were given every thing available to ease their pain and make them more comfortable, but that's it. I never saw a case where I thought the family or the doctor acted unethically. Now if someone is young and healthy and after suffering a heart attack intimidate medical care is with held because of cost -- I would have a problem with that.

[Nate]

Ethics breaks down rather quickly when pressed in the vise of reality. (Flowery, but true.)

There is no answer to this question. It's a terrible situation that has no truly good answer.

[Travis]

Why not just follow Jesus and use the Golden Rule?

If you would rather die than endure the pain of disease X, why wouldn't you allow the same for another?

As James Rachels argues, the Golden Rule not only allows, but mandates euthanasia.

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by Travis

Why not just follow Jesus and use the Golden Rule?

If you would rather die than endure the pain of disease X, why wouldn't you allow the same for another?

As James Rachels argues, the Golden Rule not only allows, but mandates euthanasia.

But here you're enshrining the will borne of the individual's heart, which Jesus wasn't doing. What's good is not always what one would like at the time, so this isn't a good way of arguing.

Frankly, it seems to me that this entire quandary is the result of the terrible way in which the over-emphasis of scientific technology has framed the world. If science can do it, it will do it, and it should do it -- this is the new Golden Rule. And it creates quantified problems of tradeoffs between pleasure and pain, efficiency and compassion. When technical-scientific discourse pushes out ethical discourse, you're left with nothing but James Rachels and Peter Singer.

The implicit argument behind all this is that because we are now gods in charge of life and death we have to decide when the person dies, which makes euthanasia inescapable. The answer, I suspect, is not to determine the right trade-off point but to revive real ethical discourse and spark a new trajectory for the medical imagination -- that is, to give up on our quest for scientific divinization and seek a different course.

[Jeffrey]

Originally Posted by Chrysostom

Frankly, it seems to me that this entire quandary is the result of the terrible way in which the over-emphasis of scientific technology has framed the world. If science can do it, it will do it, and it should do it -- this is the new Golden Rule. And it creates quantified problems of tradeoffs between pleasure and pain, efficiency and compassion. When technical-scientific discourse pushes out ethical discourse, you're left with nothing but James Rachels and Peter Singer.

The implicit argument behind all this is that because we are now gods in charge of life and death we have to decide when the person dies, which makes euthanasia inescapable. The answer, I suspect, is not to determine the right trade-off point but to revive real ethical discourse and spark a new trajectory for the medical imagination -- that is, to give up on our quest for scientific divinization and seek a different course.

Despite all the nice jargon you got there John, you're still changing the issue. Prolonging someone in pain is still deciding when they die. Why move to euthanasia? What about torturing someone in horrible pain by keeping them plugged in?

Doesn't Scripture say instead to give beer & wine to one who is perishing and in anguish?

But really John, it's hard for you to say any of this, because it's really just your socio-ethical-cultural-theological framework reinterpreting Scripture for you. It's hard to say that there's such thing as an "ethics" or "discourse" or even "trajectory" because each time period decides what those words mean.

We hide behind our terminology like "revive a real ethical discourse and spark a new trajectory" in order to have an abstraction that makes us Well-versed and proves to us that the Other is not Well-versed.

[Chrysostom]

Originally Posted by Jeffrey

Prolonging someone in pain is still deciding when they die. Why move to euthanasia? What about torturing someone in horrible pain by keeping them plugged in?

Doesn't Scripture say instead to give beer & wine to one who is perishing and in anguish?

My point is that the jump from the latter ("give beer & wine to one who is perishing and in anguish") to the former ("prolonging someone in pain is still deciding when they die") only makes sense because of the way our thinking has developed, and I'm reacting critically toward that development. Utilitarianism is what makes sense for us, but it doesn't have to be, and I'm saying it shouldn't be.

Originally Posted by Jeffrey

But really John, it's hard for you to say any of this, because it's really just your socio-ethical-cultural-theological framework reinterpreting Scripture for you. It's hard to say that there's such thing as an "ethics" or "discourse" or even "trajectory" because each time period decides what those words mean.

I get it. How does this matter?

Originally Posted by Jeffrey

We hide behind our terminology like "revive a real ethical discourse and spark a new trajectory" in order to have an abstraction that makes us Well-versed and proves to us that the Other is not Well-versed.

Here it's pretty much the exact opposite. I'm assuming that Travis does have the combination of vocabulary, training, and smarts to track with what I'm saying, and therefore I can write in a couple of sentences what would otherwise take paragraphs or pages. So, for instance, I mentioned James Rachels and Peter Singer as if the reader of my post should just know who they are, and for Travis that's unquestionably true.

Yes, jargon can be distancing. It can also be a means of communication for those who know the language. And people outside the language don't have to regard those who use it in a negative light -- for instance, I don't see any problem with the fact that your user title is "ideomancer & ailurian" and your location is "in viis mileti." I'll even bet that to some people that language is in fact mysteriously inviting, not distancing. That's how it's always struck me, at least.