Anyone who cannot, for whatever reason, assert their desire to continue living, should be terminated.
(If someone is only temporarily incapable of making this decision, then the question should be deferred until such time as it’s possible to make it.)
Why does it matter whether they should be terminated or not? Why is there a need to make a rule about it? How can you know that the answer will be the same in every case? Is it just to relieve the stress of knowing there are possible situations in which it would be hard to decide? Wouldn’t making a rule for it be a kind of brutal resort? Perhaps the family knows best whether they should be terminated? How do we know the quality of life for them isn’t satisfactory or good? Terminating someone’s life is pretty harsh, you’d better be sure. Should we even terminate them if we assume they’re not having an okay life? We don’t terminate depressed people, whether they request it or not. We don’t even know what life is or what death is, so how can anyone be so sure about such a thing? The deferrence clause does imply that, in the case of someone not lucky enough to be deferred, they could unfortunately die despite a wish, or a would-be wish, to live.
If you take a black box, and inside is the information about whether some random person X wants to live or not, and you can never look inside the black box, so you decide to kill X (which seems ridiculous), that’s the same as your scenario, except that in the latter the person may be some degree more likely to not want to live (but what about the remaining chance that they do?) and that there are expenses involved in letting them live (and what’s the price of life?)
I concede, though, that people are generally too afraid of death and unwilling to just let people die, at least in some countries.
Sounds reasonable, but now you have to specify when someone should be considered to be incapable of communication temporarily, or permanently.
This is actually a real problem. There have been a small number of cases of seemingly debilitating brain damage (think Terry Schiavo) where, after 20 years, the person wakes up and can function normally.
I know a woman whose mom got sick and went into a coma.
She eventually got well, but she stayed in the coma, and no one knew if she’d ever come out. They just kept feeding her and she wasted away to a very small but manageable size.
A year went by. They just kept coming to see her. They’d play CDs for her, talked to her, etc.
Another year went by. They were beginning to give up hope. They were wondering if “she would be better off” (meaning if they would be better off emotionally and financially) if they just pulled the plug and “let her go”.
Suddenly, early in the second year, she just woke up. When the woman I know got the call that her mom had woke up, she was afraid of what it might be that woke up – maybe a type of “vegetable”.
But her mom turned out to be okay, just missing two years of her life.
She was, however, “magically” able to sing all of the songs of the CD that they played her so often.
To this day she is okay … unless something stressful happens, and then she retreats inward, wanting to shut herself in her room and cover up and just be alone until the stress subsides. It appears like she wants to “coma” as a defense – she indeed “learned” how to do so for two years. Otherwise, she’s okay.
Don’t rush to kill anyone. Live and let live. And let death come to each person as it will. Sometimes people need help living when bad things happen to them before their body runs out of gas. But they really don’t need any help to die. If they need help to die, it probably isn’t really their time to go.
Well, one example doesn’t prove a general rule. In the case of your example, it’s a good thing they held on - but in Terry Schiavo’s case, they should have pulled the plug earlier. When you have massive brain damage, the person is already dead, even though the body continues to function - in that case, it’s a waste of money and a waste of emotional effort to keep the body alive.
Ye Gods! My thread has come back to life! Thanks for the renewed interest.
It matters because keeping vegetables (et al) alive is enormously expensive in terms of time, money, and effort. And suffering is often prolonged too.
Not sure what these questions mean…
On the contrary, the family’s judgement is clouded by relationship to the person. By analogy, no one ever puts their own dog down when it comes to it.
But think of the people and the circumstances that surround them.
They can always pop some pills or something. If they wanna commit suicide, that’s their perogative, but it’s invariably harsh to their friends and family (if they’ve got any).
Different issue.
See my response to the lucky-few aspect of the issue.
I’d put the box back into the aeroplane 
No one wants to die, but some people should.
I know this sounds like a cop-out, but I think it should be left to “common sense.”
See further down (cf. something I said to inhahe)
This is the apparent Achilles’ Heel of my criterion. My response to it is this: There is a huge number of people who “fail the test” - a really big number, that has huge costs associated with it, and grief besides. The “lucky few” that come out of it are exactly that: a FEW. If you’ve got a warehouse with 10,000 apples in it, of which 9,990 are rotten (and you don’t know which are which), you should clear the whole lot out, rather than keeping them in there and taking up all that room.
We have to accept that people die - by accidents or otherwise. I don’t think time, money and effort should be wasted, and suffering incurred, just because people don’t have the resolve to do the “decent thing” (which, incidentally, they would do straight away to an animal).
Finally, I’m not naive enough to think this will ever be implemented by any government. I merely wanted to discuss it.
But on the other hand, keeping people alive on some forms of life support is a more lot like defying death than not rushing for it. I mean it’s not something that occurs in nature, it’s serious equipment, and it keeps people alive for very long periods of time. Perhaps people misunderstand what death is. People in some societies seem to just not want to let someone go, at any cost.
That could be said to be not letting death come to each person as it will.
So I agree with your point, but to what extent? Where do we draw the line? Maybe it’s always meant to be hard.
Hardly!
It’s true, we don’t understand the nature of life ultimately, and we thus we don’t know what death is the end of, or whether it even is the end. This puts us in the dark when it comes to weighing whether someone lives or dies. Weighing requires relevant factors and not to mention precise calibration. So it may be a topic of discussion all on its own, but it’s hardly separate…
What??!
I guess it’s always a crucial issue how much you value a single life against the suffering of many. Life is, and should be, held in the highest regard, but at some point would society just be sacrificing too much? If you make decisions like this and you’re too idealistic, you walk dangerously close to the nazi camp.
When people run out of gas then they are meant to die.
When people are attacked by others (people, virus, “accident”) we can defend their right to life and security of person by appeal to the realities of our creator-endowed rights.
Penicillin is just as artificially interruptive of death as “serious equipment”.
How “long” we defend someone’s right to life is really an artificial consideration, one that is more about the defenders than the defended.
When people run out of gas then it is right to let them “go”.
Until then, it is right to keep them alive, at their implied consent if they cannot explicitly give it.
And, those who would give up on life before they run out of gas, merely because they are in pain or depressed or impoverished or whatever … should do so in private … though what with technology being at a good and powerful place to give aid of pain medication, anti-depressants, and welfare, I would NEVER recommend suicide, as suicide remains murder, self murder, and murder is always wrong.
I guess this could be true. I have no idea. Even so, I think there are still limits (which may be a red herring), like keeping someone alive who’s braindead.
Well, I’m not sure where the opinion about doing it in private is exactly coming from. Do you have a passionate opposition to people who walk out in the middle of the street and shoot their brains out? 
I think it’s almost always done in private. I guess if someone did it in front of someone else it could be scarring, at least depending on how they did it. But crap happens, I dunno. And I would by no means morally discourage people from dying, at their own choice, in the company of others if they so choose and the others choose. What if they don’t want to die alone? What if they want the moral support, or merely the love and companionship as they pass over to the other side? I wouldn’t want to shun that on account of some ultra-conservative code of etiquette.
I have absolutely no faith in the universal ability of chemicals to solve depression… depression can be a mental and spiritual problem and ‘curing’ it with drugs is just a hack. it’s too simple. let’s say person X with depression is eventually helped by years of therapy with a very ingenious and insightful psychologist. do you think chemicals could have done the same thing instead? and perhaps not everybody can even be helped by that ingenious and insightful psychologist. depression is just a fact. as long as society is the way it is, there’ll be depression. maybe there are drugs that universally ‘cure’ depression, like prozac, but what kind of ‘cure’ is it? it’s too simple, and so it’s likely that they cure the depression by killing some part of the person, in some subtle but profound way, not detectable by scientific instruments. maybe the drugs really are best for some people, but can we really blame someone who might be depressed and refuses to take them?
you were implying that you don’t believe in suicide because there of the wonders of modern society, but then you said it’s murder and murder is always wrong, implying suicide would be wrong no matter what would be available! but i think it’s hard to say whether suicide is moral. if someone stabs himself in the foot, is that immoral? similarly is self-murder immoral? especially considering he may have stabbed himself in the foot because he believed it’s the best thing for him? instead of self-murder we could call it self-euthanasia. i dont know if you meant wrong as in immoral but can we say that a person can never be correct in his concluding that his own life is not worth living? how can we know? what factors do we consider in determining whether thats possible?
Chimney,
I agree with basically everything you said.
Bravo! The only beef I have with this statement is that a very few people actually do want to die - but I only mention that to show my support of what you say. I entirely agree, and I applaud your making a statement which will surely draw blind criticism from others.
Along with this, I think your solution to the issue is absolutely correct - the people who can come out of a 20-year coma are exactly a select few, and the general principle works with the vast majority of cases.
This is the first time I’ve ever seen the question “what is death?” in a discussion about a death topic (euthanasia, the death penalty, abortion). We’re all gonna die sometime anyway, so it isn’t important in these discussions.
Exactly - we shouldn’t force dozens, say, of people to suffer just because of one unlucky person.
I don’t consider myself an idealist. And yes, for once the Nazi subject is relevant for mentioning in a topic: my response is that the things I’m advocating apply “across the board”, not just to certain groups, and that the basis of it is compassion, not anything political.