In whose interest?
Thomas Nagel
- Assisted Death: A Study in Ethics and Law by L.W. Sumner
Oxford, 236 pp, £35.00, July 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 960798 3
It would be best not to have to die at all, but failing that, many of us would like to have some control over the time and manner of our deaths, should we find ourselves in a condition so hopeless that there is no point in going on. At this date, in most of the world, including Britain and most of North America, the legally permissible forms of such control do not include voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. A physician may not, in most jurisdictions, administer or prescribe for self-administration a lethal drug for the purpose of ending life, even at the explicit request of a fully competent patient. Yet a physician is legally permitted (sometimes legally required) to take other steps that hasten death, if requested to do so by the patient or a proxy: he may end or withhold treatment (chemotherapy, antibiotics, surgery); withdraw or fail to initiate life support (respirators, feeding tubes); give high doses of opiates to relieve pain or induce coma, where these may also shorten life.
You are not logged in
- If you have already registered please login here
- If you are using the site for the first time please register here
- If you would like access to all 12,000 articles subscribe here
- Institutions or university library users please login here
- Learn more about our institutional subscriptions here
[*] Assisted suicide, but not euthanasia, is legal in Switzerland and in the states of Washington, Oregon and Montana in the US. The most unrestricted regime exists in Colombia, where the Constitutional Court struck down the prohibition of euthanasia in 1997, and no regulations have yet been put in place to govern the practice.
Vol. 33 No. 19 · 6 October 2011 » Thomas Nagel » In whose interest?
pages 13-14 | 2628 words