Last week I came upon an article on another thread that provoked some pondering. You might find it interesting. I struggled with what looked like hair splits to me.
Message 21156325
"From a moral vantage point, it can be, though it will not always be, permissible to decline treatment — even potentially life-saving treatment — when one's reason for declining the treatment is something other than the belief that one's life, or the life of the person for whom one is making a decision, lacks sufficient value to be worth living. What we must avoid, always and everywhere, is yielding to the temptation to regard some human lives, or the lives of human beings in certain conditions, as lebensunwerten Lebens, lives unworthy of life."
So far so good. But then he says:
"We know of course that there are lots of legitimate reasons for declining medical care. Often it's burdensome in nature; often it interferes with other opportunities that one might have, the opportunity for example to spend the remaining time one has, even if it will be shorter, in the embrace of one's family in the home rather than in an institution; sometimes it's the daunting expense that is involved. These can be morally legitimate reasons for declining medical care even where treatment could extend life a bit."
I'm struggling to see the differencce between that and finding one's life not worth living, the aforementioned tabu. |
