Just Kill Me Now, Please!
Megan McArdle asks "How much should we take into account someone's advanced wishes?". She gives several examples of folks who might say something like "I'd rather die than live like that", where the folks saying it are, say, very athletic and "like this" means living as a paraplegic in a wheelchair. Interesting questions, sure enough, but not what I was talking about yesterday.
There's some food for thought in her questions, but I don't think there's much dispute about making decisions based upon "what someone wants or would have wanted" in the cases she presents. If the person can recover brain functions we help them to recover them and what happens next is up to them. If the person can't recover brain functions then what do we do? I continue to think that even if that person "wouldn't want to live that way", the very essence of how we're defining this problem means that the person is oblivious to how they are living at the moment, and will continue to be that way so as long as their lungs draw breath, whether naturally or artificially. In other words -- to that person it no longer matters whether the "plug" is pulled or not, by the very way we define discussions like this. They simply can't and won't know what decision is or isn't made.
It's a living will, not a comatose will. It's there for the living to do with as they please. I'm waiting for the case where the agent named in a living will decides to not "pull the plug" even though that's what the will says should happen -- in other words, the reverse Schiavo case. Will someone else sue to "enforce" the document?