Tracing the soul: medical decisions at the margins of life.
Most religious traditions hold that what makes one a person is the possession of a soul and that this gives one moral status. This status in turn gives persons interests and rights that delimit the set of actions that are permitted to be done to them. In this paper, I identify the soul with the capacity for consciousness and mental life and examine the ethical aspects of medical decision-making at the beginning and end of life in cases of patients who either never have had or have lost this capacity. I argue that, although these patients may lack moral status, they nonetheless have moral value as human organisms and forms of God-given biological life. In particular, I explore what this value entails about the permissibility of withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment and of harvesting viable organs from patients with no higher-brain function.
Glannon
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Biomedical Ethics Unit, Faculty of Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 1W9.
D000757:Anencephaly; D033421:Beginning of Human Life; D001926:Brain Death; D003243:Consciousness; D003643:Death; D003704:Dementia; D004622:Embryo, Mammalian; D005066:Euthanasia, Passive; D006801:Humans; D018458:Persistent Vegetative State; D028723:Personhood; D010684:Philosophy; D028725:Theology; D014019:Tissue Donors; D020858:Tissue and Organ Harvesting; D026712:Value of Life; D028761:Withholding Treatment; D015053:Zygote
Death and Euthanasia; Genetics and Reproduction; Health Care and Public Health; Philosophical Approach; Religious Approach