Terri Schiavo Case to be Decided soon...

Mr. Pessimistic

Right...Marriage gives the next of kin status to the spouse. Which, IMHO, makes sense.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Loricat

The idea that the spouse is next of kin is one of the main arguments for gay marriage -- because you would hope that a surviving partner would not have to fight the family for the partnership's children or assets.

L

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Chris OConnor

This thread was moved from the Religion, Philosophy & the Arts forum to the Politics, Current Events & History forum.

Chris

MadArchitect

One thing that has been interesting to observe in all of this is how little people are capable of addressing the ethical and legal implications of the case apart from their emotional responses to it. You can hear it in the adjectives they use -- a friend said, "Why don't they just let that poor woman die?" People are angry, and angry people form solid opinions quickly and with very little recourse to a second opinion. I'm not sure how we can achieve any sort of clarity on a matter as things stand.

In some ways, it reminds me of the O.J. Simpson trial. Everyone seemed to have their own opinion as to whether or not he murdered Nicole Simpson. But if you dug deeply enough, it quickly became clear that their opinions generally weren't founded on any real preponderance of the evidence -- what evidence was available -- but rather on an emotional response. People were angry, either at the smugness of a celebrity who thought he could get away with murder, at a law enforcement system that seemed deadset on counteracting the success of a black man, or (if we admit that some people, even those we recognize as "good people", are sometimes prone to the worst thoughts) at a black man for killing his white wife. That these reasons for outrage were almost always founded on assumption rather than any real knowledge of the case was beside the point -- people needed a firm foundation on which to base their opinion, and these reasons served well enough. It always bothered me, how many people could give you a definite answer, "of course he did it" or "hell no he didn't." There were times when I would kissed a person on the spot if they had merely admitted that they didn't know.

The Schiavo case is a little more worrisome, though. We're no longer talking about the consequences of a death that has already taken place, but of whether or not to allow a death. I'm all for an emotional response to events, and the deadening of emotional affect is one of those tendencies in our culture that I think we should struggle against. I am not so sure that it should play such a heavy role in determining law or ethics.

jjacobs43

With all of the speculation about about the husband's motives in all this there is definately a similiarity to something like the OJ trial. But it's different in the sense that you don't really need to know all of the facts about the husband to have an opinion on the case. Whatever the husband's role and his motiviations, the fact is, this is a woman who has no chance of recovery based on any real medical opinions. I've never met a person that would want to be artifically kept alive like that. In my shoes, I'd want my spouse to be able to make the decision - I entrusted my life to this person when I married her. Removing emotion from the equation, you have to come to the conclusion that the husband should make the call - for the greater good of our freedoms.

MadArchitect

From a strictly legal standpoint, I'm not sure that the husband's apparant motivation should play any part, be it good or bad. Precedence is a concern, although, this particular case isn't necessarily in danger of sstting the precedent. The very fact that, in the absence of a living will, a spouse could end life support for the wrong reason, without any form of check placed upon that power, should be reason enough to suspend judgement.

I have no doubt that most married people in this forum have enough trust in their spouses to feel confident that their wishes would be carried out in just such an instance, and that doubt is, in all likelihood, well warranted. But to make it law would be to put the liberties of millions of less fortunate spouses in jeopardy. You can bet that there are people who would pull the plug on their own spouse in order to save themselves some money or facilitate a second marriage or for any other selfish reason you can imagine. It's easy enough to say that no one should stay married to such a person, but the evidence of social work suggests that it's a fuzzier line than many people would believe. And it may be an extreme minority that would want to be kept on life support even in the most extreme of debilitating circumstances. But if we're going to treat seriously their will in such a case, we have to protect even the minority cases, right?

Which isn't to say that we should necessarily respect their will. I'm open to arguments with the bottom line that anyone reduced to a certain state with no chance of recovery should be treated according to policy, as though their probable will in the case is nulified by their current state. I don't necessarily incline towards that viewpoint, and I think it raises some rather sticky questions, but I'd happily listen to anyone who could argue it well.

But the consensus in this forum seems to be that Terri Schiavo's probable will, and the probable wills of others in similar situations, should be respected. Fair enough, I'm just not convinced that the state has any reason to believe that the spouse is uniformly the best person to speak on their behalf.

Mr. Pessimistic

Mad: I will address your response soon.

I just read this article. This one thing stood out.

Quote:
Mary Schindler's recollection of what her daughter wanted was different. She testified that Terri had commented on news coverage of the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose ventilator was turned off in 1976 after her parents went to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Schindler said her daughter told her this about Quinlan: "Just leave her alone. Leave her. If they take her off, she might die. Just leave her alone and she will die whenever."

Link to story

Terri Schiavo was 13 years old in 1976. Maybe she said this at the time...but is it not possible that a 13 year old's views may change over the course of 14 years? (Terri was stricken with this condition in 1990).

Just food for thought.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Mr. Pessimistic

Quote:

WASHINGTON - A week after their unprecedented intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, Republican congressional leaders find themselves in a moral and political thicket, having advanced the cause as a right-to-life issue — only to confront polls showing that the public does not see it that way.

...

"Advocates of using federal power to keep this woman alive need to seriously study the polling data that's come out on this," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has been talking to both social and economic conservatives about the fallout. "I think that a lot of conservative leaders assumed there was broader support for saying that they wanted to have the federal government save this woman's life."

Public reaction to lawmakers a surprise

They keep shooting, they are going to hit their foot sooner or later!

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

MadArchitect

Here's an link leading to most of the case documents concerning Schiavo. I haven't had a chance to look through many of them yet, but I thought you guys might find it useful:
news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/schiavo/index.html

Mr. Pessimistic

Thanks Mad...my main goal is to provide any info I come across, so I appreciate your input!

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Mr. Pessimistic

Quote:
Consider it from another standpoint: which is the more serious crime, murder or larceny?

Now at the risk of sounding cold…I would place the Enron financial crime over the murder of, say, a child molester. While someone getting murdered may be horrible, it may be, I will not say justified, but understandable for any number of reasons. Crimes of the level of the Enron scandal hurt many more people, directly and indirectly than one murder.

Quote:
the cessation of life has more implications for the victim

How does the CESSATION of life have ANY implications on the victim…the victim is dead…there is no implications! But I forget I am talking to a theist …BUT IF one believes in god, heaven and such, the now dead person is better off in the after life, no? That is one thing I do not understand about religious folk…if the afterlife is so great, why is there such a fear of letting go (i.e. – The Schindlers).

Quote:
but a fatal wound is always more ethically serious than one that may heal.

I would dare say not always. You seem to say that the emotional wounds heal…but do they ever really subside? A fatal wound may be the right thing to do at any given time, depending on which moral model you follow. Some extreme Christians for example feel that any murder is wrong and a sin…but if someone is raping your daughter or slicing your wife’s neck, and you fail to save them because of a lack of lethal force, even if inadvertent, I think that is the real sin. The objective is to protect the victim in my opinion, when that victim is a real victim, and not someone who desires an assisted suicide, whom is someone making a choice.

Quote:
I understand that, but it is not a foregone conclusion, even in the minds of the ill, that death is preferable to a life of pain. One of the mistakes of dealing with circumstances like these, I would say, is that we tend to treat the human will as something constant and decisions as writ in stone rather than consciousness. I don't mean to sound callous, but even for the terminally ill, some days are better than others. It's a tricky line to walk, because just as we cannot rightly assume that the will to die will hold out indefinitely, we can't rightly assume that it won't.

And this is what I mean about philosophical banter…this line of reasoning takes away the chance of anyone making a decision for himself or herself, because human reason and independent decision making is thus irreversibly neutered. This is why the morals I have in my head are so much better than any I have seen…because I give the choice to the individual and trust that they are mature enough to make that decision. I do not think for anyone. I never said the human will is constant. But if one makes a decision to die on a given day and that wish is carried out, then that decision is very valid, as the individual is no longer around to change his/her mind. That final decision is the ultimate truth to that person.

Quote:
Unless death is instantaneous, though, a patient being euthenized passes through a number of degrees of consciousness. There is always a point at which they lose the ability to object, and in the interest of ethical practice we have to be concerned with whether or not that point precedes the loss of the ability to change one's mind.

This is philosophical micro managing. If the individual made this choice, which would be a process if legalized, with many contracts and forms to ensure the commitment of the individual, then the individual makes the choice. Whatever happens inside the individual, which cannot be intoned to the outside world, is not a consideration, since it is pure speculation.

Quote:
The problem is that, in any given case, it's impossible to decide from an external position whether or not a person is serious about suicide until it's over and done with.

Which is why the individual is key in this decision. Externally, we should stay out of it…especially the government.

Quote:
Voluntary ignorance is not, so far as I'm concerned, an ethical standpoint.

Speculation and second guessing a grown individual’s decisions and wishes an ethical standpoint to me. Is there any way to say that those that DO want to die would change their minds? Everyone by necessity of life has to make decisions, even if that decision is to let others make decisions for them. At any given time, decisions are made based on the state of current affairs in the decision-makers world. And these decisions are valid given those circumstances.

Quote:
How would an entirely subjective ethics benefit the world? How would it benefit anyone, really? If we hold ethics to be inherently subjective, then our attempts to condemn genocide, rape, oppression and so on will ultimately be frustrated.

You fail to understand me. Ethics are subjective, because I say murder is good. PROVE to me that I am wrong with real evidence and not just because you say it is wrong. Just like you cannot prove the natural rights of humans to be evident, you cannot prove that murder is wrong. So ethics are indeed subjective. Now, a system of subjectively agreed upon ethics is not subjective, if that is what the majority of people accept. Not that the majority is ‘right’, but they can enforce their chosen standards through policing and your basic use of force to make others obey or be imprisoned or put to death…or however else it could be enforced.
A system of ethics may be necessary and desirable, but they are still subjective. The fact that no two humans are in total sync in any respect should speak to this.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

MadArchitect

misterpessimistic: Now at the risk of sounding cold…I would place the Enron financial crime over the murder of, say, a child molester. While someone getting murdered may be horrible, it may be, I will not say justified, but understandable for any number of reasons.

Whether or not it sounds cold is a bit beside the point to me. If we're talking about crime, then murder is always a more serious crime than any merely economic crime. There's a bit of distortion in your example, though. If you're talking about the number of people harmed, then it's best to look at each crime as though the number of people harmed was equivalent. Let's do so, but to make the crimes as equivalent as possible, let's not use Enron as an example. We'll compare a serial killer and a particularly fierce con-man. Let's say that both have had the same number of victims -- the killer has mudered 100 people (we'll leave aside the question of torture, since my point deals specifically with death); the other has robbed 100 people to the point of absolute desolution (no savings, no property). Which is the worse crime? For that matter, which is morally worse?

Now let's throw in a qualification. Let's say that all of the victims were hospital inmates (and in fact, there have been cases of interns or nurses who have killed numerous patients over time, temporarily evading detection by making the deaths look accidental). Now we have 200 victims in a hypothetical hospital. One hundred of those victims no longer have the money to pay for treatment, and will soon be ejected. For some, this will be a serious threat to their health. But of the other 100 patients, health is no longer an issue -- there are no mortal issues confronting them any more. Some may have been terminal, others likely not. But even of those who were terminal they've been deprived of any time they might have had remaining. So what is the worse crime: the endangerment, to varying degree, of the first 100, or the deaths of the other 100?

Incidentally, by raising the issue of number of people affected, you've summoned up the spectre of a problem that's vexed utilitarianism since the time of Bentham and Mill. Which is the more important term in the formula "the greatest good for the greatest number", the "good" or the "number"? If it's impossible to rendered a certain degree of good to more than a few, is ethics best built on the foundation of giving a lesser good to everyone?

Crimes of the level of the Enron scandal hurt many more people, directly and indirectly than one murder.

How does the CESSATION of life have ANY implications on the victim…the victim is dead…there is no implications! But I forget I am talking to a theist

It's pretty obnoxious to have one belief thrown back in your face as the reason for every position you argue. And can you explain to the audience precisely what I believe about the afterlife? Recite for me exactly what I've said about the afterlife in previous posts, if you don't mind.

Without even raising the possibility of life after death, I would say that the fact of mortality raises every implication at once. Do you have particular ambitions? Do you care for particular people? Do you enjoy a particular hobby? Your death is a disaster for all those things at once, so I don't really see how a threat to any particular concern can outweigh the threat made to the cumulative concerns of a person's entire being.

You seem to say that the emotional wounds heal…but do they ever really subside?

They've got a better chance of healing than a fatal wound.

Some extreme Christians for example feel that any murder is wrong and a sin…but if someone is raping your daughter or slicing your wife’s neck, and you fail to save them because of a lack of lethal force, even if inadvertent, I think that is the real sin.

There are extreme believers who will posit any given thing as the ethical right. We regard them as extreme because their beliefs reduce a diverse range of situations to a single, simple point of view. We're not terribly concerned about them right now. What we're interested in is, what ethical position best takes into account the complexities of a given issue?

Personally, I would say that most people, when put to the test, would say there is a particular protocol involved in questions of mortality. It's wrong to harm another person, for instance, but it's okay to harm them if doing so will prevent greater harm from coming to someone else. That still leads to certain complexities -- for example, is it right to kill someone in order to prevent a rape? Most people would sanction the use of force or injury to prevent a violent crime like rape, but might not sanction lethal force unless the attempted rapist elevated the nature of the threat so that murder was equally probable.

The objective is to protect the victim in my opinion, when that victim is a real victim, and not someone who desires an assisted suicide, whom is someone making a choice.

Which brings us back to the question I raised earlier: if choice is liable to change, how can we rely on the choice of a voluntary suicide to excuse us from what would otherwise be an unethical act?

And this is what I mean about philosophical banter…this line of reasoning takes away the chance of anyone making a decision for himself or herself, because human reason and independent decision making is thus irreversibly neutered.

Not irreversably. But either way, if your complaint against philosophy is that it reveals the complexity inherent in any given situation, then I'd dismiss it out of hand. The only alternative is the sort of extremism that we mentioned above. Pragmatic extremism is no better than any other form of extremism. But an awareness of the ethical complexity of a situation does not have to bar one from practical action. We're only barred from practical action is we insist that every circumstance be ideal.

This is why the morals I have in my head are so much better than any I have seen…because I give the choice to the individual and trust that they are mature enough to make that decision.

Better in what sense? That's certainly more practical from your point of view, but it may not be more ethical. And I suspect that there are limitations to your application of that principle. You certainly wouldn't trust certain individuals to whatever decision they'd make with a shotgun. For that matter, would you make it a principle to never intervene in the case of any suicide? Where, if anywhere at all, do you draw the line?

But if one makes a decision to die on a given day and that wish is carried out, then that decision is very valid, as the individual is no longer around to change his/her mind. That final decision is the ultimate truth to that person.

Thinking of decisions in terms of days distorts the issue. Decisions and changes of mind take place on a scale of moments, not 24 hour periods. I'm not sure that you see the implications behind your statement. If death erases the ethical implications, then why can the same not be said of those who are murdered? Their death no longer matters to them, so what's the harm done?

Externally, we should stay out of it…especially the government.

I'd agree on the point of government involvement. Legal questions stand apart in my mind from purely ethical considerations. That "we" should stay out of it does not, to me, seem any more intuitive than the idea that we should stay out of any other self-inflicted harm. Drug-use, for example, is as much a choice as suicide; so are eating disorders. Are we to treat those the same way that we treat suicide -- as boundaries that we cannot rightfully cross?

Is there any way to say that those that DO want to die would change their minds?

No, there's not, and I'm not arguing for a secure ethical position, but rather an ethical position that recognizes the complexities introduced in ethical action by the fact of our subjectivity. My concern is that the position you have expressed makes the same kind of mistake as that made by the opposite position. The question that remains is, what position can we take in order to minimize the sort of mistakes in judgement that we will, as subjective creatures, invariably make? Total uninvolvement does not seem like an ethical position to me, merely a policy that serves as a precedence for inaction.

And these decisions are valid given those circumstances.

You've used the term valid several times now without addressing its ambiguity. You're going to have to provide a little more explanation if you want me to understand how it's valid in the specific terms of this part of the discussion, that is, valid as an ethical position.

You fail to understand me. Ethics are subjective, because I say murder is good. PROVE to me that I am wrong with real evidence and not just because you say it is wrong.

If you truly thought murder was good, then you'd take every opportunity to do it. There is, as this example suggests, a form of behavioralistic evidence for the truth of any ethical claim. The entire program of determining ethics in philosophers like Plato, Aristotle and Kant was founded on a more or less behavioralistic method.

The lack of a material reference point in ethics is not a matter of its subjectivity, but of its theoretical and social nature. You might just as easily describe democracy as subjective because it has no strictly physical or evidential analogue. The problem of calling either "subjective" is that you open both of them up to falsification thereby. I might, for example, refuse to recognize any given law of the country because it was created through the "subjective" process of democracy. But once I transgress that law, you can bet that there would be several million people ready to call me to task for it. For that matter, you could call monarchy subjective and claim yourself king. Rather than give any credence to your subjective claim, people would just consider you loony, as loony as though you had claimed that your dog told you to kill the president. Rather than call a social and cultural phenomenon like ethics subjective, I think it would be more apt to call it collective.

Ken Hemingway

Mr. P. wrote: Ethics are subjective, because I say murder is good. PROVE to me that I am wrong with real evidence and not just because you say it is wrong.

So, P, do you think that if someone said, “All children between the ages of 3 and 6 should be regularly subjected to sadistic sexual torture”, there would be no rational way to disagree with him?

If that's what you are saying, I disagree with you. I'm pretty sure that what he is proposing is wrong. Theists try to tell me that I have no right to say that if I don't believe in God. That unless the universe, in some sense, disapproves of this behaviour, then I cannot; that I must agree that there are no standards, that I have to admit that "everything is relative".

I am not convinced by them. I know that what the pedophilic sadist is saying is wrong, and I know that is not because of some magical dispproval coming from the sky. The difficulty is to get clear about how moral discourse works so that we can explain these conclusions.

The best I can offer at this point is to say that in these examples we are using the word "good" is the sense of "moral"; and then to add that anyone who claims that the sexual torture of children is moral, just doesn't understand what the word "moral" means.


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