Is it morally wrong to take a life?

The Coffee Shop
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Interesting story brought up by Glen Beck this morning. It looks like some pretty slippery-slope stuff there.

Is it morally wrong to take a life? Not really, say bioethicists

by Michael Cook | 27 Jan 2012 | 4 comments

tags: bioethics, dead donor rule

Is it morally wrong to kill people? Not really, argue two eminent American bioethicists in an early online article in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, of Duke University, and Franklin G. Miller, of the National Institutes of Health believe that “killing by itself is not morally wrong, although it is still morally wrong to cause total disability”.

Ultimately their aim is to justify organ donation after cardiac death (DCD). This is a state in which a patient is neurologically damaged and cannot function without a respirator. Within minutes of withdrawing this, the organs are removed. However, the authors state frankly that the patient is not dead at that point because it is possible that the patient’s heart could start beating again. (Other bioethicists disagree, vehemently.)

“he criterion of irreversibility has not been satisfied; hence, these patients are not known to be dead at the time of organ procurement.”

In view of well-publicised organ shortages, transplant surgeons are eager to increase the number of available organs. DCD is an important avenue. However, a nagging suspicion that these patients might not be dead is still a substantial stumbling block because the medical profession insists that donors must always be dead. But Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller have an solution:

“he dead donor rule is routinely violated in the contemporary practice of vital organ donation. Consistency with traditional medical ethics would entail that this kind of vital organ donation must cease immediately. This outcome would, however, be extremely harmful and unreasonable from an ethical point of view . Luckily, it is easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing.”

http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/bioethics/bioethics_article/9901

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Luckily, it is easily obviated by abandoning the norm against killing.

Whew. For a minute there, it seemed like it might be a challenging problem. If all we have to do is abandon the norm against killing, though, what’s the problem?

but the authors are not murderers.

Are we sure?

Nor, they say, is life “sacred”. The only relevant difference between life and death is the existence of abilities – and a brain-damaged person no longer has these.

How are they defining “brain damaged”? (Cause it’s sounding like I might be able to do away with a few of my peskier in-laws. Oh, and save some lives, of course. I’m all about saving lives here.)

What abilities are they talking about?

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Is it morally wrong to take a life?

No.

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If they advocate “abandoning the norm again killing,” and if they’re actually willing to put that into practice, it’s hard to see how you could avoid the conclusion that they are killers.

I thought, however, that nowadays the life/death boundary was defined in terms of brain function rather than heartbeat?

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Nor, they say, is life “sacred”. The only relevant difference between life and death is the existence of abilities – and a brain-damaged person no longer has these.

How are they defining “brain damaged”? (Cause it’s sounding like I might be able to do away with a few of my peskier in-laws. Oh, and save some lives, of course. I’m all about saving lives here.)

What abilities are they talking about?

Yeah, they didn’t even say “brain dead”, which sometimes turns around as well.

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I think the arggument would be that they’re not testing the top of a slippery slope but defining with greater precision where the slope starts. At the point where the appearance of “life” is just a mechanical reaction to artificial stuimuli (respirators etc.) then I’m inclined to agree.

The grey area for me is where it can be shown that those reactions are supporting (not causing but supporting) something like brain function which, no matter how feeble and limited, is independant of those stimuli. Even is you can prove the brain function would shut down immediately on the stimuli being withdrawn I struggle not to call that life.

In the euthanasia debate I do make a distinction between proactive and reactive euthanasia. If death occurs because you cease doing something then it’s a lot easier for me than if you have to actually take steps to cause death. Regardless, that’s an argument that plays out in a scenario where someone has made a clear living will or our legal system has vested the power to make the decision in, say, a relative. The straw man for this scenario should be someone who has made it clear they would donate when dead but want all medical treatment available until that happens.

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No, it is ethically wrong to murder though. And that is where people seem to have disagreements. People view the death penalty, self defense of life and property, and war as murder where other do not.

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First off, I think the accepted rule on Slowtwitch is to post a link to the article rather than cutting and pasting the article itself. Don’t want anybody getting in any trouble!

As for whether it is morally wrong to take a life, the bit that confuses me is the line:

“the authors state frankly that the patient is not dead at that point because it is possible that the patient’s heart could start beating again. (Other bioethicists disagree, vehemently.)”

So when they start taking organs out, is it possible that the patient could recover or not? I sincerely hope that at that point they have already tried all the normal resuscitation techniques and declared the patient dead. If not, surely they should be trying to resuscitate? If the patient (or corpse at this point…) can’t be resuscitated and their heart isn’t beating, then how possible really is it for them to suddenly come back to life? 1 in a hundred, a thousand, a million? Or are we into the realms of “it’s never happened, but theoretically it could”, in which case as far I’m concerned they’re dead.

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seems to me that the crux here is the definition of ‘death,’ rather than the question of whether it’s morally wrong to take a life per se.

it’s been mentioned that brain death is more the key determinant of ‘life and death,’ now, but as i understand it even that isn’t clear. i think that, except where people get hit by runaway freight trains or something, ‘death’ is more a series of related events, or a cascade of increasing irreversibility, and we simply have to chose an arbitrary point in there somewhere where we say ‘death’ has occurred.

-mike

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This is the same perverted logic advanced by Margaret Sanger in her quest to legalize the killing of infants.

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Is it morally wrong to take a life?

No.

X2. Ask any active-duty member of the armed forces who has combat experience.

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Only if your a Hitler or a NAZI !!!

(I really wanted to be the first one to bring up hitler in a thread at least once.)