Euthanasia and consequences

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Call for no-consent euthanasia

The key part of this argument is all to do with moral philosophy:

Prof Doyal says withdrawing life-saving treatment from severely incompetent patients - which may involve turning off a ventilator, ending antibiotics or withdrawing a feeding tube - is "believed to be morally appropriate because it constitutes doing nothing. It is disease that does the dirty work, not the clinician. Yet this argument cannot wash away the foreseeable suffering of severely incompetent patients sometimes forced to die avoidably slow and distressing deaths."

He draws a parallel with a father who sees his baby drowning in the bath and fails to do anything to save it. The father foresaw the certainty of the death and did nothing and would therefore be morally considered to have killed the child.

"Clinicians who starve severely incompetent patients to death are not deemed by law to have killed them actively, even if they begin the process by the removal of feeding tubes. The legal fiction that such starvation is not active killing is no more than clumsy judicial camouflage of the euthanasia that is actually occurring."

First of all, I thought that there was quite a lot of confidence that most cases of withdrawal of treatment did not cause unnecessary suffering. (Or at least, if suffering was detected, there is no issue with administering pain relief, even if an unintended consequence is shortening life.) So I am not sure that unnecessary suffering is really the issue.

But this Professor's arguments are all based on an acceptance that consequentialism is the right way to make ethical decisions. Peter Singer is also a "consequentialist", which should send up warnings.

Rather than have me bang on about why it consquentialism is a problem, have a look at the good Wikipedia article about its critics. (All hail Wikipedia.)