Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T19:28:56.927Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - Forgoing life-sustaining food and water: Is it killing?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Dan W. Brock
Affiliation:
Brown University, Rhode Island
Get access

Summary

The moral permissibility of patients forgoing life-sustaining medical treatment has come to be widely accepted. The issue of forgoing life-sustaining food and water, however, has only very recently gained attention in public policy discussions. One source of resistance to extending this acceptance of a general right to forgo life-sustaining treatment to the case of food and water has explicitly philosophical origins: for a physician to withhold food and water might seem to be not merely to allow the patient to die, but to kill the patient, and therefore wrong. A closely related moral worry is that for physicians to withhold food and water would be to make them the direct cause of their patients' deaths, which also would be wrong. And finally, many worry that providing food and water is ordinary care, not extraordinary or “heroic,” and so must be obligatory.

In each case, a distinction is drawn – between killing and allowing to die, causing or not causing death, and withholding ordinary or extraordinary care – and in each case it is claimed that the former, though not the latter, is morally forbidden. I consider appeal to the intrinsic moral importance of these distinctions to be confused, both in general and as applied to food and water. In the hope of reducing the impact of these moral confusions in the policy debate about forgoing food and water, I will address here both the general meaning and the putative moral importance of these distinctions, as well as their specific application to the case of food and water.

Type
Chapter
Information
Life and Death
Philosophical Essays in Biomedical Ethics
, pp. 184 - 201
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×