Consider the following case:

On July 9th, 1992, my father was in a very serious car accident in Connecticut. He wasn't wearing seat belts and during the collision the left side of his head slammed into the support post running along side the windshield. He was taken immediately to Yale University Hospital in New Haven where he was kept alive and given serious painkillers. Even with the painkillers he was obviously in a great deal of pain, sometimes pretty obviously excruciating, other times not. He had suffered extensive brain damage and was, so far as anyone could tell, not really aware of his surrounding or his situation and never would be. There was, the Doctors told us, no hope of a real recovery, though early on they thought he might at some point survive without the help of the various pieces of equipment to which he was currently connected.

By the end of the month we faced the following issue: should we ask that further efforts not be made to sustain his life. We were told that he wouldn't die immediately if he were disconnected but that he would surely die relatively soon and that he could be given significant levels of morphine to eliminate as much pain as possible. My father had himself thought a great deal about questions of euthanasia and suicide. He had many times asked me to promise to help him die if the time came that he decided to commit suicide (which I wouldn't do). And he wrote a paper, which appeared posthumously in The Humanist (vol. 53, 1993, pp. 26-29), called "Death with Dignity," in which he defended the moral legitimacy of suicide but also argued against a public policy that would allow assisted suicide or euthanasia of anyone who was not mentally competent to make the decision at the appropriate time. As things stood, he was no longer in a position to make a decision and we had to.

Two Questions: