T_Bone wrote:
@karlos
"Of course, this is a deeply sensetive issue. There rarely is any agreement where emotion is in conflict with rationality."
Even rationally I don't like it.
I don't like it either. The entire legal case stinks, turning the unfortunate victim of a tragic, irrecoverable injury into a legal/media circus. Any shred of dignity she may have had left has been completely leeched away.
She's going to die, it's inevitable, and she's probably not going to know one way or the other, but the precident this sets is just bad.
Looking at it rationally (and this might sound a bit cold, so apologies there), this lady is already dead. She has been dead for over a decade.
Death does not mean the cessation of all biological function. Indeed, when you die the cells in your body continue to function for some considerable time (depending on their tolerance to oxygen deprevation). Ultimately death is the cessation of all
coordinated metabolic function - the processes that seperate you from an equivalent mass of slowly dying individual living cells.
We can prolong the life of any tissue artificially by ensuring it receives nutrition and oxygen, but nobody would consider a person as being alive because their heart, donated for transplant, was now beating in someone elses chest cavity.
In this case, the basic biological functions of an entire human body are being sustained artificially. However, the single most critical function that seperates her as a person from her as a mass of living tissue has already been lost.
