Congressional ridiculousness aside, it's been heartening to see that most (?) people seem to recognize that the Schiavo case is morally (though perhaps not legally) complex, and are not going to get zealous one way or the other.

I haven't apprised myself of all the relevant details of the case, but here are some things I think I think:

-- it would be morally permissible to keep the tube in as well as to remove it. And I think most people are onto this, and the most disturbing voices we hear are those on either extreme, who either think we must remove the tube or to keep it in.

-- I'm not too concerned with Terri Schiavo herself, since it seems reasonable to assume she's not there anymore, what with no cerebral cortex and all. If that's true, then the case becomes enormously less interesting, and the ambiguity I noted in the first comment isn't really moral ambiguity so much as it is that either course of action is morally insignificant. I suppose the real interest in the case lies in what it reveals about the people doing the deciding about the tube -- both sides of which are probably committing a fundamental error if the above analysis is correct, because they both seem to be assuming that she's still a person. If there were reason to think she were still a person, then -- astonishingly -- I think I *could* find myself on the side of W and "erring on the side of life", though many other details of the case would have to be filled in first.

- There are deep problems with motivation on both sides -- "deep" in that it seems that in any such case it will be hard to determine whether what one's own motivation for making the decision would be.

-- While I am in favor of yanking the tube, I do wonder why some people in the debate seem so eager to yank that tube - maybe we can chalk it up to the polarizing effects of the extreme right.

-- A living will would not make such situations unproblematic, because of the potential problem of partial information.

-- while the Congressional legislation was ridiculous, I don't think it was ridiculous because the decision is essentially a state/private matter, but because of the details of the "law" passed.

-- tangent: the killing/letting die or active/passive euthanasia distinction is not useful at all, and I don't understand why so many people are attracted by the idea that it is sometimes okay to pull life support, but never okay to inject someone with an overdose of morphine or whatever. There is a distinction there, I think, and of course there are sometimes (often?) cases where killing someone would be wrong but letting them die wouldn't be wrong, but it would not be because one act was a "killing" while the other was a "letting die", but because of a different distinction -- namely, the attitude that we take toward the victim -- that those two categories need not map onto

  ¶ 8:24 PM