[supercat]

This whole thing is a mess: "Hard cases make bad law"

This is not a hard case. It's a very easy case, marred by extreme corruption.

[presently no screen name]

It's a very easy case, marred by extreme corruption


Well said! It's almost like they are taunting us - "do something about it - because we aren't going to give you what you want... no matter what".

[lepton]

It IS a hard case, because while she IS severely damaged, and the upper end of PVS is neither clearly understood or defined, she is not comatose or brain-dead - though being beyond brain death, she may or may not be cognitive at all, while not being "asleep" as with a coma. She was severely messed-up; enough so that it is not at all unreasonable to expect that if she were capable of making the decision with detailed foreknowledge, that she might indeed choose to be allowed to die. Conversely, we don't have unquestionable evidence of that.

Complicating it further is that she is not terminal and does not require extreme measures to keep her alive (I think that this is probably the strongest relevant argument). The moral premise and argument for Right-to-die not being suicide is that the individual is terminal and that further treatment only extends suffering - that the treatments main effect is to force the extension of suffering. That is pretty clearly not the case here.

Regardless of how this works out, this case sits within the gray area, and attempts to legislate a response in this case will likely have a bevy of unintended consequences.