Acting To Let Someone Die Analysis

In Acting to Let Someone Die, Andrew McGee critiques the medical ethics view that withdrawing life-sustaining treatment (LST) or life support is an act of killing in contrast to the idea that withdrawing LST is simply an omission rather than an act. He focuses mainly, however, not on whether withdrawing LST is an omission or an act but whether the withdrawal lets the person die or kills them, concluding that providing LST merely postpones death and its withdrawal just lets the person die of the original causes that initiated the LST in the first place. I plan to assess McGee’s discussion of the difference between withholding and withdrawing life-saving treatment, a distinction that he ultimately decides does not exist, and the idea that there
This achieves his ultimate goal of eliminating this distinction between withholding and withdrawing entirely, thus supporting one of the key points to his overarching argument that withdrawing LST lets a person die rather than kills the person. The analysis of classifying withholding and withdrawing as equivalent is convenient for McGee’s overall conclusion, but I find that the argument has some gaps and counterarguments left unexplored by the author, especially concerning the moral implications of withholding versus withdrawing treatment. On The article Are withholding and withdrawing therapy always morally equivalent? by Daniel P Sulmasy and Jeremy Sugarman addresses that exact issue. The two authors begin by noting that the idea that the idea that there is no moral difference between withholding and withdrawing LST is widely accepted among many medical ethicists and begin to flesh out why exactly they are not among them. “Withholding is distinguished from withdrawing by the simple fact that therapy must have already been initiated in order to speak coherently about withdrawal. Provided that there is a genuine need and that therapy is biomedically effective, the historical fact that therapy has been initiated entails a claim to continue therapy that cannot be attributed to
In support of his argument for the equivalence of withholding and withdrawing treatment, McGee references the equivalence principle saying that just as lawful withholding LST is ethical and does not cause death, so lawful provision and then subsequent withdrawal of LST is ethical and does not cause death either. Sugarman and Sulamsy reference a similar Equivalence Thesis which asserts two things: 1) If it would have been morally permissible to have withheld a therapy (that has in fact already been started), then it is now morally permissible to withdraw that therapy; and 2) If, in the future, it would be morally permissible to withdraw a therapy (that has in fact not yet been started), then it is now morally permissible to withhold that therapy (Sugarman and Sulmasy, 1994). They argue against this thesis with the hypothetical case of a newborn set of twins who both have suffered from carbon monoxide poisoning, but there is only one respirator to save them. The doctor flips a coin to choose which girl gets it and proceeds to hook Girl 1 up to it, but then the parents request that it be switched to the Girl 2 because they like her more. The moral implications of withholding the respirator from Girl 1 in the first place