Withdrawal of life-support: four problems in medical ethics

... In this paper I shall consider the following four beliefs which often cluster together: A) Passive euthanasia is justifiable, but "pulling the plug" and active euthanasia are wrong; B) There is no right to health care. We have no duty to provide free riders with health care; C) Abortion is immoral because it violates the right to life of the fetus; D) Justice sometimes requires us to increase a patient's risk of death by shifting a scarce resource to someone who needs it more. For the sake of concreteness I shall attribute these beliefs along with certain, often invoked rationales to a purely imaginary person named Ron. I shall not show that the individual beliefs are right or wrong or that the individual rationales are strong or weak. Instead, I shall show that Ron cannot consistently use these four rationales to justify these four beliefs. More precisely, I shall show that beliefs (A) through (D) together with certain common, general background beliefs involve incompatible views about the withdrawal of life-support. My objective is to make the incompatibility explicit and thus to persuade people like Ron to abandon some of their beliefs.