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Pascal's Wager and the persistent vegetative state.

Jim Stone1

  • 1The University of New ORleans, USA. jstone@uno.edu

Bioethics
|September 12, 2007
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Pascal's Wager supports continued life for patients in persistent vegetative state (PVS). Considering this wager is crucial for informed decisions regarding life-sustaining treatment and advance directives for PVS patients.

Area of Science:

  • Medical Ethics
  • Neuroscience
  • Philosophy

Background:

  • Persistent Vegetative State (PVS) presents complex ethical dilemmas regarding life-sustaining treatment.
  • Advance directives require informed consent, yet definitions of 'permanent' PVS are debated.
  • The minimally conscious state (MCS) is an emerging diagnostic category relevant to prognosis in PVS.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To defend the application of Pascal's Wager to decisions about continued life for PVS patients.
  • To argue that current understandings of PVS prognosis and diagnostic criteria are inadequate for informed consent.
  • To assert that withdrawing medically-delivered nutrition and hydration from PVS patients is ethically more challenging than often assumed.

Main Methods:

  • Philosophical argumentation applying Pascal's Wager to PVS.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Analysis of diagnostic criteria for PVS and MCS.
  • Ethical evaluation of informed consent in the context of advance directives.

    • Main Results:

    • Pascal's Wager provides a strong ethical basis for choosing continued life in PVS cases.
    • The likelihood of recovery from long-term PVS and regaining independence is underestimated.
    • Current definitions of permanent PVS are flawed, complicating advance directive creation.

    Conclusions:

    • Decisions regarding PVS patients must incorporate Pascal's Wager for informed consent.
    • Withdrawing nutrition and hydration from PVS patients is ethically difficult to justify.
    • Improved understanding of PVS prognosis and diagnostic categories is needed.