The Moral Rights of the Terminally ILL

Abstract

The care of dying patients is a major concern of medical ethics. There are problems about how to keep up their morale; problems about how to reduce their suffering in a way that does not dull their remaining time; and moral problems about what treatment to undertake or terminate, and what information about it to give the patient and family. My main concern here will be with these moral problems. I shall explore them by examining certain of the important moral rights of people who are dying, but I shall also consider some of the moral rights of physicians and of a patient’s family. Of course, the moral issues raised by terminal illness may be approached differently, for instance by exploring the relevant moral principles; and the same substantive results might be reached by a quite different route. But talk of rights is pervasive in current discussions of these issues; and I believe that by clarifying certain of the rights of terminal patients, their doctors, and their families, we should achieve some insights into how a person in any one of these groups should treat people in each of the others. We should also learn something about the physician-patient relationship in general, and perhaps something about rights, which are not nearly so well understood as one would expect from the frequency and confidence with which many people invoke them to support their moral judgments.