Baffled About Terry Schiavo

I don't have anything interesting to say about the Schiavo case, but I would like to express my bafflement at how this issue has seemingly become politicized. I wouldn't have guessed that people would have lined up along liberal-conservative lines on this one.

I'm not even sure whether those who oppose removing her feeding tube do so because they think that human life should be preserved even in cases in which there is no mental activity or because they think that Ms. Schiavo is still mentally alive. That is, I don't know whether this is a disagreement about the moral principle or about the non-moral facts of the matter.

Since it seems preposterous to think that it is obligatory (e.g.) to keep someone's body alive even after their brain has been removed, my guess is that those who opposed the removal of the tube do so because they think that she is still mentally alive. That is, that this is a disagreement about the neurological facts of the matter rather than about moral principle.

But I doubt that most of us actually know enough about Ms. Shiavo's condition, or about PVSs to make such a judgment. So is this yet another case in which we have to leave the determination of the facts up to the experts? Well, hesitant as I am to trust doctors about anything very conceptually complex, I'm inclined to think it is.

[Semi-footnote: a friend of mine is in his first year of med school and is on a panel that considers bioethical issues. Recently, explaining how bad most doctors' moral reasoning is, he said "I'll be happy if I hear just one valid argument before the year is out. I've given up hoping for soundness. I'll settle for validity."]

But it's probably worth noting that it is likely that consciousness is a vague property--that is, a property that one can possess in degrees. Much of what I read on the subject seems to presuppose that Ms. Schiavo is either conscious or she isn't, though it seems like the real question might be to what extent is she conscious? Of course, the answer might be to no degree whatsoever; on the other hand, it might be to some slight degree. Perhaps she is, say, as conscious as a dog. Would it be wrong to end her life in that case? Or maybe she's rather less so, perhaps to the same degree as a cat. What then? A mouse?

What a horrific thing. What a horrific decision to have to make.

But, back to the original point, why on Earth would conservatives and liberals line up on different sides of this one? If they are disagreeing about the neurological facts of the matter, then--since those issues are orthogonal to political issues--one would expect pro- and anti-tube-removal people to be distributed evenly across the two political camps.

So what's going on? A (pretty obvious?) conjecture: this is a disagreement about what to do in a case in which it is possible but very unlikely that someone is conscious to a significant degree. For some reason a segment of the religious right (though I've read somewhere that it's not a majority of folks on the right) think that the right thing to do is keep the putative person alive, whereas most others think it isn't. At least this is consistent with analogous conclusions with regard to the very similar abortion question, another case in which we can't tell to what degree the creature in question might be conscious.

It's still not clear, however, why people would line up in this way.

Um...more later?