Back to the Quill Case: The Unpleasantness of Gray-Area Cases

On April 2, I very briefly discussed the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Vacco v. Quill (1997). I promised more. So here, at least, is a bit more.

To resume where I left off: the court's opinion, by Chief Justice Rehnquist, said this:

"[W]e disagree with respondents' claim that the distinction between refusing lifesaving medical treatment and assisted suicide is 'arbitrary' and 'irrational.' ... Granted, in some cases, the line between the two may not be clear, but certainty is not required, even were it possible. Logic and contemporary practice support New York's judgment that the two acts are different, and New York may therefore, consistent with the Constitution, treat them differently."

It had by then become customary for some patients to carry the "do not resuscitate" tag with them. The decision to so label a patient was NOT treated as murder. Providing the patient (a mature, rational patient in a lot of pain) with a pill than would enable him to end his own life: THAT was prohibited. The question is whether this distinction makes sense.

Judging from their comments in oral argument, the Justices in Quill seem to have worried most about slippery slopes. At the bottom of the slope, one can imagine a doctor prescribing a lethal dose of a pill to a teenager who was suffering from the pangs of unrequited love, or dealing with a bad break-up with his/her first love. Imagine this person of majority age but still young enough (and perhaps sheltered enough) to have had little experience of the ups and downs and eventual recovery and new ups in such matters. The strong intuition is that assisting THAT suicide is wrong. Though that hypothetical sounds very different from the actual facts of Quill, the Justices wanted and failed to receive assurances of a firm conceptual distinction somewhere that would serve better than the simple seeming distinction between killing and not-keeping-alive.

What then were the facts in Quill? Dr, Dennis Quill sued New York on behalf of mentally competent terminally ill patients. Crucially, though the pathology was well advanced in the case of each patient involved (and three of them died while the matter was pending before SCOTUS) they were NOT on life sustaining equipment, Thus, there was no "plug" to "pull." That was their equal protection argument: they were being denied the same right to hasten death as would be available to someone who WAS on a respirator or the like, who COULD effectively ask that the plug be pulled.

Personally, I sympathize with the Justices' concern about the slipperiness here. But I have to wonder whether a sort of institutional self-interest plays a part. The Justices don't want to hear a string of heart-breaking cases in various gray areas and to have to make difficult calls. Nor do they want their colleagues in black robes on lower courts to have to do the same. Is that in part simply because it is an agonizing thing to have to do, and they want their own jobs and those of their colleagues to be shielded from that agony?

If it IS their job, then they should be willing to bear it. Nobody should have to, well ... give them a pill to enable them to avoid it!

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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