Question Some people believe that removing someone from life support is wrong and is "playing God" because it could most likely cause death. With that line of thinking, shouldn't life support be considered "playing God" since they are sustaining life (especially when there is almost no chance for recovery)?

Accepted:
January 2, 2014

Comments

I think you're right to wonder about the 'playing God' objection. First off, it's not always clear what the objection actually is. Sometimes, it seems to be the straightforward claim that only God may make decisions about life and death (and so about when to prolong life or hasten death); humans may not. But, if this is the claim, you're right to notice that, if it works against a decision to hasten death, it should also work against a decision to prolong (or sustain) life; and so, the objection ends up also undermining the position of the person making the objection. But I wonder if the objection is not sometimes a different sort of claim, one that doesn't suffer this sort of problem. The claim might be that only God may decide the time of a person's death, particularly when means are available to us humans to prolong or sustain that life. In other words, the claim might be that, so long as there are means available to prolong a person's life, we humans must decide to use those means to prolong that life, because otherwise we are deciding to end that person's life prematurely and that's a decision that is properly left only to God. Now, there may very well be other problems with this version of the 'playing God' objection, but it at least doesn't suffer from the problem that you raise for the other version of the objection.

You'll notice that I didn't address the parenthetical "(especially when there is almost no chance for recovery)". That's because I think that is really a separate issue, one having to do with the relevant sense of 'life' that is or is not to be prolonged. If there's no chance of recovery (and so, let's assume, the person is in a permanent vegetative state), you might think that there is no way to prolong 'life' in the relevant sense of life. In this sort of case, you can often prolong the biological life by ensuring that the body's biological functions continue, but you cannot prolong the human life (a life of a human who is conscious, etc.), for there is no such life left to prolong. Why make this distinction (or a distinction like it)? Because someone who objects to 'playing God' in the second sense above could still agree to remove someone who's in a permanent vegetative state from life support, for she can say that this person is no longer 'alive' in the relevant sense and so there's no question of whether to prolong life or hasten death; there's only the question of whether or not to keep the body's biological functions going.