Levy Neil
Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, Oxford University.
Monash Bioeth Rev. 2009 Jun;28(2):13-1-13. doi: 10.1007/BF03351310.
The question whether and when it is morally appropriate to withdraw life-support from patients diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state is one of the most controversial in bioethics. Recent work on the neuroscience of consciousness seems to promise fundamentally to alter the debate, by demonstrating that some entirely unresponsive patients are in fact conscious. In this paper, I argue that though this work is extremely important scientifically, it ought to alter the debate over the moral status of the patients very little. First, the data presented is complex and difficult to interpret; we should be wary of taking the claimed discovery entirely at face value (though the remaining questions will probably be settled by future research). Second, though the demonstration that some of the patients are in fact conscious would show that they are moral patients, and therefore beings whose welfare must be taken into account, it would not, by itself at any rate, show that they have an interest in continued life.
对于被诊断为处于持续性植物状态的患者，在道德上是否以及何时撤掉生命维持设备是生物伦理学中最具争议的问题之一。最近关于意识神经科学的研究似乎有望从根本上改变这场辩论，因为它表明一些完全无反应的患者实际上是有意识的。在本文中，我认为尽管这项研究在科学上极其重要，但它对关于这些患者道德地位的辩论应该不会有太大改变。首先，所呈现的数据复杂且难以解释；我们应该谨慎对待所声称的发现，不能完全照单全收（尽管其余问题可能会由未来的研究解决）。其次，尽管证明一些患者实际上有意识会表明他们是有道德地位的个体，因此是其福利必须被考虑的存在，但无论如何，这本身并不能表明他们有继续生存的利益。
