Death and Natural Life Since

¶ … Death and Natural Life

Since the age of modern medical intervention and surgery, healthcare in general, sanitation, and nutrition, human longevity nearly doubled in the Western Hemisphere during the 20th century (Yates, Djousse, Kurth, Buring and Gaziano, 2008). In most respects, that is a good thing, but there is also a dark cloud to the silver lining. Specifically, larger numbers of people continue living long beyond the age at which they would probably have died and for many of them, their last years of life may be more painful for them and for their families than they would have wanted to prolong through aggressive acute interventions as long as they did.

One of the consequences of the fast evolution of clinical medical science is that the vast majority of healthcare resources will inevitably be spent on the last phase of life, and often without necessarily generating value in terms of quality of life from public healthcare resource beneficiaries. That is not to suggest that healthcare should not work to prolong and maximize the quality of human life as much as possible. But there is no benefit to managing patients at the probable end of their natural lives exclusively as medical cases without consideration for whether prolonging life by artificial intervention is necessarily the optimal moral choice from some perspectives. Generally, if there is only a pessimistic prognosis for the objective quality of life for a patient of advanced age, making the most aggressive recommendations for clinical intervention of all of the natural ways that death otherwise occurs naturally from advanced age may not necessarily be the most ethical thing to do.

Natural Life Span vs. Maximum Life Span

Natural life span is not the same thing as maximum life span. The former refers to the life span or life-span range that is the most probable for a given person at the time of birth (Yates, Djousse, Kurth, et al., 2008). It reflects all of the factors and influences that typically determine longevity for the members of a given population. The maximum life span refers to the highest verifiably recorded age of any member of a given population; by definition, this represents the exception rather than the rule.

Age-Based Rationing vs. Discrimination and Slavery

On could reasonably argue that age-based rationing of healthcare resources is a delicate ethical issue or that it represents the potential for insensitive decisions; but it is not, fundamentally, a form of discrimination and it is completely differentiable from a societal moral abomination like slavery. First, it is not arbitrary the way a distinction based on ethnicity is. Instead, it is based on the objective principle of conserving public healthcare resources optimally to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Second, it is not discriminatory, because it would affect everyone the same. That is because every person would be entitled to maximum benefits eligibility until the same specific age. Unlike any kind of discrimination, certain forms of healthcare (such as major surgery) could be justifiably excluded from coverage at the expense of the public if the objective medical prognosis projected an extension of life of less than one-twentieth of the age of patient. The issue could still be argued in terms of the ethics of withholding care, but it is not discriminatory.

Age Discrimination vs. Race Discrimination

In principle, age discrimination is like race discrimination in that it results in different rights or treatment of certain people because of a shared characteristic and also because that characteristic is not something that is the result of choice. Just as nobody can control his or her ethnicity or skin color, nobody can avoid aging or deteriorating in health as a function of advancing age. However, age discrimination and race discrimination are much more different than they are similar, mainly because everybody ages and because there are objective rationale for certain kinds of different treatment of people based on chronological age that do not apply to racial discrimination. For example, race does not determine how physically capable a person is of performing a set of tasks or how long he or she may continue working for an employer, or how much he or she is likely to miss work because of health problems or how much the employer may have to pay out in healthcare costs over that employee's career with the organization.

Feasible Possible Alternatives