Terry Schaivo...

Gary C Gibson. - 12:32pm Mar 21, 2005 EDT (#295 of 301)
Social philosophy issues exemplified in the Terri Schaivo life continuity struggle were not resolved or substantively addressed by the bill Congress passed and the President signed to relive her from immediate forced starvation and send the issue back to the courts.Courts cannot substitute for legislation with Judicial activism. They cannot add into the U.S. Constitution or body of laws what isn't there by forming a patchwork of common law precidents.

The gaps in legal reasoning created by a Congress indebted to the biomedical and trans-national oil industries has previously had opportunity to set standards for beyond natural limits of life extended individuals such as Terri Schaivo, VP Cheyney, and millions of others. Congress must define whom has the right to decide which adults should die, and clarify when it is or isn't murder. At issue is the alienation of individual rights when advanced medical procedures are applied to extend life beyond a natural limit. Laws made before penicillan, open heart surgery and numerous others radical advances were developed never needed to examine the issue and issues of artificially extended life.

Laws that were made against murder and manslaughter were not composed to consider who has the right to turn off the 'feeding tupe', the dialysis machine, the pacemaker etc. Human beings do not have the capacity to act anything at all on God's level, it is hubris and outright silly when they do so in their moments of faithlessness choose to express the opinion that 'they should not play God'. If Leonardo Di Vinci were considered to be God for illustrative purposes, human abilities at the creation of art would not even rise to the level of mud-pies. Even so the moment when humanity choose to play 'mud pie-make' arose when medical science permitted the widespread artifical extension of life with antibiotics and other devices. The role of aesclepus and modern doctors is to extend life not to kill it.

The role of physicians is to perpetuate life and health not decide when and how to end it. Lawmakers cannot pass the buck on examining social philosophy and legal issues to doctors either. Lawmakers must consider the loss of civil rights if any that should occur to individuals living on artificial life support, and who has the right to choose to kill them. The issue of taking another's life has in civilized society always been a public and legal issue rather than a personal issue. La Sagrada Familia was a process philosophy of architecture and contemporary design raising the highest aspirations of mankind in the civil society of Barcelona and Catalonia into a temporal ecclesiastic context. The peace was unfortunately followed by the facist conquest and the slughter of thousands of intellectuals under Franco.

The legal and social structures mankind erects are no sure defense against Satan and the pervasive incursions of evil when so many want to rule the world. It has not been previously decided who should have the right to execute a judgement of death upon a life-extended individual by nihilation of artificial life support. Some my philosophically consider the broader question of what environmentally comprises life support in a mass production society of course, yet Occam's Razor of national debt and foreign and transnational investment and reliance would seem to preclude a democratic treatment of those concerns in the U.S. public sector filtered by mass media inertializng trans-national corporate fiat...

Gary C Gibson. - 12:39pm Mar 21, 2005 EDT (#296 of 301) http://www.ggibsonsblog.blogspot.com/
Members of society cannot be expected to acquiesse as accomplices to publicized distant yet Americans processes to starve to death any American in citizen in a sort of public specticle to rival the Michael Jackson trial if that wer possible.

Of course people in Mexico are just trying to have 6 or 7 children, and Americans are talking about perpetuating 'vegetables' or whatever would seem a luxury abroad, yet the moral devlopment of a nation should occur even if the border is porous and other cultural values may be at war. It isn't evident that the free market could not meet a need for low-cost storage and maint facilities for the brain challenged (excluding Mr. Cheyney here) as well as bio-med body screening diagnostic and imaging machines in for a quarter per use to replace those disappearing phone booths from the American street corner.

When no one lived with artificial life support no one had to decide if someone else's life support should be turned off. It was never debated at that point if an ontological duty or right existed to continue a life or to 'turn off' a life. Was the right to 'turn off' another's life a murder, a man or womanslaughter or what? Do insurance and property ownership rights remain with art-extended 'vegetables', or do they go to next-of-kin? Should lawmakers make structures to adjudicate death sentences upon the low-brain functioning people on life-support and appoint executioners to impose a more humane method of death than protracted withdrawl and starvation from life support?

Of course some sort of official investigation would need to be made to certify that the targeted individual fully conformed to the legal requirements for imposing a death sentence upon them. The trouble, or a trouble, is that there are many people of moral conscience that would not wish to acquiesese in the death by others of others in American society-even if they say it's there right to privacy as kin to kill them. Individuals married together may lose certain rights that individuals normally would be expected to have regarding relationbs with other persons.

However there are many individual rights that fully remain within family relationships that are inalienably given by God and enforced as codified in the U.S. Constitution and sundry other promulgations consistent with the constitution. Freedom from torture, from slavery, from assault and battery, from captivity and from murder are obviously inalienable rights for ordinary individuals in any civil spocial context inside or outside of a family group. This recent 'right' of choosing to end the life of another, albeit defenseless individual with low brain activity (can they put the NMR brain activity tensors of Terry Schaivo up on CNN...a variety of circumstances and images in response to various stimuli would be interesting) cannot be just ad hoc'd and evaded by Congress.

If someone is going to be accountable for ending the lives of others after artificially taking them past the point where nature would have eneded the life it is a new category of moral accountability that affects all members of the society in which those people might be terminated.

Gary C Gibson. - 01:12pm Mar 21, 2005 EDT (#300 of 300) http://www.ggibsonsblog.blogspot.com/
...If there are those willing to pay the costs of keeping very damaged individuals alive until they die of a natural death from some other cause it would seem senseless not to allow them to do so. If social poverty demands that no expenses go toward the maint. of artificial life support, then that would perhaps become a natural end in itself. It would be good if the minimal brain activity of Congress and the President in balancing the federal budget and creating surpluses to pay off the national debt would show some signs of occurring. Yet it may be that alternate fuels, alternate transport modes, sales of my political books and other positive developments will need to wait for the future inspired paramount leader to show up with puxatawnee Phil.