Letting Him Down: making the euthanasia decision easier

Euthanasia versus letting die: Christian decision-making in terminal patients.

Utilitarianism and quality-of-life considerations have increased the pressure to devalue life in terminal situations, leading to ethical confusion among caregivers. Where is the balance between a commitment to life and a commonsense willingness to "let go" when the time comes? This paper explores this balance, using a case history of a man with respiratory failure. This provides an opportunity ...

Killing, letting die and euthanasia.

Medical ethicists debate whether or not the moral assessment of cases of euthanasia should depend on whether the patient is 'killed' or 'allowed to die'. The usual presupposition is that a clear distinction between killing and letting die can be drawn so that this substantive question is not begged. I contend that the categorisation of cases of instances of killing rather than as instances of l...

Option Grids: shared decision making made easier.

OBJECTIVE To describe the exploratory use of short decision support tools for patients, called Option Grids. Option Grids are summary tables, using one side of paper to enable rapid comparisons of options, using questions that patients frequently ask (FAQs) and designed for face-to-face clinical encounters. To date, most evidence about 'patient decision aids' has been based on tools with high c...

Making Life Easier for Firefighters

Being a firefighter is a tough job, especially when tight city budgets do not allow enough firefighters to be on duty when a fire starts. This is formalized in the Firefighter problem, which aims to save as many vertices of a graph as possible from a fire that starts in a vertex and spreads through the graph. In every time step, a single additional firefighter may be placed on a vertex, and the...

Dummy Elimination: Making Termination Easier