“Always to Care, Never to Kill”

National Review Online ^ | March 21, 2005 | Q&A by NRO Staff

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National Review Online recently had a chance to talk to Robert P. George, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, about the Terri Schiavo case and the broader issue of assisted suicide. Professor George has published widely on law, ethics, and philosophy in books, scholarly journals, and, too rarely, in articles for NRO. He previously served as a presidential appointee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

National Review Online: How should we go about thinking about the circumstances under which it is morally permissible to refuse medical treatment? What principles ought to guide us?

Robert P. George: From a moral vantage point, it can be, though it will not always be, permissible to decline treatment — even potentially life-saving treatment — when one's reason for declining the treatment is something other than the belief that one's life, or the life of the person for whom one is making a decision, lacks sufficient value to be worth living. What we must avoid, always and everywhere, is yielding to the temptation to regard some human lives, or the lives of human beings in certain conditions, as lebensunwerten Lebens, lives unworthy of life.

[AliVeritas]

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