Article Text
Abstract
This paper takes a novel approach to the active bioethical debate over whether advance medical directives have moral authority in dementia cases. Many have assumed that advance directives would lack moral authority if dementia truly produced a complete discontinuity in personal identity, such that the predementia individual is a separate individual from the postdementia individual. I argue that even if dementia were to undermine personal identity, the continuity of the body and the predementia individual’s rights over that body can support the moral authority of advance directives. I propose that the predementia individual retains posthumous rights over her body that she acquired through historical embodiment in that body, and further argue that claims grounded in historical embodiment can sometimes override or exclude moral claims grounded in current embodiment. I close by considering how advance directives grounded in historical embodiment might be employed in practice and what they would and would not justify.
- advance directives
- bioethics
- dementia
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Twitter @GovindPersad
Contributors I am the sole author of this manuscript.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent Not required.
Ethics approval This article was not based on human subjects research.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- The harm principle, personal identity and identity-relative paternalism
- Moral uncertainty and the farming of human-pig chimeras
- Critical notice—Defending life: a moral and legal case against abortion choice by Francis J Beckwith
- In defence of newborns: a response to Kingma
- Are those who subscribe to the view that early embryos are persons irrational and inconsistent? A reply to Brock
- Is there a ‘new ethics of abortion’?
- Genetic enhancement, post-persons and moral status: a reply to Buchanan
- Challenging the principle of proportionality
- Views of the person with dementia
- Infanticide and moral consistency