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Okay, my initial reactions to Chapter 2:

1. Does anyone else feel some misgivings about Gazzaniga's statement on page 27: "In some horrendous sense, they are no longer even members of our species, if being a member requires one to pass basic mental tests of competency"? Now, clearly Gazzaniga himself feels edgy about this point of view, but at the same time he does very little to discredit it. It seems like one of those gut reactions he mentions, but doesn't it require some corrective? It seems like a potentially unfortunate statement, one that could easily be prevailed upon by those looking to justify what we might otherwise regard as unethical behavior. If nothing else, it requires a hard and fast criteria for what standards we'll apply to the question of a subject's humanity, and I'm not sure that Gazzaniga has at all equipped us to address that question. Dementia patients, the mentally handicapped, victims of neurological trauma, the profoundly stupid -- it isn't at all a hypothetical question to ask where we draw the line. And at some point we have to get back to the basic question of why the question of humanness should hinge on mental capacity at all.

2. The last issue brings us to a more general observation, which is that Gazzaniga's opinion seems to be heavily influenced by the assumption of normitive states. The fully developed dementia case is not a normative state, but should that fact of its deviation from the norm render it susceptible to a difference in moral status? Even if "some sublime inner state" is unavailable to the Alzheimer's patient, are we justified in regarding them as less human? Eventually, the question has to be argued back to the point of who ought to be given the power to determine what are and are not the normative states, and how radically different a person must be to fall out of the protection of our ethical standards.

3. At least for the moment, Gazzaniga is right that "research on ageing that seeks eternal life is not the issue." (p. 30) The issue, it seems to me, is the control of life, and along with it, the control of death. Because, the more that evade the circumstances of a natural death, the more we're forced to consider the circumstances under which it is ethical to intentionally end life. What is a good death? And by extension, what is an unethical life -- that is, when is it unethical to continue living, or stickier still, to allow someone to live?

4. Methodological complaint: is Gazzaniga going to make a habit of justifying his opinions by analogy to inanimate objects? In the last chapter it was Home Depot; in this chapter it's "Nelly" the car. Such analogies function by allowing us to see human subjects as mere objects -- that will presumably allow us to view them without irrational biases -- but doesn't ethics begin by assuming that humans are somehow distinct as a class of objects? There's a serious danger, I think, in confusing the issue with analogies like these.

5. I've brought this point up in the euthanasia poll, but I'll bring it up here again. If society has an obligation to "allow a dignified method for ending life for those with terminal or totally debilitating diseases" (p. 33), shouldn't it also allow suicide under all circumstances? What about physical impairment confers on the desire to die a moral or ethical status that is denied to the otherwise healthy person?

6. Finally, I wanted to raise the question of how Gazzaniga's discussion of intent in the previous chapter plays into his ethical considerations in this chapter. Are they consistent or even compatible? For example, if, neurologically speaking, a senile demential patient could be viewed as equivalent to an early stage of embryonic development, how difficult would it be to rationalize an argument for performing scientific experiments on patients with a certain degree of mental deteriation, with or without a "living will" type declaration?

Yeah, a lot probably depends on how you define self-consciousness or awareness. Science probably will come up with an answer to the question of when awareness ends, but in order to do so it may begin by redefining what that term means. This happens a lot in the sciences, and a lot of time we as laypersons tend to adopt the answers without really being aware that the terms of the question have changed.

ginof: Perhaps those completely unable to function are not truely human. However, I don't know that we would take away any rights they have as humans.

This seems to me a pretty worrisome line to tread. On the one hand, it provides some sort of theoretical foundation for terminating life in the case of patients with presumably no chance of recovery. On the other, it could also provide the theoretical foundation for sustaining unrecoverable cases so that they may be used for certain kinds of scientific experiementation. Assuming that we all share, if not the conviction, then at least the vague feeling, that such use would serve as an ethical breach, then we're obligated to reassess either 1) the idea that humanity can be determined by "certain standards of competency", or 2) the assertion that this conception of humanity should serve as the basis for ethics.

I guess my thought experiment around this would be: If you knew that tomorrow you would no longer be able to communicate and you would die six months later, and during this 6 months you would be in a lot of pain, further, there was no chance of cure, would you want to die? I'm not sure, but I think I would. At the very least, many would seriously consider it.

Looking at the extremes can distort the issue. Let's take a less extreme example. If told that, tomorrow, they would be paralyzed from the waist down, how many people would opt for suicide now, while they can still do it for themselves? Do we have any sort of moral obligation to attempt to prevent that?

Or another: a person is told that they will go irrecoverably blind within the week. That person plummet's into despair, making clear gestures towards a desire to kill themselves. Given that blindness is, for that person at least, an "abnormal" state, why should we feel any less inclined to prevent their suicide than we would in the case of a physically healthy 15 year old?

tarav: Is not taking the pills suicide?

I say no. Not taking the pills cannot be equated with an active desire or intention to die. In some sense, it's refusing intervention, but I'd say it's no more an act of suicide than is smoking, or eating poorly. These are all choices that, when considered, are likely to lessen a person's chances of dying, but they're not made in order to hasten death but rather out of other considerations.

These are the sort of decisions that we all make on a daily basis, and very few people choose longevity over "quality of life" on a consistent basis. The difference in the example you've cited seems, to me, to be a matter of quantity -- this boy can be more reasonably certain that his decision will shorten his life, whereas the rest of us can happily sustain the illusion that these decisions won't make much of a difference in the long run. And in the end, he's entitled to the same excuse that we make on a daily basis -- there are plenty of dangers which might precipitate his death before the disease ever kills him.

Further, I'd say that deciding to name this an instance of suicide would obligate the judge to consider other forms. Christian Science as a whole would have to be considered a philosophical stance promoting suicide. I don't endorse Christian Science, but neither would I say it particularly endorses suicide.