Help us: Classic Case presentation of Donald(Dax)Cowart Rejects Treatment and is Ignored!?

Question

a. Was the higher good served?
b. Decide what the "higher good" is?

Answer 1

I'm going to have to turn the order of your questions around in order to answer them properly.

Questions of what the 'higher good' is have been around for millennia, and I don't think they are likely to be resolved to everyone's satisfaction any time soon. But there are two prominent thinkers I like to refer to in times like this: Aristotle and Kant.

Aristotle, believed that the purpose of humans is to reason, and that to be good an entity must perform his function well. This puts us in a bit of a quandary - if we deny a person's choice to die we are countering their very purpose, but on the other hand if we allow their reason to prevail they will cease to function well and stop reasoning altogether. I think Aristotle would have suggested that such a difficulty suggests a flaw in one of our hypotheses, and in this case it would be that a reasonable person CAN choose to destroy themselves.

I suspect this is the view of much of the medical community, as Dax himself occasionally points out on some of his tours. It raises the question of whether this is really so - that any person who wished to die is by definition unreasonable.

Kant is a big fan of reason, arguing that it is in fact greater than any instinctive sense of good or bad, if properly applied. His idea of 'good' is whatever would be beneficial if everybody did it all the time. At first, being allowed to kill yourself when there seems no hope of retaining what you value would seem to be a good thing, but we can also come up with examples (Dax is a good one) of people who would have killed themselves if given the opportunity, but who instead went on to develop new values and live productive and beneficial lives. Thus allowing death or suicide where recovery is possible is bad, and should NEVER be allowed, according to Kant.

Dax argues that patients should be better informed, have more say in their treatment, and be treated with kindness instead of threats as happened in his case. I can only agree with him as far as that goes. Many of the treatments that were used on him have already been abandoned as inhumane.

Yet even three decades after his recovery, Dax also says that he should have been allowed to die. I would just say that his reasoning is still faulty. I think I would put things this way:

When his accident occurred, Donald Cowart DID die. Many of the things Donald had would be simply unavailable to Dax. Yes, they share the same memories, family, and past, but Dax is handicapped in ways Donald cannot possible understand. Donald's future, his hope, dreams, and reality are completely inaccessable to Dax, except as a painful memory. I think Kierkegaard but it best when he said, "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly one you can never have."

THAT was the key to Dax being able to build a new life. He had to discard the old one and be born again. And births are seldom painless for anyone. It would have been nice if he could have been made to understand this, so instead of trying to fight to save his old life or despair over its loss, he could instead have focused his efforts on the future and hope that he could attain, one that even he has to admit is not very bad, all things considered. This is done nowadays sometimes in military hospitals (they are perhaps more accustomed to personality death and rebirth) but sometimes not. I would like to see it done more.

Was the higher good served? Poorly. But without a doubt on my part, yes.

Answer 2

Donald Dax Cowart