Elective-death survivors’ feelings cannot be approached regarding their management in the same manner as the feelings of health-care professionals. The latter are charged with the well-being of their patients, clients, or consultees, and it is ethically incumbent on them to strive to prevent their feelings from coloring their perceptions and influencing their reasoning. The acknowledged difficulty of meeting this ethical obligation is eased somewhat by the cumulative effect of professionals’ routine contact with many patients as well as by the objectivity afforded by their training and expertise. Admittedly, it remains an open question to what extent health-care professionals do effectively counter emotional influences on their perceptions and reasoning when dealing with patients and clients who are facing and making life-and-death treatment decisions, but they seem to do so well enough and, moreover, we have little choice but to take it that they do. But there is good evidence that overall professionals succeed in meeting the ethical challenge, perhaps the best evidence in fact being the frequency with which patients and more often their families complain about physicians and other professionals being too detached when dealing with terminal cases.

In any case, we all have experienced countering our feelings to some degree and thereby in some measure checking the effects of our emotions on what we think and do in circumstances where we need to act in ways that go against our affective inclinations. Moreover, whether or not in a professional capacity, we take it to be part of our being rational that when we need to, we can control our feelings, that we can counter the effects of our emotions to a significant degree, and we tend to think less of people who will not or cannot manage their feelings. The alternative is to succumb to our feelings and thereby surrender our autonomy to emotional pressures, but to do so would be to lessen ourselves as persons.