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Prospective Autonomy and Critical Interests: A Narrative Defense of the Moral Authority of Advance Directives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 July 2009

Ben A. Rich
Ben A. Rich
Affiliation:
Assistant professor in the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics, and assistant director of the program in Health Care Ethics, Humanities, and Law at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, Colorado.
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Extract

In the mid to late 1980s a debate arose over the moral and legal authority of advance medical directives. At the center of this debate were two point-counterpoint law journal articles by Rebecca Dresser and Nancy Rhoden. What appeared to have the makings of an ongoing critical dialogue ended with the untimely death of Nancy Rhoden. Rebecca Dresser, however, has continued her challenge of advance directives in numerous publications, most recently in a critique of Ronald Dworkin's Life's Dominion. Like Rhoden, Dworkin has been a staunch advocate of advance directives as an exercise of what has come to be referred to as prospective or precedent autonomy. In this paper I will consider a number of the issues that Dresser has repeatedly raised about the infirmities of advance directives, and suggest that it is from an understanding of and appreciation for the narrative dimension of the life of a person that advanced directives draw one of their most powerful justifications.

Type
Special Section: Alpha and Omega: Ethics at the Edges of Life
Information
Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Spring 1997 , pp. 138 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

Notes

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