The Right To Life of a Comatose Person

Some of the factors to be covered in this study include the concepts of consciousness, self-consciousness, the unconscious, the desire to live, and the idea of the "magic moment."

The study will basically argue that Tooley offers a consistent viewpoint in both works, with respect to the right to life of a comatose person, and that he is morally and philosophically correct in making the argument that such a person has the right to life.

A number of qualifications have to be made before we can understand specifically what Tooley is declaring when he says that the comatose individual has the right to life, for Tooley includes so many possible qualifications for such a right to life that the comatose person (who is capable of recovering) can qualify in a number of ways.

One of the considerations Tooley makes with respect to a person's right to life has to do with consciousness. For the being to be truly considered a person with a right to life, that person must have a relationship with consciousness. He must be conscious of himself, of his life, and of his desire to continue to live.

However, it is clear that the person who is in a coma cannot possess such a co

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ee months would mean that the individual who falls into a coma at three months would have the right to life. However, Tooley is not so severe in his analysis that he would draw a line inextricably at three months. Instead, he analyzes in terms of degree. For example, we read that At about the age of three months [infants] probably acquire properties that are morally significant, and that make it to some extent intrinsically wrong to destroy them. As they develop further, their destruction becomes more and more seriously wrong, until eventually it is comparable in seriousness to the destruction of a normal adult being (Tooley 411-412). In other words, the right to life of the comatose person can be seen as a matter of degree as well, according to Tooley's philosophy. For purposes of this study, we will not focus on the subtleties of the age of the comatose individual, but will rather simply accept that he is a "normal adult human being" who qualifies as deserving the right to life according to Tooley's specific standards (desire to live, consciousness, self-consciousness, right to have his interests preserved and protected, and so on). The problem then becomes one of the difference between the unconscious individual and th
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Approximate Word count = 2226
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)