ABSTRACT
The question in my title–a deliberate inversion of Kuhse and Singer’s now-famous question, “Should the baby live?”–is one that is being asked more and more frequently. As Gerald Gruman has observed:
It is questionable if today the young comatose patient is the prototype for the discussion of issues of death and dying. A more probable crucial issue is that of the elderly: a reservoir of relatively defenseless persons, perceived, through bigoted “ageism,” as unproductive and pejoratively dependent. In them, modernization has created a population stratum that, in a state of nature or conditions of scarcity economics, “ought” to be dead. 2
