ABSTRACT
Medical patients, under ordinary circumstances, are free to make their own choices about how to be treated (or not to be treated). A cancer patient, for example, is free either to accept or to refuse life-extending chemotherapy, based, for example, on their own view of how to weigh length of life versus quality of life. Or consider the following case:
Ozzie is diagnosed with a disease that is easily cured with a blood transfusion, but fatal without a transfusion. Ozzie is a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and thus believes that accepting blood transfusions is contrary to God’s commands; he therefore refuses the transfusion, knowing full well that he will die.
