End-of-Life Decisions

In this article from 2000, based on a four-part forum held at Columbia University, experts on end-of-life issues discuss the ethics of deciding when to prolong the lives of patients. They debate the relative merits of living wills and whether a person can ever predict the scenario of death in sufficient detail to provide doctors with helpful guidelines. They weigh the appropriateness of administering medical procedures that provide comfort in patients' final hours but may hasten death, and discuss the economics of prolonging life and the increasing tendency to weigh one patient's potential to live against another's, as resources become more scarce.