You actually can be too connected, if the connections are of the wrong kind and if they’re reinforcing your existing prejudices rather than altering them. You can pay to much attention to those around you, even if they’re really smart.
In this article, I consider whether the advance directive of a person in minimally conscious state ought to be adhered to when its prescriptions conflict with her current wishes. I argue that an advance directive can have moral significance after its issuer has succumbed to minimally conscious state. I also defend the view that the patient can still have a significant degree of autonomy. Consequently, I conclude that her advance directive ought not to be applied. Then I briefly assess whether considerations pertaining to respecting the patient's autonomy could still require obedience to the desire expressed in her advance directive and arrive at a negative answer.
This paper evaluates the role being adopted by the European Court of Human Rights when confronted with claims arising from the extreme restriction of access to abortion services in certain Member States. It will be argued that in response to such claims the Court has been prepared to find that the suffering of the applicants can be captured as forms of rights violation, but it has sought to avoid taking a stance as to foetal life, leading it to adopt a highly deferential approach and to avoid the substantive issues at stake, of protection for female reproductive health, dignity and autonomy, in favour of focusing mainly on procedural ones. Having considered such issues as the missing gender-based aspects of the abortion jurisprudence, this paper concludes that its restrained and largely procedural stance has enabled the Court to provide some limited protection for women, on healthcare grounds, but that the opportunity to recognise that highly restrictive abortion regimes systematica...
Terminally ill patients who want to commit suicide should be able to receive medical help to die, a government adviser on care for the elderly has said. Martin Green, a dementia expert for the Department of Health, said patients who were too frail to take their own lives were being denied “choice” and “autonomy” because assisted suicide is illegal in the UK. In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, he urged ministers to review the law and suggested that a referendum or a free vote in Parliament should be called to settle policy on the issue. “If you’re going to give people ‘choice’, it should extend to whether or not they want to die,” he said.
You actually can be too connected, if the connections are of the wrong kind and if they’re reinforcing your existing prejudices rather than altering them. You can pay to much attention to those around you, even if they’re really smart.
Coronation Street is to explore the issue of the 'right to die' when terminally ill Hayley Cropper decides she wants to take control of her death. Hayley, the first transgender character in a British soap, has been diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer.
Physician-assisted suicide laws in Oregon and Washington require the person's current competency and a prognosis of terminal illness. In The Netherlands voluntariness and unbearable suffering are required for euthanasia. Many people are more concerned about the loss of autonomy and independence in years of severe dementia than about pain and suffering in their last months. To address this concern, people could write advance directives for physician-assisted death in dementia. Should such directives be implemented even though, at the time, the person is no longer competent and would not be either terminally ill or suffering unbearably? We argue that in many cases they should be, and that a sliding scale which considers both autonomy and the capacity for enjoyment provides the best justification for determining when: when written by a previously well-informed and competent person, such a directive gains in authority as the later person's capacities to generate new critical interests a...
The Parliamentary Assembly, referring to its Resolution 1859 (2012) on protecting human rights and dignity by taking into account previously expressed wishes of patients, commends the Committee of Ministers for its foresighted and timely adoption of both the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Dignity of the Human Being with regard to the Application of Biology and Medicine: Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine (Oviedo Convention, ETS No. 164) and Recommendation CM/Rec(2009)11 on principles concerning continuing powers of attorney and advance directives for incapacity.
Seriously ill children under 16 may be forced to take life-saving medical treatment against their wishes - but only after their maturity and viewpoint have been carefully considered, the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled.
Incremental heuristic search methods use heuristics to focus
their search and reuse information from previous searches to
find solutions to series of similar search tasks much faster
than is possible by solving each search task from scratch. In
this paper, we apply Lifelong Planning A* to robot navigation
in unknown terrain, including goal-directed navigation in unknown
terrain and mapping of unknown terrain. The resulting
D* Lite algorithm is easy to understand and analyze. It implements
the same behavior as Stentz’ Focussed Dynamic A*
but is algorithmically different. We prove properties about
D* Lite and demonstrate experimentally the advantages of
combining incremental and heuristic search for the applications
studied. We believe that these results provide a strong
foundation for further research on fast replanning methods in
artificial intelligence and robotics.