So what is the being that remains, and what are our
moral obligations toward it? If such a being is less than an
animal, it would presumably share the status of plants.
It is alive, but has absolutely no moral status whatsoever.
We could then treat the patient in the way we would any
object. If it is a burden, it could be discarded. Nothing
demands that we maintain such a being, since it carries
no moral status. Imagine, for example, a case in which a
woman has duties toward her children and husband but
also has a demented father who is no longer capable of
taking care of himself. By the sort of Kantian reasoning
on which Cooley’s argument depends, the woman’s duty
toward her rational relatives would automatically trump
any and all obligations toward her father. In fact, there
would be no true obligations toward her father, since he
is no longer a human being with moral status. From here,
the jump to active euthanasia is not a large one.
By basing moral worth solely on a specific notion of
rationality, Cooley’s approach leaves no room for duties
to non-rational beings. Cooley uses this to reject eutha-
nasia, by pointing out that we cannot have a duty to kill
the patient because we cannot have any duty toward
non-rational beings. However, I believe the argument for
euthanasia could be strengthened by such loss of status.
By comparing demented patients to dangerous madmen,
and presenting the loss of rationality as a loss of person-
hood that makes them less than animals, Cooley leaves
no reasons for keeping such patients alive. Even senti-
mentality would have to be dismissed as irrational given
the circumstances. There is nothing to be sentimental
towards, as the persons we knew are gone.
