There are several important questions here.
These include the following:
If we uphold the ethical principle of beneficence, should we as health professionals try to keep people alive at all costs?
Is keeping a patient ‘alive’ always a ‘good’ act?
Could maintaining life, in some circumstances, be considered ‘harmful’ and thus indicate that ongoing treatment is not always morally required?

Search for examples of where these debates have been held. Make notes about how you feel as you try to answer the questions. Think about these feelings and how they may affect your practice.

7.1″ She did not look dead. A Cape ventilator stood chugging faintly at her bedside and there was an endotracheal tube in her mouth connected via a couple of lengths of rubber tubing to the ventilator, but otherwise she looked, quite literally, as though she were asleep. Until that moment I had thought that this notion must be exactly what it sounds to be, an easy cliché: but it was true. Sally’s heart beat on: the monitor beside her bedside showed normal sinus rhythm. Intravenous infusions kept her blood pressure up to normal despite the death of her brain’s regulating centres. Thus she was pink, warm, apparently comfortable in her white sheets ”
Benjamin (1993, p. 85)

Think about whether or not you think it is counterintuitive to associate any physical movement with the idea that someone is ‘dead’.

Philosophical concepts of death relate more to the ending of ‘a life’, the loss of a ‘person’ or a permanent loss of consciousness than to the cessation of physical function. A philosophical view is more concerned with the overall experience of death than with the fulfilment of specific medical criteria.

7.2
Read this explanation of DNR orders (BBC 2014). Could DNR orders be described as a form of passive euthanasia? Make some notes such orders are used in the acute medical ward .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/euthanasia/overview/dnr.shtml
7.3
Individuals in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) present clinicians (and society as a whole) with a range of complex ethical and legal problems. The PVS patient’s brain stem remains intact but all higher brain functions are lost; the patient is therefore deprived of the capacity to think, perceive, remember, etc., although they may breathe spontaneously and react in a reflexive manner to stimuli.

It may be claimed that the patient’s ‘quality of life’ is so poor that withdrawing medical treatment is morally justified. Alternatively, it may be argued that to withdraw treatment is ‘wrong’ in that it is equivalent to killing the patient. Airedale NHS Trust v Bland (1993 ) (discussed in Unit 3) highlighted some of the ethical and legal difficulties raised by a PVS.