capitalism

158 Evolutionary Psychology
a patient with large amounts of pain medication in an
attempt to relieve suffering (i.e., mercy medication), is
allowed in some states. In such cases, the killing is considered
passive in the sense that the patient’s death is incidental
to the physician’s attempt to control pain. Conversely,
voluntary euthanasia is generally only allowed if passive.
The one notable exception is Oregon, where physicianassisted
suicide for terminally ill patients is legal.
Given these distinctions, it is logical, based on libertarian
first principles of individual liberty and self-determination,
that a libertarian society would support an individual’s right to
choose either passive or active euthanasia, regardless of
whether he were terminally ill, and equally condemn any
form of involuntary euthanasia whether passive or active and
no matter how close to death a person may be. The only
proper role of government would be to ensure voluntariness
by creating safeguards to ensure that decisions regarding
euthanasia be made by competent individuals who understand
the consequences of their intended actions and give their full
and informed consent freely. As long as these criteria are met,
libertarian societies also would allow individuals to arrange
for euthanasia while competent to be carried out at a later date
should they become incapable of making their wishes known.
For example, someone could have an advance directive
requesting what could be understood as active nonvoluntary
euthanasia (e.g., the advance directive requests active
euthanasia should its author ever become permanently unconscious
or ever advance to stage 3 of Alzheimer’s disease).
Libertarian theory, however, does not provide clear
guidance with respect to incompetent individuals. Temporary
incompetence can be dealt with by emphasizing efforts to
bring about competency. For example, under certain circumstances,
it may be appropriate to wait for children to
mature sufficiently to make their own decisions. Patients
who are unconscious, paralyzed, or heavily sedated to
facilitate treatment could, if at all possible, be revived to
assess their end-of-life wishes. But what if it is impossible
to get informed consent?
A presumption that someone close to the incompetent
patient should make decisions for that patient provides a
workable solution. Although not necessitated by libertarian
theory, such surrogate decision making is not inconsistent
with libertarian theory. Having someone close to the
incompetent patient, usually a family member, make decisions
is preferable to having a court, a committee, or some
other governmental entity making the decision. There is no
doubt that family responsibilities can cause conflicts of
interest, and therefore it should be possible to challenge a
surrogate’s decision. However, anyone challenging a surrogate’s
motives should bear the burden of showing that the
surrogate has no reasonable grounds for making the proposed
decision. When the choice is letting the family, however
defined, decide based on its own cultural and religious
norms, as opposed to letting the government apply some
generalized independent standard of what is in the patient’s
best interest, the choice should be clear: It is preferable to
keep such personal and difficult decisions as private and as
free of the interference of others as possible.
Whether you wish to live or die like Prometheus or like
Job should be your decision or, barring your competence,
the decision of those who love you, not a decision made by
anyone else through government fiat or otherwise.
See also Bioethics; Health Care; Individual Rights; Paternalism
Further Readings
SFR
Arras, John D., and Bonnie Steinbock, eds. Ethical Issues in Modern
Medicine. 5th ed. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1999.
Campbell, Joseph. “Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and
Art.” Joseph Campbell. The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays
1959–1987. Antony Van Couvering and The Joseph Campbell
Foundation, eds. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. 189.
Engelhardt, H. Tristram, Jr. The Foundations of Bioethics. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Foley, Elizabeth Price. Liberty for All: Reclaiming Individual
Privacy in a New Era of Public Morality. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2006.
Hall, Mark A., Mary Anne Bobinski, and David Orentlicher.
Bioethics and Public Health Law. New York: Aspen, 2005.
Jonsen, Albert R., Mark Siegler, and William J. Winslade. Clinical
Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical
Medicine. 6th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006.
EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover,
understand, and map the human mind as well as to
explore the implications of these new discoveries for other
fields. The eventual aim is to map human nature—that is,
the species-typical information-processing architecture of
the human brain.
Like all cognitive scientists, when evolutionary psychologists
refer to the mind, they mean the set of information-processing
devices, embodied in neural tissue, that are
responsible for all conscious and nonconscious mental
activity and that generate all behavior. Like other psychologists,
evolutionary psychologists test hypotheses about
the design of these information-processing devices—these
programs—using laboratory methods from experimental
cognitive and social psychology, as well as methods drawn
from experimental economics, neuropsychology, and crosscultural
field work.
What allows evolutionary psychologists to go beyond
traditional approaches in studying the mind is that they
make active use in their research of an often-overlooked