Mark D. White
Last night I read a wonderful and concise article by Jillian Craigie (King's College London) from the latest issue of Bioethics (25/6, July 2011) titled "Competence, Practical Rationality and What a Patient Values." The abstract follows:
According to the principle of patient autonomy, patients have the right to be self-determining in decisions about their own medical care, which includes the right to refuse treatment. However, a treatment refusal may legitimately be overridden in cases where the decision is judged to be incompetent. It has recently been proposed that in assessments of competence, attention should be paid to the evaluative judgments that guide patients' treatment decisions.
In this paper I examine this claim in light of theories of practical rationality, focusing on the difficult case of an anorexic person who is judged to be competent and refuses treatment, thereby putting themselves at risk of serious harm. I argue that the standard criteria for competence assess whether a treatment decision satisfies the goals of practical decision-making, and that this same criterion can be applied to a patient's decision-guiding commitments. As a consequence I propose that a particular understanding of practical rationality offers a theoretical framework for justifying involuntary treatment in the anorexia case.
Craigie argues for assessing the procedure–in this case, practical judgment–by which a person comesto the decision whether to refuse treatment, rather than applying external standards to the decision itself or the reasons that led to it. She emphasizes that in the past, simply exhibiting a behavior and expressing a preference that was characterized as or associated with a mental disorder was taken as evidence that the patient was "irrational." In the case of anorexia nervosa (on which she focuses in the article), if the patient expressed an overwhelming desire to be thin, this was judged to be irrational simply because that was one of the hallmarks of the disorder. Craigie correctly identifies this as circular reasoning, akin to listing homosexuality as a disorder and then "concluding" that homosexual desires are "pathological" (or interpreting denial of a problem as evidence of the problem–for one of the most disturbing instances of this that I've read, see Deirdre McCloskey's Crossing: A Memoir).
Instead, Craigie recommends looking into the quality of the reasoning by which the patient forms the value or preference that leads to the treatment refusal. She considers several approaches of evaluating the process by which the patient comes to a particular conclusion rather than simply judging the decision itself, or the value or preference that led to it. I was gratified to see this approach, because that is what I argue in much of my work on paternalism and welfarism: assuming that paternalism is justified in cases of involuntary behavior, involuntariness must be assessed procedurally–based on how the individual came to "act" in a certain way–rather than judging the value, prudence, or wisdom of the act itself. Whatever external evalutors think of an action is irrelevant–all that matters is how she came to that decision, and if she acted voluntarily.
Craigie argues that there is some evidence–though perhaps not enough at this point–to suggest that anorexics form their overwhelming desires for thinness in ways that compromise their true autonomy, and compares this case to Jehovah's Witness who refuses blood transfusions, in which case she recognizes that the religious value leading to that decision may be a core value of the individual, and is therefore less questionable. This is in line with what I have argued elsewhere (including chapter 5 of Kantian Ethics and Economics), we should assume that individuals make decisions in their own interests, as complex and multifaceted as they are, and interference with them is only justified if there is evidence that a decision (or action) was not made (or taken) voluntarily. (And yes, I realize that voluntariness is a topic of discussion all in itself, but I think the point stands even without specifying it further.) Refusal of medical treatment is fantastic application of this, and I am very happy Craigie raised these issues.
just appeared at the Los Angeles Times' 
.) Thanks to Jevon Phillips for the great questions, and be sure to let me know what you think!
Mark D. White 