Advance Directives, Autonomy, and neurodegenerative diseases
PhD project by Daniel Lucas
The project deals with a particular problem in medical ethics: advance directives as artifacts of autonomous wishes. It focuses on the problem of advance directives and later emerging neurodegenerative diseases, especially dementia.
I will look at what we mean by autonomy and how autonomy is related to relationality and vulnerability. The question is: What can it mean that an advance directive is an artifact of an autonomous will in the context specified above?
The problem presents itself in the following way: Advance directives are produced at t1 to be put n practice at t2. Therefore, it is essential to understand what idea of diachronic personal identity underlies the conviction that we are allowed to make these self-binding directives and if it holds, especially in the context of neurodegenerative diseases that are likely to alter the personality and cut bounds to the former self.