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Morality as a concept is academic unless it is to decide the big issues we are confronted by in day to day life. In terms of morality of governments? Religions? Autocrats? Humans in cults, ideologues in ideological groups? As i have indicated humans are led. There is nobody home to discern right from wrong. Even the most obvious betrayals of decency like not dumping acid in your daughter’s face after she has been victimized by a rapist and countless shake your heads are manifest. Honor of the family is the norm and value of the daughter is a distant second. So you get degenerate results. Normal decent human impulses are subordinated to religious/cultural norms. (Empowering Islamic norms and enabling Islam to encroach in Europe, Canada and USA is fucking stupid beyond stupid if you care at all about tolerance and hope to minimize human suffering.)

After that preamble ramble here is a situation i had to navigate and not sure i did the right thing. I had an uncle who was in need of help. For about 20 years i visited him almost weekly, brought him food, went to court in his behalf roughly a dozen times over stupid stuff like feeding stray cats on the rented property in violation of the lease. Anyways i was the only one he fully trusted and i was his health care proxy. He made it clear he never wanted to end life support. There was a famous Massachusetts case in which the state wanted to terminate the life of a girl on life support and was paying for that life support. He distrusted authority and thought the state was acting in its interest and not the girl’s and that the girl might recover. While the case was pending in court with the state asking for a judicial order to end life support the girl came to from her coma.

So with that backdrop i was supposed to insure his wishes would be carried out if he were not conscious to express same. Well the day came i got a call from hospital. He was undergoing a heart attack and had not breathed in some minutes. They wanted to know if he should be resuscitated. It was a no brainer for me. YES. They saved his life but he was in a coma. And sure enough he was on life support. I still recall being with the neurologist as a detailed brain scan was performed and there was literally zero brain activity. I asked Doctor House ( that really was his name) if there was ANY CHANCE of him recovering. Was there any underlying consciousness? The answer from the doctor was an unequivocal no. So yup i substituted my judgment for his. I betrayed his wishes as health care proxy.