| 英文摘要 |
The Hospice Palliative Care Act and the Patient Right to Autonomy Act in Taiwan entitle patients the right to refuse life-sustaining treatments under certain conditions. Referring to this right as the“extraordinary right of refusing treatment,”Hsiao-Chih Sun differentiates it from the“ordinary right of refusing treatment,”which does not cover life-and-death situations and argues that these rights should be regulated differently. However, Hsiu-I Yang has published several papers opposing this view and calling it“the differentiation theory.”Yang argues that any adult patient of sound mind can unconditionally refuse any medical treatment, including life-sustaining treatment (Claim A), and that the patient’s right to refuse treatment is not limited by the stage and kind of disease (Claim B). On these grounds, she maintains that the differentiation theory is unnecessary and, judging from the accounts of some clinical cases, even questionable in its plausibility.
In response to Yang’s arguments, this paper discusses the differentiation theory in four parts. The first part introduces the controversial issues and structure of this paper. The second part examines the nature of the right to refuse treatment. This part is further divided into two sections. The first section explains Yang’s views on the criteria of patient autonomy and her two claims (A & B). The second section comments on these views and develops this paper’s standpoint about the nature of the right to refuse treatment. The plausibility and necessity of the differentiation theory are explored in the third part, which is again divided into two sections. The first one contends that in the Jehovah’s Witness case cited by Yang, the differentiation theory has no issue of ambiguity and is, therefore, plausible. It is then in the second section pointed out that the ordinary right of refusing treatment and its counterpart, the extraordinary one, involve different basic rights protection and conflict, and accordingly that the differentiation theory is necessary both in terms of the criteria of patient autonomy on the subjective side and the stage and kind of diseases on the objective side. The fourth part is the concluding remark. |
