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On March 9, 1995, a car driven by television broadcaster Hugh Finn was smashed in a head-on collision on an icy road, leaving him with serious neurological damage. Though some physical examinations—and the testimony of those who spent enough time with him to notice small changes—suggested that he alternated unconscious sleep cycles with regular conscious periods, he lay unmoving for the next three years.
Early last summer, accepting medical advice that Finn would never improve, his wife, Michele, ordered his life ended. And after months of fighting off legal challenges from her husband's family, she at last succeeded. On October 9, 1998, Hugh Finn died of starvation and dehydration in a nursing home in Manassas, Virginia, eight days after doctors removed the tubes providing him food and water.
The twists and turns of the Finn case were heavily reported in the local Washington, D.C., and northern Virginia press. And almost every newspaper and television account contained the same quotation, a line in which Hugh Finn's wife put forward her fundamental argument for stopping his care. Sometimes it was given as Michele Finn's indirect report of a conversation with her husband in 1993: "He said he would never want to live like that"; sometimes it was stripped down to her intuition of his nature: "He wouldn't want to live like that." But, particularly in the shorter form, it was exactly what was so strenuously denied by the family members whose dispute with Finn's wife made the case newsworthy, and to live in Washington was to read or hear the line nearly every day from June to October.
There's nothing new about such claims to know the desires of those who cannot speak for themselves. The anti-euthanasia lawyer and author Wesley J. Smith has argued that Finn's condition received notice only because it involved a fairly prominent figure with relatives able to publicize their objections. The Virginia court's ruling that allowed the removal of Hugh Finn's food and water is typical of the way such cases are routinely decided. And Michele Finn's argument for ending her husband's life is typical of the kind of proof routinely taken as convincing.
In fact, this sort of claim - -a description of what would be wanted by someone presumed incapable of having or expressing wants—is ubiquitous nowadays. It is the euthanasia advocates' most intuitively persuasive slogan, recognized as compelling by the courts. It is heard on the lowest-brow talk shows and read in the highest-brow publications. In the fall of 1996, six of America's most famous philosophers—Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon, and Judith Jarvis Thomson—submitted to the Supreme Court a brief arguing that the legalization of assisted suicide is necessary to alleviate "the anguish some would feel at remaining alive, but intubated, helpless, and often sedated near oblivion."
But it was only under the constant bombardment of Washington news reports about Hugh Finn that the real strangeness of the claim first struck me. The notion that "he wouldn't want to live like that" initially seems both plausible and humane, but closely examined it becomes increasingly confusing: an impulse of pity somehow transformed into a demand that we be pitiless and hard.
If one stops for a moment to consider it, there is something very odd about the "would" that invariably occurs in such constructions. It is, in the technical language of grammar, is a "modal auxiliary," indicating one of the few remaining common uses of the subjunctive mood in current American English. But why are such claims phrased that way in the first place? Why, if Mrs. Finn wants to convince us that she knows her husband's desire, does she naturally fall back on the subjunctive present, "He wouldn't want to live like that" rather than the straightforward indicative present, "He doesn't want to live like that," or even the indicative past, "He didn't want to live like that"?
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