Ethics of Withdrawal of Life-Support Systems: Case Studies in Decision Making in Intensive Care

by Douglas N. Walton

A well-organized, thoughtful, and logical discussion of a difficult ethical issue frequently encountered by clinicians.
Journal of the American Medical Association

Walton has made a successful attempt to write about medical concerns without ever leaving the layperson to flounder in confusion. Probate Law Journal

In recent years the question of when to terminate life-extending medical treatments has become a thorny social issue. Douglas Walton has brought together a number of these case studies and analyzed the very difficult issues they raise.

276 pages, Paperback

First published June 29, 1983

About the author

Douglas Neil Walton (PhD University of Toronto, 1972) is a Canadian academic and author, well known for his many widely published books and papers on argumentation, logical fallacies and informal logic. He is presently Distinguished Research Fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation, and Rhetoric (CRRAR) at the University of Windsor, Canada, and before that (2008-2014), he held the Assumption Chair of Argumentation Studies at the University of Windsor. Walton’s work has been used to better prepare legal arguments and to help develop artificial intelligence. His books have been translated worldwide, and he attracts students from many countries to study with him. A special issue of the journal Informal Logic surveyed Walton’s contributions to informal logic and argumentation theory up to 2006 (Informal Logic, 27(3), 2007). A festschrift honoring his contributions, Dialectics, Dialogue and Argumentation: An Examination of Douglas Walton’s Theories of Reasoning and Argument, ed. C. Reed and C. W. Tindale, London: College Publications, 2010, shows how his theories are increasingly finding applications in computer science. A list of titles of many of Walton’s books is given below. Links to preprints of many of his published papers can be found on the website

http://www.dougwalton.ca