Artificial nutrition and hydration: bioethical and biolegal profiles

The issue of artificial hydration and nutrition - NIA - shifts the focus to the duties that medical practice has to fulfil towards patients and their conditions. The need to adopt different forms of ethical evaluation, given the probabilistic and statistical nature of any clinical diagnosis, leads to different scenarios that ascribe immediate moral significance to human life, but at the same time link moral attribution (ethical or legal) to the subjective-existential dimension of the persons in whom that life is embodied. The choice of one point of view or the other seems to guide most current bioethical issues, such as the legitimacy of suspending medical treatments, the redefinition of the concept of health and its legal protection, and finally the definition of a new threshold between the “normal” and the “pathological”. In this regard, some efforts lead to a shift, not so much epistemological as ethic-legal, of the state of vegetative state under the category of disability.