The history

The Hippocratic tradition held that a physician should not give a deadly drug even if asked. The principle stood for two millennia, while medicine’s power to hold a corridor open was modest and the closing was a matter of weeks.

In the late twentieth century that changed. Level-four accommodation — ventilation, tube feeding, dialysis, cardiac support — could hold a body in a narrowed corridor for years. Sometimes with the operator’s self-registration suppressed by sedation, fragmented by dementia, attenuated by the accommodation itself. The corridor extended at the cost of the operator it was supposed to be a corridor for.

Medical ethics answered with autonomy. Advance directives. Courts extending decisions to families. Assisted dying legalised in some places. The institutional record of a shift still under way.

The structure reads the same shift and locates it. The right to exit is not a new principle brought in from outside. It is the operator architecture applied at the threshold where levels one to four can no longer hold the corridor open as one the operator can register from inside.

This is the short edition of Ø Applications — a summary. Where a step is compressed here, the original carries it in full. The original book (PDF) · This edition (PDF)

The same page on the420code.org: the420code.org/models/applications/09-end-of-life-care-and-the-right-to-exit/