For over three years in the early 1990s a man called Anthony Bland lay on a hospital bed in the condition that medicine used to call "persistent vegetative state" and now calls "permanent vegetative state" (hereafter PVS).¹ The responsible physicians provided him with nutrition through a nasogastric tube, antibiotics whenever an infection arose and other basic care. As far as one could tell Bland was aware of nothing. There he was, without relation to an exteriority; food and oxygen being of relevance to him only once they had been absorbed into his body. In Airedale NHS Trust v Bland [1993] 1 All E.R. 821 his doctors sought declarations from the English High Court that it would not be unlawful for them to let him die through starvation and dehydration. The case proceeded to the Court of Appeal and finally the House of Lords.