The Role of a Guardian: A Servant, Not a Master

Guardianship has often been mistakenly seen as a position of power of the guardian over the "guarded." This essay shall argue the contrary: that guardianship is a position of servitude that requires the guardian to do his best to promote the well-being of the individual under his care. Yet the foremost principle of guardianship ought to be identical to the central statement of the Hippocratic Oath: First, do no harm.

The fact that it is blatantly immoral for parents to kill or, more generally, abuse or neglect their children illustrates a more general principle with regard to the status of guardians and the limitations on them.

The guardian is an individual who has taken custody of an individual in some manner incapacitated from the full use of his rational faculty, either by physical limitations (as with the paralyzed and comatose) or by a lack of knowledge to serve as data for the rational faculty to process (as with children).

In all cases, the assumption of guardianship is a choice, made either explicitly or implicitly (as with conceiving children, for example). There is no such thing as "guardian sovereignty," however. Guardianship does not presume ownership of another person and does not nullify the fact that the person being "guarded" still holds a property in himself, i.e., his mind and body.

So long as individuals overseen by guardians are still alive, they still possess the capacity to exercise their will in at least some part of their lives. So long as they can do so, they should be allowed to do so, and no one may overrule them in these areas.

In all other areas necessary for survival, but in which those individuals are physically unable to act or incapable of making decisions objectively beneficial to themselves, their guardians can only perform those actions which unquestionably advance those individuals' lives. They may feed a person like Terri Schiavo whose paralysis prevents her from feeding herself, but they may not give her poison in place of food, or starve her while she is under their care (which is precisely what Michael Schiavo did to his former wife).