He probably wasn't, so I would assume he had some sort of court-appointed guardian or something (not sure which term is most applicable, but under the circumstances "guardian" may not be that far off...). That would not have been the first decision the guardian would have had to make, after all.
What I see is that you assume something, that is his doctors where his guardians. Then you draw a conclusion from that very assumed thing. That's intellectually dishonest. I don't know if there was a conflict of interest, or there wasn't. I would like to know, but can't find anything with a few minutes of googling.
I agree with your conclusion, that if there were a conflict of interest, then it's an outrage. But please don't assume something then draw conclusions from it.
It seems that you have strong emotions about the issue. I guess you would not have consented to this treatment. That's okay. But strong emotions doesn't make circular reasoning right.
Please let me know if you find, or have found already, anything more about the court-appointed guardian.
There's really no solution to this problem. It's obvious you disagree with the outcome, but equally obviously many would agree... he certainly didn't have the agency to give a solid answer by most of our standards (apparently some here disagree). There's no good solution, nor would I even agree there's a "default answer" here per se that we can fall back to. In the end all you can possibly end up with is a power struggle over whose personal preferences are going to be followed.
I have to agree here. The default would be to dispose of his body in a traditional way. There could be arguments about burial or cremation or maybe some other tradition I don't know about, but no one thinks of thin-slicing the head as any kind of default in todays (or yesterdays) world. I find the question of how this got approved almost as interesting as the original story. I can only think of 3 ways to decide: 1) prior consent from a parent 2) just ask him even though his brain is not normal 3) politics. Debating the legitimacy of #2 is really just going with option #3.
