It is immoral to kill someone. Human violence is immoral because violence causes suffering. But artificially prolonging life with medical technology when it only extends suffering is also immoral. It ought to be recognized that if someone is beyond recovery without medical technology, then people ought to leave them be. Going through death is the most difficult part of life, and if someone is unconscious and would be dead without medical technologies, one ought to do them the favor and allow them to die.
Even if a death was painful, a death that has been undergone is not made better by reversing it.
The greatest mistake of common current ethical theories is a lack of awareness that everyone will die. It is illogical to pretend that life is a value in itself. Only the absence of suffering can be an ethical value.
Absence of suffering includes the absence of the awareness of the imminence of one’s death (not just the experience of a death without physical suffering). This is why the best fate that possibly can await anyone is to die suddenly in the middle of one’s life, and preferably during one’s sleep. Medical technology that aims to eliminate this option is misguided.
On the other hand, medical technologies that help to preserve physical attractiveness are highly valuable, as physical attractiveness is of great importance if one aims for a sexually fulfilled life.
Many people feel this way, which explains the popularity of reconstructive dentistry, LASIK operations, liposuction, and facelifts, even though people have to pay for such procedures out of their own pockets, while being kept alive in ICUs is often paid for by the government.
There are far too many ICUs. If, for example, after a road accident, a person is unconscious and could survive only in an ICU, society should not artificially prolong their existence through endless technological intervention. Allowing a natural death in such cases is much preferable to dying a prolonged death from cancer a few years later.