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Your father still drives and probably should not. Whose decision is it to take the keys?

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Applied ethicsModern EuropeanLiberalism#ageing#autonomy#family#paternalism
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

A familiar family scene. Your father is eighty-four. He drove for sixty years without an accident, and has had two small scrapes since the spring. Lately he gets lost on routes he has known for decades. His doctor has not told him to stop, and he has no intention of stopping. The car is how he gets to his brother, to his place of worship, to his friends.

Some questions to start with:

  • Mill's harm principle allows us to interfere with someone to prevent harm to others, but not to protect him from himself. Your father's driving puts others at risk too. Does that settle it, or only open the question of how much risk is too much?
  • Is it different if you are the one who will be driving him everywhere afterwards?
  • Is quietly "losing" the keys more respectful than a confrontation, or less?

Answers from experience are especially welcome, from either side of the wheel.

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4 answers

  1. Alistair Gow

    Contributor

    From the surgery side, a practical note for anyone in Britain. A driving licence has to be renewed at seventy and every three years after that, and it is the driver who declares whether he is fit. Doctors can inform the DVLA if a patient keeps driving against advice, and professional guidance allows it, but most would far rather not.

    I watched many families try to make the GP the villain so they would not have to be. It rarely worked. The decision may rest on risk to others, but the conversation belongs to the family, and it goes better early, before the scrape that isn't small.

  2. Serkan Aydoğdu

    Contributor

    Twenty years driving a bus. Every older driver I have known, the car was not transport. It was proof he was still a man who goes where he wants.

    So don't hide the keys. He will know, and then you have taken his dignity and his trust in one day. Sit with him, and ask him to drive you somewhere he has gone a hundred times. If he gets lost, he will see it himself.

  3. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    I coordinate home care, and the pattern I see is this: the keys are taken, everyone feels responsible, and three months later the man is lonely and declining. Removing a car without replacing what it did is not safety. It is isolation with a good conscience.

    Before the conversation about stopping, I'd make a list of every journey the car makes in a week and find another way for each. The ethics is in that list, not only in the decision.

  4. Ruth McAllister

    Reader

    I took my husband's keys two years ago, so I'll say what nobody told me.

    In the end the decision was not really mine or his. One afternoon he drove to the shop he had used for thirty years and phoned me from a lay-by forty minutes away, not knowing where he was. After that the question was not whether but how.

    I didn't hide the keys. We went to the GP together, and the GP said the words, so that I would not become the person who took his freedom. Femke is right about what comes after. The car was his independence, and I had to replace the trips, not just stop them. A neighbour now drives him to the bowling club on Thursdays. That neighbour has done more for his dignity than any argument.