DISTANCED PERSPECTIVES - AIDS, ANENCEPHALY, AND AHP

US court decisions guaranteeing life-sustaining care to anencephalic i nfants have been viewed with disfavor, and sometimes disbelief, by som e ethicists who do not believe in the necessity of life-sustaining sup port for those without cognitive abilities or an independently sustain able future. The distance between these two views - one legal and incl usive, the other medical and specific - seems unbridgeable. This paper reports on a program using multicriterion decision making to define a nd describe persons in a way which both acknowledges the differences p erceived by many as well as those commonalities insisted on in U.S. co urt decisions. It does this through application of the Analytic Hierar chy Process to a hierarchy of ''humanness'' criteria, and secondarily through reference to that concept's subset, personhood.