Mary Warnock and the Culture of Life

I agree with you the way you view the issue. I remember Jack London once said everything positive has a negative side; everything negative has positive side. It is also interesting to see different viewpoints & learn useful things in the discussion.

I agree with you the way you view the issue. I remember Jack London once said everything positive has a negative side; everything negative has positive side. It is also interesting to see different viewpoints & learn useful things in the discussion.

For people to face death rationally and make rational choices about it would be profoundly bad for the present society. After all, if you knew that you were going to die in a month, why not wrap yourself in explosives and say hello to your least favorite person? Death is a resource, like money or life, that can be spent toward one's personal values. But it is a resource with too much purchasing power for society to allow people to spend it rationally.

Hence the fixation on taking all rational calculation and cost-benefit analysis out of death. If people are permitted to consider death rationally, some will, and their values may not be yours. That, I think, is the central fear: Rational thinking at a point where society's constraints and rewards cannot apply will lead to collapse and anarchy.
--G

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What about the argument that the current normative position may encourage medical research and therefore the prolongation of quality life - the knowledge that people will be prepared to spend on keeping themselves alive is surely mobilizing much R&D;?

I find it interesting to see this discussion come up here. I've wondered whether libertarians tend towards the deontological or the consequentialist view of ethics. Generally, I've suspected libertarianism as a whole (granted, that's not the position of any individual) of leaning extremeley far in a deontological direction, with all its talk of "rights" to freedom and liberty and all. But then libertarians come back with all sorts of arguments that are supposed to show that free markets are the most effective way to distribute goods and services, suggesting that they hold to these economic views for consequentialist reasons. Not having read the article you link to, I'd guess that this post puts you relatively far on the consequentialist side (as I consider myself). But libertarianism as a political program seems hard to me to justify on such grounds - rather, it seems more likely that certain sectors would be extremely regulated, others would be totally free, and others would be in between, instead of the absolutes that libertarianism seems to be framed in terms of.

"When we decide for ourselves when death is appropriate for another person, the results are often misguided and horrific"

The idea here is that we are not deciding for another person when death is appropriate. We would allow people to decide for themselves when death is appropriate, and allow them the option of asking for help with carrying out their wishes, without fear of prosecution for the other person, or the stigma that Will describes.

Watching someone close to me die of cancer made me very aware at a fairly early age that there are indeed far worse things than death. Making someone go through the torturous pain that accompanies many terminal conditions, or drugging them into semi-consciousness just to deal with it when they would rather be dead but are too sick to do it themselves is what is cruel, in my opinion. I believe that you can say both that life is intrinsically valuable and that each has the right to decide when and how their own life, no matter how valuable, should end.

When we decide for ourselves when death is appropriate for another person, the results are often misguided and horrific (see: many late-term abortions, Death Row pardons, misguided wars, "racial cleansing", political executions, September 11, many sharia law penalties, etc.)

So my fear is not that there are too many stigmas associated with death, but that there are not enough stigmas. We may decide that some death is morally acceptable, but let's not advocate getting comfortable with it.

Matt,

I see. Thanks for explaining your position. I guess I don't have a big problem with erring on the side of letting people who are not terminal but are living in undending misery consent to be killed. That doesn't sound like a bad thing to me. (I'm not even sure I'd call it 'erring.' Whatwould bother me are cases where people that are depressed but could get help are being killed (in accordance with their consent). (Or other cases relevantly similar to this kind.) But there are always going to be borderline cases with things like these.

And since I consider it to be worse for a terminally ill patient to be forced to live than I do for a severely depressed person to kill himself, I think that assisted suicide should be legal.

"there is no way to competently legislate when it is okay to kill someone"

Oops - I don't mean to open a can of worms with this assertion. Let's narrow the scope of that statement to "there is no way to competently legislate when someone's quality of life has reached a terminally miserable point."

Luka-
In certain circumstances - and not obscure exceptions, either - I would agree with you that a patient could grant meaningful consent to be actively killed. Those are the heartbreaking cases that militate most strongly in favor of doctor-assisted suicide, euthanasia, whatever.

But isn't that in itself an argument of compassion, i.e., a sentimental argument? Granted, there are gruesome and not-so-gruesome functional reasons in favor of mercy killing, but those aren't what drive your assertion that it is ethically sound, even advisable. So Ms Warnock's "send 'em out to starve" arguments notwithstanding, most of its proponents view legalized mercy killing as a act of social and legal compassion.

But sometimes, the slope really is slippery. Compassion on an individual scale could (and I think would) become callous indifference on a social scale. I think that even if my personal convictions allow me to view certain mercy killings as ethically sound, society needs to view life as intrinsically valuable because there is no way to competently legislate when it is okay to kill someone. Sentimentality is the only friction on the slope, as I see it.

For instance, assuming that mercy killings ought to be permitted for the terminally ill, at what point should an Alzheimer's victim be considered "terminally ill?" Do you trust your congressman to decide?

I know this rather sounds like your grade school principal's argument of "sure, it's okay if you do something, but what if everyone else did it?" I'm working on that...

Matt,

Can you explain why you think it's important to keep people alive when they are terminal, in great pain that can't be dealt with without making them unable to think, and want to die?

What's wrong will killing them that situation?

(It actually seems to me that it might be wrong not to kill them in that kind of situation.)

Palliative care is the opposite of "[spending] tens of thousands of dollars to extend my life a couple extremely miserable months" - in fact, it often hastens the onset of death.

In your view, does palliative care presuppose that life has an unconditional value, and is therefore always an unacceptable alternative to euthanasia once a patient in pain has been declared terminal? And is that presupposition sentimental in nature?

I understand your objection to palliative care if it prolongs a miserable existence, but definitionally, such care would not be "palliative." What I mean by the term is any care that's intended to provide comfort once a patient has been declared terminal, and after all life-sustaining intervention has been withdrawn.

The important thing is to encourage greater awareness on the part of physicians, caregivers, and patients of when that point ought to be declared. There's a lot of good to be done on this count that will vastly improve the lives of the dying and their families, even without broaching the subject of euthanasia.

Maybe I'll print bumper stickers: "Die Sooner! Just not right away."

My only practical concern over euthanasia is the possibility that insufficiently strict regulations could lead to people who don't want to live being duped/bullied into accepting euthanasia by unscrupulous interested parties. I have no ethical objections to the idea of euthanasia itself (though I suspect this places me in a minority).

Matt, There's often no point to palliative care. In many cases, in order to sufficiently mute the pain, you have to give knock people unconscious. What's the point of a life spent either in terrible pain, unconscious, or such a drugged fog that normal thought is impossible? Life is worth having only conditionally, and people should be allowed to say what those conditions are.

There's a lot of middle ground left between euthanasia (which I abhor) and not prolonging life. We could reduce the amount of near-death suffering (and, yes, expense) by emphasizing palliative care and being more frank with patients and their families about the benefits (or lack thereof) of continued care.

On the subject of life and its value, Warnock just sounds like a batshit old crank to me. She's obviously carried away with the unsentimental shock value of her arguments. If "spirituality and sentimentality" are what it takes to preserve a codified reverence for life as such, then bring it on.

But this part I like very much:
Her regret is that too many teachers avoid hard moral lessons: “They find it easier to tell children about the rainforest than about right and wrong. Yet little children aren’t very tempted to cut down rainforests.”

In a perfect world, kids would learn the message early on that tough moral choices aren't just for other people - some difficult test of character could be lurking around the next corner. It's why I'm eternally grateful to my high school government teacher for showing us The Perils of Obedience in class.

You mean, like, pyramids?

Amen!