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| Sciavo case wrap up | | Date Created: Apr 03, 2005, 12:23 PM |
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I'm still not sure about US News & World Report, but there are occasional worthwhile summary articles and John Leo's columns are in it. (Although I can get them from Townhall.com).
A recent column by John Leo is, "A regrettable limit on life", advertised as "Red and Blue Bioethics". I had just started to get into the topic of bioethics because of a chapter in the book, Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall For Stupid Ideas by Daniel J Flynn. More on (Moron?) this book later, but the chapter in question is on Princeton's tenured professor, Peter Singer, and it's followed by a chapter on the intellectual dishonesty of the I, Rigobertu Menchu episode. Which leads to a common thread with the John Leo article.
"...Bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government. This explains why Leo Kass, a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics, is under such fierce attack and why Princeton University picked Peter Singer as it's first scholar in bioethics. Singer thinks parents should be able to kill disabled newborns.
Among bioethicists, Kass says, 'there is kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured.' Under pressure from bioethicists, norms have been collapsing...
The Schiavo case is a breakthrough for persuading the public to lower the bar on moral constraints. Once we had a bright line between pulling the plug on patients kept alive by life-support systems and killing people like Terri Schiavo who are not on life-support systems but merely being fed through a tube..."
Leo doesn't quite get it on the Schiavo case but he's pretty good on liberal vs. conservative issues, and although I don't totally buy his "red-versus-blue issue" here, I think I see what he's getting at.
I also hadn't thought too much about the bioethics issue as related to other intellectual or academic departments or areas, but given Flynn's book and Leo's essay, I can see that socialist/leftist rot and political/ideological influence has taken over bioethics as well. What Leo doesn't see is that the Republicans, religious right, and faith driven people's fight in the Schiavo case is a variety of the same thing, and both sides are wrong.
The reason they're both wrong gets at the problem of leftist ideology acting as a religious faith without an identifiable god or organized religion. (Religious ideology is more obvious). People should be able to choose intensely personal issues like bearing children and end-of-life decsions, not because the liberals are correct. And the religious moralists shouldn't be able to block their decisions just because of creeping liberalism in the courts or in bioethicists. Other people shouldn't be making your decisions for you whether they're Democrats, bioethicists, Republicans, lawyers, judges, liberals, or conservatives.
This is particularly the case when the law is fairly clear and generally agreed on. Individuals should be able to make they're own decisions even if they're wrong. This is why the Schiavo case is a tragedy but isn't going to lead to death camps and rampant euthanasia. Institutionalized death only happen when the state or those acting with power and authority (such as religions or lawyers) get involved. Deciding to abort a pregnancy is a tragedy too, but it's only a problem if it's state sponsored. Choosing to have yourself sterilized should be an individual decision, not a state one as another example.
Freedom means making your own decisions and suffering the consequences of them whether they are in this world or the next. Freedom doesn't mean moralists on the left or the right telling you what you should be doing and it certainly doesn't mean the government telling you what to do.
Now there's still the issue of when individual rights and decisions conflict with the law, the legitimate rights of others, or when individual decisions aren't known. Peter Singer notwithstanding, few want a society where parents or the government can decide to kill their children after they're born. It wasn't clearly known what Terri Schiavo's wishes were or would have been. In tragic situations with no clear individual decision, someone has to decide. The law in a society such as ours would say that the court closest to the issue has to decide. It's not perfect but it's the best we have. Most still agree with this even though it isn't pleasant and the court can make a poor choice too.
But still it's a single case. As soon as everyone gets to second guess it or advocacy groups get to decide or God (in the person of people who claim to know what God wants) or the federal bureaucracy, God forbid, gets to decide, then we have a real problem. Tough cases make bad law as the saying goes. Better to let individuals decide or the closest local court and let it be. Neither liberals or conservatives have a corner on the individual decision and morality market.
The problem is ideology and group power in situations when it should be an individual's choice or the next best thing.
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