Good morning.
- Raising kids.
- On a relationship with God.
- Modern slavery in the Maldives.
- On the Healthcare bill.
- Guns and the right to life.
- For those not reading Greek.
- Inconsistencies in the White House healthcare notions.
- Difficulties in reading the bills.
- Afghanistan over the last 8 years. The administrations narrative that of 8 years of neglect … not true. Surprised?
- Moses as an American hero.
- Road trains.
- 50k soldiers buried.
- Contra euthanasia.
- Quietly giggling on a shelf.
- That brave new world.
- Economics, back to square one or not?
Your guns link goes to the health care propaganda piece.
Re: the health care propaganda piece, here’s my comment on another blog pushing it:
Pure propaganda piece. Detailed rebuttal.
c, of course, is the liar who wrote “No Exit,” the big article against the Clinton health care plan in the 90s. She’s also the liar who started the lie about health care reform leading to the euthanasia of old people.
Contra euthanasia.
Ok, it’s explicitly religious. That’s fine. You religious people force your terminally ill people to suffer even when they beg you to help them (or let them) end it. Just keep your religious rules out of the laws that govern all of us, religious and not.
(c should be McCaughey, of course.)
JA,
On euthenasia … A Russian prelate talks about medical ethics and your first remark is to keep his paws of your US practices. That’s got to be the weirdest leap I’ve seen in a while. He’s Russian. American Orthodoxy counts are comparable or smaller than those of American Jew who as you know are a really scarily dominant voting bloc.
Whatever.
An American linked to him. An American who is part of the bloc that votes against things like legalized euthanasia, as far as I can tell. I don’t see it as a big leap.
Guns and the right to life.
I agree wholeheartedly. The right to self-defense is a part of the right to life.
That said, just as a statistical truth, I think most people are better off not owning or carrying guns — the risks of suicide, escalation of violent encounters, accidents, and the false confidence to venture into unsafe situations greatly outweigh the potential self-defense usage. But I don’t think the government should prohibit them.
In regards to euthanasia and health care, I think by this point is has been exposed as a lie. American society is too centered on consumption to embrace the idea that people should give up their lives rather than consume vast amounts of resourses for marginal gain. If anything euthanasia has been redefined in the debate to mean simply being told you *may* have to pay out of your own money for some treatments of dubious benefits.
But euthanasia is also a philosophical topic and Mark is into the theology/philosophy more than most right wing pundit types. Here I’m skeptical of the idea of euthanasia ‘ending suffering’. When you get down to it, most suffering can be drugged pretty well. We have gotten very good at controlling the brain with chemicals and no doubt we will continue to improve. Even if you are so doped up that you only get a few minutes of real life per day, it doesn’t seems pretty rare to achieve a state where life is truely not worth living. An unhappy life is still a life and there’s no rule in the universe that says suffering is not the norm. On the contrary, it is the norm. I’m not saying I would force suffering people to not commit suicide, but I would hesitate to embrace the idea that suicide should be the default answer to living with suffering. When it comes down to it, we have a remarkable ability to decide what level of suffering is really intolerable. Look at the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam war. Even in those moments of agonizing pain they didn’t flinch. Since we can decide why encourage us to set the bar low? Doing so only increases the amount of intolerable suffering in the world.
I’m not taking a pro-life stance here of life uber alles. I can see an argument for why suicide may be ethical in some situations. The most obvious that comes to mind is giving up your life for some larger cause or for another. A soldier who volunteers for a mission that has little chance for success is not necessarily behaving unethically IMO. Nor would someone who opts to give someone else an organ that then puts them at risk of an early death.
I could see someone opting for an earlier death to spare wasted resources on themselves that could more profitably be used to help others more. But here I think its too easy to confuse price with true cost. An intensive care bed supposedly costs thousands per day. But most of that is fixed cost. The bed is there whether or not you’re in it. The nurse monitoring the patients collects her pay every two weeks whether or not you’re in the bed. Even massive amounts of morphine is cheap. When the hospital says your bed costs $3,000 a day the true marginal cost is almost certainly a fraction of that and the rest is the hospital trying to make up for various capital investments, money losing parts of their business and so on. It’s not like you choosing to end your life a day early would free up $3,000 that could be spent on a child in the neonatal unit.
It is often repeated that a huge amount of medical cost is spent in the last few days of life….but I suspect that’s more like a huge amount of medical billing happens in the last few days of life. If your interest is not being a burden on those who need help, staying alive a few extra days may actually provide the hospital with the profits they can use for their low income outreach programs and other worthy causes.
I’m definitely not saying euthanasia should be encouraged, nor do I hope it becomes common. I just think that a person has the right to make that decision for him/herself.
I think the line between DNR and (assisted or not) suicide is one of those artificial lines people draw to make themselves feel better — but requesting enough morphine (or whatever) to kill you does not strike me as morally different from requesting the ventilator being turned off.
An old post of mine about Active vs. Passive Morality.
I think there are a few lines that are relevant, but sometimes blurry.
First is product and by product. Taking morphine to relieve pain may shorten your life as a byproduct but you’re not primarily taking it to do that. Taking morphine to shorten your life is different. Consider the case of someone who wants to OD on morphine because they have an illness that *will* produce pain in the future but right now is not producing such pain.
Second is omission and commission. Declining a medical procedure (even a very simple one like a feeding tube or cpr), is omission. Being smothered by a pillow or taking an OD of morphine (not as a byproduct) is commission. I’m not saying that commission may never be ethical, but it is a line IMO that is neither artificial nor irrelevant.
Boonton:
But why do people make a moral distinction between omission and commission?
Situation A: A glass of water has been poisoned. Alice knows it’s poisoned but Bob doesn’t. Alice watches Bob pick up the glass and chooses not to tell him it’s poisoned before he drinks it.
Situation B: Alice poisons the glass of water and gives it to Bob. He drinks it.
You’re arguing that Alice is more culpable in situation B than in situation A. I don’t see that as obviously true. Can you justify it?
By acting a person takes on a share of the responsibilities for the consquences of acting. Putting poison in a glass makes one responsible for that glass and all that happens after. Likewise by taking a drink from an unknown glass you yourself take on responsibility for bearing the risk that what seems like safe water may not be.
By acting a person takes on a share of the responsibilities for the consquences of acting.
But isn’t that just a bias, albeit a common one? Why should it matter if I poison you or refrain from preventing you from unknowingly poisoning yourself when it would be trivial to warn you? In either case, the result is identical.
True the result is identical, but if we don’t take ownership for our own actions then what can we ever take ownership of?
I suppose you could redefine not warning someone that the water is poisoned as some type of negative action but I think it makes sense to draw a line between commision and omission.
Y’all,
For what it’s worth Christian little (and big) “o” orthodoxy is with JA on this one. Confessions of sins cite, sins of commission and omission (what I have done and left undone).
I’ll try to write something on medical ethics and practice this weekend.
Keep in mind I’m not asserting that there is no such thing sa a sin of omission. I’m asserting that there is a line between the two types of sins. The difference between them is real.
Boonton,
I’ll certainly agree that there is a ontological difference between them, in the sense that the two can be distinguished.
I’m not however so sure that the distinction means that generically one is less serious than the other.
Fair point, off the top of my head though it seems like commission is generally worse than omission. Baiting a glass of water with poison seems to be worse than simply failing to warn someone a glass is tainted… Can you think of an example where the omission would be worse than the corresponding commission?