Truth And Common Sense

The ethicists pushing the idea that newborns aren’t really human because they aren’t self-aware or produce anything is so mind bogglingly stupid that it rails against your conscience and intelligence like an Oklahoma tornado.

They argued: “The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.”

Rather than being “actual persons”, newborns were “potential persons”. They explained: “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ’subject of a moral right to life’.

“We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.”

As such they argued it was “not possible to damage a newborn by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the morally relevant sense”.

The authors therefore concluded that “what we call ‘after-birth abortion’ (killing a newborn) should be permissible in all the cases where abortion is, including cases where the newborn is not disabled”.

They also argued that parents should be able to have the baby killed if it turned out to be disabled without their knowing before birth, for example citing that “only the 64 per cent of Down’s syndrome cases” in Europe are diagnosed by prenatal testing.

Once such children were born there was “no choice for the parents but to keep the child”, they wrote.

“To bring up such children might be an unbearable burden on the family and on society as a whole, when the state economically provides for their care.”

I highlighted the last line to make a point. This is about arguing the “State” is the ultimate beneficiary of all humans that are born. If you don’t produce, you don’t have a right to exist.  This is the argument for the euthanasia of elderly citizens. They are past their prime, a net user of resources offered by the society, and will not ever become productive again.  So they are, in the eyes of ethicists like those above, a dead limb that needs to be cut from the body.  They are “dead” already because they can’t produce just like the babies aren’t human yet because they haven’t produced.  Wow!!!!

Back in the nineties, the Wachowski brothers produce a movie called the “Matrix”.  Those who watched it loved the action and adventure.  Some heard the message, intentional or not, that people could be, or may be, considered simply a power source enabling the Matrix to operate. The Matrix decided who lived or died, or what “life” they had, etc.   Some saw the series of films reflecting different religious and philosophical beliefs.  Others saw it more along the line of big government verses individual liberty.  How much to you give up to the “State” in order to feed it?  Remember in the movie the “Matrix” controlled everything and let you have what you thought was free will.  In today’s society, we may have reached a fundamental step towards this ultimate control.   Many are trying to stop it or at least slow it down for many different reasons.  One of those is the issue of the sanctity of life.  As we’ve seen in the past, the degrading of other humans is not always done by ignorant bigots.  In fact, I’ll argue the vast majority of the people involved in degrading other humans are not some backwater tribal members, but highly educated intelligent humans who took a long time to think through their position, and still promoted it as viable.  This kind of twisted disconnect between intellect and reason is frightening.  But it is part of the human condition.

They preferred to use the phrase “after-birth abortion” rather than “infanticide” to “emphasise that the moral status of the individual killed is comparable with that of a fetus”.

Both Minerva and Giubilini know Prof Savulescu through Oxford. Minerva was a research associate at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics until last June, when she moved to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Melbourne University.

Giubilini, a former visiting student at Cambridge University, gave a talk in January at the Oxford Martin School - where Prof Savulescu is also a director - titled ‘What is the problem with euthanasia?’

Do you know why I would support an iron worker or carpenter as a national leader over some Harvard educated numbskull? Because the Harvard guy thinks it is only proper to consider an idea, no matter how perverted or silly, because it is “an intellectual principle”.   On the other hand, the carpenter would say, “Let me get this straight. You want to kill a baby, just starting out, without knowing its potential, because it didn’t hit the ground running or producing for the ’state’.  Come over here son, and let me introduce you to my twenty-two ounce framing hammer. I think I need to knock some sense into your head!”

Folks you can’t make this stuff up!  But it does highlight the kind of argument humans have had since the beginning and the reason why it is so important to fight back against these kinds of perverted arguments.  It also brings up some points I’d like to offer-

1. The fact is the greatest threat to the sanctity of life is not from some backwoods ignorant tribal members, but from the intellectuals among us.  Time and again, millions of people were first argued to be inferior and useless, and then exterminated in what was considered by contemporaries as very enlightened societies.

2. It is never the people making the argument admitting the group they belong to may be useless.  If you’ll notice, the people arguing now are neither newborn or elderly.  Oh, the “old and useless” part of their lives is coming, but they can’t see it through all their intellectual rationalizations.  I’m willing to bet, once retired, having medical problems that are paid for by the “State”, they’ll suddenly rethink the Solyent Green exit they promote today.  Ah, the foolishness of youth!

3. What constitutes useful?  Can I argue that over educated would be philosophers that produce nothing, create nothing, service nothing are in fact worthless to society? If an assembly line worker at a plant suddenly died, there would be a drop off in productivity until a new person was hired and trained to replace them.  If a farmer was injured and couldn’t harvest his crop, the crop would fail and a finite amount of food would not be brought to market. If a top brain surgeon stopped practicing patients could actually die.    But if an intellectual fell off the face of the earth what would be the measurable damage to society?  Would it be hungrier? Colder? Have less products to use?   If Tom Friedman or Paul Krugman  stopped writing biased columns would the world stop turning? Would one person suffer? (There could be a good argument less people would suffer, but I digress… .) If Barney Frank retired and left office, would we suffer as a nation? Would one person go to bed with less?

I think it would be a great warning, a kind of “I wouldn’t do that if I were you” deal, to the ethicists who want to argue usefulness as a key to whether or not someone should be forcibly removed from society.  In reality, as far as being useful, they fall far, far down the list of who stays and who gets to take the “hot shot” ride to the next plane of existence.  And they should also remember that they, as intellectuals now arguing for the “State” could be found wanting in the eyes of the State someday.  That is what happened in the past as the intellectuals who once rallied for the cause were found to be a threat and were eliminated.  You’d think they would have figured that out by now, but then again… Harvard… .

Just saying…