Scary thought

I have always been particularly fascinated by ethical issues involving living beings. Whether those living beings are non-human animals subjected to human oppression and torture or a human animal trying to determine whether it is morally permissible to end the life of a fetus growing inside her, issues of life and suffering have always found me to be a receptive listener and willing analyst. Particularly when dealing with issues of human life (but on rare occasions for non-human animal life) I find people coming back with the ethical equivalent of political party’s published ‘talking points’ – small soundbites of intuitively palatable moral wisdom which the public seems to absorb and digest approximately as well as they would absorb and digest a steel ball bearing. Inevitably, sometime in the discussion, someone will regurgitate the soundbite, poisoning the discussion for a frustratingly vast stretch of otherwise useful conversation.

Among the most pernicious of these moral maxims people love to parrot is ‘All life is precious!’ This little gem seems lovely on its surface, but it never seems to pass inspection by anyone who stops to look beyond the initial “Ooh… shiny!” intuitive reaction. All life is precious? If someone seriously thinks this, I’m worried about whether they understand the meaning of the terms ‘life’ and ‘precious.’

Currently in the United Kingdom, a furor is being raised over a medical decision being made by a mother with a teenaged daughter. The daughter, Katie Thorpe, appears to be severely disabled (both mentally and physically) and she cannot care for herself in any appreciable way. The mother, fearing that her daughter will soon begin menstruating has chosen to have doctors perform surgery on her daughter to remove the daughter’s uterus. The mother’s explanation is that while her daughter may not have a very high quality of life, she can at least spare her the indignity of monthly cramps, headaches, and bleeding that will cause her discomfort she is wholly unequipped to understand or deal with.

Groups which stand up for the rights of the disabled, however, are incensed. They are calling the procedure a forced sterilization of a disabled individual, and some advocates holding their position are invoking the time-honored tradition of painting their opponents as Nazis. In discussing this issue with some people who agreed that the medical procedure should be prohibited from being performed on this girl, they invoked that classical gem ‘But all life is precious, therefore we should let this little girl flower into womanhood and make her own reproductive choices.’

Now, I’m going to sidestep over my critique that the girl is wholly incapable of making any choices – whether those choices are of what to wear that day or of whether to undergo costly and invasive surgery to prevent her from becoming a reproductive adult. I’m also going to leave by the wayside the logical structure of the argument where the conclusion ‘we should let the girl [not have the surgery]’ doesn’t in any way follow from the premise that ‘All life is precious.’ Instead, I want to think about the concept of whether that first statement of ‘All life is precious’ is actually true.

Most people won’t hold the position that the statement is meant to actually include ALL life, so I’ll ignore non-human animals and plants. The statement appears to have two conceptual parts: First, there seems to be the assertion that all human lives are equally valuable, and second, there seems included the hidden statement (that would alleviate the logical error committed by my friend above who made the statement that sparked my thoughts on this matter) of ‘performing action ‘X’ which causes harm to a human on the basis of some inter-human discrimination is morally objectionable.’
Is all human life equally valuable and are inter-human discriminations morally objectionable? It seems morally palatable to say so on the surface. This intuition (whether natural or learned) is precisely what allows us to easily say that treating someone differently on the basis of their skin color, the shape of their eyes, the language that they speak, or the religion that they practice is wrong. There isn’t any reason for us to treat these groups differently. Just because someone of darker skin than I have looks different than me doesn’t mean that I can morally treat them differently than myself. It isn’t a valid line to draw across humanity since we are all the same.

And yet, to blithely assume that there are no valid lines that could be drawn across humanity, for any reason at all, seems to me to be somehow strikingly naïve. Here, of course, we aren’t discussing ‘final solutions’ or anything that terrible – we’re talking about whether another person can make medical choices on behalf of another person simply because of the latter person’s membership in some sub-set of humanity.

But let’s take a step out further into the crazy land of philosophical hypotheticals and propose a scenario that actually WILL entail the deaths of others. Does the idea that we are all equally valuable even hold up there, where we might think it to be the strongest?

Suppose that reality actually is the plot of some awful Hollywood Sci-Fi action flick (which however terrible, I’d probably still want to see it). A giant meteor is rushing toward the Earth and a scientist has managed to discover it in time to alert the world’s governments as to the immanent demise of our world. For the purposes of this scenario, suppose the meteor is so large that diverting it or blowing it up simply aren’t options. We will either leave the Earth or we will die. After getting together enormous sums of money, the world’s governments manage to construct a massive ‘Noah’s Ark’-like spaceship on which to load 1,000 humans, our accumulated knowledge, scientific equipment, and genetic samples of as many non-human animals and plants as they could accumulate. The spaceship will provide a safe home for the thousand individuals chosen to inhabit it, and they are capable of surviving the fiery holocaust to come for long enough to allow the planet’s surface to become habitable again. You are in charge of filling the available spots in the life-raft, so to speak. Who will you choose?

Of course, there will be discriminations made, and I’m sure that even an ‘All life is precious’ sort of person will be more than amenable to saying that the ship will need highly skilled people to help rebuild civilization after when the smoke clears. Doctors, engineers, metallurgists, and other trades will be needed. I don’t think that anyone would truly favor a sort of purely random lottery choice to fill the ship since you might end up with a group reminiscent of the spaceship found in Douglas Adam’s ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ series, where the spaceship sent to colonize a new world was populated only by hairdressers, advertising people, and phone-booth sanitizers. What I’m after is whether there are any appropriate physical discriminations that can, or rather should, be made when choosing who will live and who will die.

Suppose there are two engineers with identical skills and knowledge. Both would be useful for helping society to rebuild. Both would be equally capable of designing the new roads, bridges, and vehicles necessary to do the work. The only difference between them is that one of the engineers is in a wheelchair and the other has the full use of his legs and is easily mobile. However heartless it might seem, there does seem to be a plausible argument for letting the ambulatory individual onboard while sadly condemning the wheelchair-bound fellow to a terrifying death.

Assuming that all of the ‘knowledge’ or ‘craftspeople’ positions were filled and you still had another hundred spots to fill, would it be appropriate to fill one of those spots with an individual who is profoundly mentally retarded? With someone with Down’s Syndrome? To make the discrimination even more clear, would it be appropriate to fill the spot with someone who is known to have a heritable heart defect, or even someone in whose family runs poor vision necessitating the wearing of reading glasses? Given the ample supply of equivalent, but non-defective human specimens from which to choose, aren’t such discriminations morally obligated?

Naturally, when extended to absurd lengths, common moral sentiments can be found to have gaps and holes all over them. Invoking the ‘lifeboat’ situation always finds ways to strain our conventional notions of morality. The point of the exercise is rarely to point out that the lifeboat scenario holds the key to moral choices in everyday life, but rather to show that our moral statements are not nearly so absolute as we might otherwise think. Some other rule as yet unexplicated tells us where to draw the line between the lifeboat case and the easy case of whether to discriminate on the basis of skin color. Instead of invoking the rule now shown to be non-absolute, perhaps it is time to delve into the project of figuring out when it is and is not appropriate to make those discriminations. Perhaps it is time to examine the exact preciousness of the life at issue in the given case under the given circumstances to determine what the moral choice is.

It is a difficult path to walk, but it is one that I would recommend for everyone. Striving to understand how one ought to live demands more than regurgitating simplistic moral axioms and applying them to novel situations. It demands that one be willing to override the easy answer and question everything, including whether there are some times when it is morally acceptable or even obligatory to make a decision that condemns billions to a fiery grave. If it might so be acceptable or obligatory, then we need to be substantially less blase about how we go about positing the rightness or wrongness of ordering a hysterectomy on a single developmentally disabled child.