PT: It's too hard to say, "Your husband is in a lot of pain and his
life will be unbearable. Do you want me to kill him for you?"
PS: Another reason is that the Judeo-Christian view is still very
influential, and it's hard for people to break out of that mold. We still
view human life as sacred.
PT: What would happen to us if we broke out of that mold?
PS: We already have. But some people are afraid that it' we create
actual policies, crazy doctors will be running loose with loaded
syringes.
PT: I'm curious about another suggestion of yours that seems
invented for shock value. You suggest that we shouldn't treat a baby as a
person until it's a month old. Why?
PS: That proposal was intended for severely disabled newborn
beings. What do you do in that situation?
PT: But what led you to pick the arbitrary date of one month? Why
not just leave it at birth, which is still the most powerful physical
moment? And besides, nobody's going to accept your proposal. We're still
going to continue saving premature babies when we can.
PS: You have to ask yourself, does a baby have a right to life as
soon as it's born? Or does its right to life come into existence
gradually? Of course it's gradual, but that doesn't help the policy
makers. If you're trying to shape policy, you need to try and draw lines
somewhere. So I came up with an arbitrary point, as a way of
demonstrating the fact that babies, unlike older children, don't yet have
the capacity for seeing themselves as independent beings.
The point is, we do already make life-and-death decisions about
newborns and their reasonable chances for life without major handicap. So
who should be allowed make that decision and how? I suggest it should be
the parents, along with their doctors.
I would not be happy with the view that we should keep every baby
alive from birth no matter how serious its disabilities. But right now we
can't actually kill newborns, because we're just not comfortable with
that. St) we "let" them die. Again, I think that's a fiction.
All the same, I have acknowledged in Rethinking Life and Death that
an arbitrary boundary line doesn't work well from a public-policy point
of view. So there is a strong case for treating all human beings as
having a right to life from birth, simply because that is the only really
clear and visible line of demarcation. At this stage I'm still thinking
about the best way to resolve these difficult issues.
PT: Do you have children yourself.? Everyone says that however you
feel about kids in the abstract, it changes when you're confronted with
critical decisions regarding your own. How would you behave given a dire
situation involving your own offspring?
PS: I have three grown daughters. It is important to remember that
I have never said that it is OK, or a trivial matter, to kill newborn
infants in normal circumstances, that is, when they have loving parents
who care for them. My point is that the wrong clone is really, at that
stage, a wrong to the parents rather than to the infant who has no
awareness of its own existence.
So, of course, I cared for and loved my children, and would have
been deeply upset if they had died, but that is really because of my
feelings, and those of my wife, not be. cause of what they were at that
moment. So I don't think it is true that I don't take emotions into
account.
PT: But look how messy and complicated these real-life situations
are. I'm not sure any ethical view can actually address life as it
is.
You say we're like the animals, but if we face that brutal fact
then we have to admit that we're part of nature, and nature is not
moral.
Nature is often remorseless. Animals kill others for food and
protect: only those who share the greatest genetic heritage with
them.
It's all built into nature, so any moral system has to take the
amoral aspect of nature into account. There's a lot of beauty, but
there's also genocide. How much can we ever shape this gloriously,
terrifyingly messy thing called life?
PS: You're being descriptive, not prescriptive. At the descriptive
level, everything you say is true. But you could follow that view through
to total moral nihilism. I think we're under a moral obligation to do
better.
PT: You don't have to be a moral nihilist to recognize that human
beings are part of amoral nature, even though we may be able to defy the
process of evolution in many ways, and impose some kind of moral order on
it that it wouldn't have otherwise.
For example, I certainly feel better when I eat eggs from
free-range chickens that have been running around leading relatively
happy lives. And the animal liberation movement probably led to that and
that's good. But if I'm starving, I won't care at all, I'll eat an egg
from a caged chicken without a second thought.
PS: Sure, so would I. But coherent, intelligible ethics can have an
impact. I've discovered that by working in the animal rights
movement.
I know a number of people who became vegetarians after they read
Animal Liberation, and that book is very much a rational argument. It's
been pleasing to see people moved by a rational argument to change their
ethical positions and their lives.
PT: There's something I don't understand about preference
utilitarianism. Let's say there are 11 beings, and 10 of those beings
want to kill one of those beings. Do the intense preferences of those 10
outweigh the intense preference of that one?
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