In a rather horrifying article in New York magazine, Michael Wolff describes the saga of his ailing mother and her losing struggle against dementia. His piece, which begins with a somewhat sympathetic consideration of the ethical and moral dilemmas facing end-of-life patients, slowly transitions into mixed messages about the value of people in vegetative states, and ultimately lands in unvarnished contempt for the life of the woman who raised him. In what becomes a quest to rid the world of his own mother, he dispenses such gems as:
Discontinuing the medication felt like both a solemn and giddy occasion. A week passed, and then the doctors began to report in a chipper way that she was doing well, all things considered. She had withstood the shock to the system. She was stable. [...]
I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end.
The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going.
Perhaps that feared “culture of death” isn’t so exotic or hyperbolic, after all. Read the rest of “A Life Worth Ending” for a glimpse at how it takes root among the respectable.
May 23rd, 2012 | 3:19 pm
Was it Walker Percy who wrote that compassion led to the death camps?
May 23rd, 2012 | 4:39 pm
He’s not talking about killing anyone. He’s talking about withholding heroic, extreme efforts to prolong barely keeping someone “alive,” in the sense of keeping the heart beating.
Everyone single one of us makes this same cost-benefit analysis daily. Each of us is or ought be 100% confident that at some point, some coal-miners, dam-builders, or nuclear power plant-operators are going to die, or have died, as a result of our need for electricity. Each of us should be 100% confident that because we choose to allow cars to go fast, and not to be built like tanks, that someone could die as a result of our driving.
You can’t not make this sort of cost-benefit analysis, not without living in a cave (and even then, you’re making the same cost-benefit analysis in favor of you dying as an indirect result of living in a cave).
May 23rd, 2012 | 5:15 pm
It was sheer lunacy, as the author/son realizes afterwards, to perform heart surgery on an 84-year-old woman, showing signs of dementia, who was refusing treatment! It has always struck me that the Catholic Church is very wise in allowing people to forego “extraordinary measures” to prolong life. This seems to me clearly to be a case where extraordinary measures were taken twice to prolong the suffering of the author’s mother. I don’t think the Catholic understanding of the point of living is to extend the life of the body as long as possible at all costs. Certainly it is against Catholic thought to deliberately kill someone, even in this horrible condition. But to prolong her life seems to me wicked. And the author is quite correct that with the increase in numbers of the elderly and in diseases like Alzheimer’s, we can foresee a future in which—if all the individuals in his mother’s condition are dealt with in the way his mother is being dealt with—there will not be enough money in the entire economy to pay for it.
Note the following:
And remember demographics. The ratio of old to young in the United States is increasing.
It is one thing for a person capable of making his or her own decisions to hang on to life at all costs. It is quite another for caregivers to make decisions on behalf of those who are mentally incompetent to prolong their misery.
Please don’t misunderstand. I am not talking about death panels. I am talking about making reasonable decisions for oneself and for loved ones. I think if any 84-year-old woman is having heart trouble and major surgery is advised, if she is competent to make her own decisions, it would be perfectly within the bounds of Catholic thought and Catholic medical ethics for her to say no.
May 23rd, 2012 | 6:50 pm
I don’t think there is anything unconscionable here.
I came across this article the other day, which explains (albeit in a sort of anecdotal way) that doctors often choose to forego costly and uncertain treatments in favor of enjoying the end of their lives and dying peacefully, rather than suffering through prolonged and invasive treatments of dubious efficacy. It seems like a reasonable decision, though of course if you wish to spend millions and live in a hospital ward in order to extend your life by a few months, clinging on bitterly until the very end, that is your right, I suppose.
May 23rd, 2012 | 6:52 pm
I would have to agree with Mr. Nickol here. I don’t think the author seriously is looking for ‘death panels’ to make unthinkable decisions, but is speaking from a perspective of seeing his mother trapped as a result extraordinary measures. There was a point when her heart was clearly following her mind in its deterioration but was drawn back from the precipice by an inappropriate surgical procedure. There is more to respecting human life than fixing assorted body parts one by one until the doctors are faced by one final thing that can’t be fixed.
Being an orphan myself, I don’t devote too much thought to this topic. But the day will come when I may be the old parent, faced with an assortment of maladies. As pro-life as I am, I hope there will be the opportunity to eschew extraordinary procedures. . . or even something along the lines of a pneumonia vaccination, so that my demise will be more a matter of nature taking its course rather than medicine having exhausted every extraordinary trick up its sleeve.
May 23rd, 2012 | 7:47 pm
Leaving aside all the rest, what does he think he’s sparing himself or his kids by not getting long-term care insurance? Does he somehow think that guarantees him a quicker death? In reality, it could just result in the situation that developed with my own parents — inability to care for themselves in their own home, but still a fair amount of life left in them, with a serious financial problem on top of it.
Whether to get LTC or not is not a simple decision, but it strikes me as fallacious that he seems to associate buying the insurance with a lingering existence. You could have a lingering existence WITHOUT the insurance if you wind up with the kind of condition that leaves you disabled but not dying, and then you’re even worse off. And so are your kids.
May 24th, 2012 | 6:41 am
I agree with David Nickol. The oft-cite lines of Arthur Hugh Clough,
“Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:”
come very close to the traditional Catholic position.
It is a result of the consequentialism that characterises modern moral philosophy that the distinction between killing and merely letting nature take its course has become blurred.
May 24th, 2012 | 7:01 am
Everyone single one of us makes this same cost-benefit analysis daily. Each of us is or ought be 100% confident that at some point, some coal-miners, dam-builders, or nuclear power plant-operators are going to die, or have died, as a result of our need for electricity.
There is a difference in category. You are conflating two unlike things, as if they were like.
One really important difference: intent. Nobody is deliberately trying to kill the industrial worker. There is every expectation that we will get our coal without anyone dying at all. If you go into most industrial worksites in America, you will find stringent safety requirements; you will be expected to wear funny glasses, hard hats, special shoes, hi-vis, and whatever else is likely to reduce the risk of accidents. You will notice signs posted – both signs instructing workers on how to reduce the risk of accidents, and also signs bragging about how many days it has been since the last accident. If they hit a certain number of days, the workers will get t-shirts boating “300 days with no recordables!” or some such (because it has been found that this sort of behavior increases the workers’ sense of pride in not having any accidents).
Somehow I don’t imagine that the hospital will be handing out prizes if Grandma lives beyond her expected usual diagnosis.
Another difference: voluntary vs. assigned from on-high. The worker who signs up for a high-risk job in today’s marketplace knows the risks – and is compensated accordingly.
If people were deemed unfit for full citizenship and were sent to coal mines, then the situation with coal miners might be comparable to this man judging his mother unfit to live.
We cross a dangerous line when we grant that some members of society have the right to decide (based on their own judgment/criteria) that some people shouldn’t be alive anymore.
May 24th, 2012 | 1:14 pm
Blake,
But if the factory really wanted to be safe, it would shut down. The factory owner, and every consumer of anything the factory makes, puts factory workers’ lives at risk every day the factory is open. All those safety aspects you talk about – hard hats, etc. – fall on the right side of the cost-benefit analysis. But there are other safety aspects – e.g., (and most extremely) shutting down the plant – that cost more than the few lives it saves are worth. They don’t do “whatever else is likely to reduce the risk of accidents.” They only do those things that are cost-efficient, which requires placing a cost on life. Your intent is that you have the goods produced by the factory. You don’t intend for anyone to die as a result, but your lack of intent doesn’t make anyone less dead.
Your compensation argument is immaterial. First, do you really believe coal-miners are that well-paid, relative to much safer jobs, like professors, bankrs, or lawyers? Second, whether they’re paid or not, you’re still participating in their deaths. If you really morally object to doing a cost-benefit analysis with people’s lives, that some of the people you (and everyone else) help kill get paid for it is irrelevant.
At the societal level, letting some old people die when they get old isn’t any different than accepting the fact that some people are going to get run over as a result of our societal desire to drive places.
May 24th, 2012 | 3:48 pm
There is a saying that hard cases make bad law. It is not until the very end of his long essay that he gets to his point: Death Panels are not all that bad. He extrapolates his own trauma of caring for his mother to make his case.
What Michael Wolff in essence is calling for is a national program that will take the burdens of “end of life” away from families and assign them to some federal bureaucracy. In his round about way, he is acknowleding the evil of this administrative function. Wolff believes that if there were Death Panels already in place, there would have been no possibilty that his mother would have lived as long as she did. The Cost-Beneift Analysis would have seen to it that his mother would have died long ago. He doesn’t acknowledge or see the dangers that once a person has been diagnosed with the condition of “dementia” that they are essientially given a death sentence. We all know how bureaucracies work.
May 24th, 2012 | 5:40 pm
First, do you really believe coal-miners are that well-paid, relative to much safer jobs, like professors, bankrs, or lawyers?
Yes.
Unionized industrial workers make six figure salaries, if they’re open to overtime work.
Compare that against other jobs of similar education and skill level (it is not appropriate to compare industrial jobs to professional careers that require years – and tens of thousands of dollars – of up-front investments).
May 24th, 2012 | 5:45 pm
Second, whether they’re paid or not, you’re still participating in their deaths. If you really morally object to doing a cost-benefit analysis with people’s lives, that some of the people you (and everyone else) help kill get paid for it is irrelevant.
Even if that were true (and it’s highly questionable at best), it doesn’t change what I already said.
May 24th, 2012 | 7:58 pm
Jamie r, it’s not that simple, either. Without adequate energy supplies and all the things that are operated with them, people die, too. Our “desire to drive places” has life-saving aspect to it, too — transportation for medical care, affordable and accessible food supplies, and on and on.
So you can’t say that if we were really concerned about people dying, we’d shut the factory down. People would die that way, too.
May 25th, 2012 | 6:56 am
Blake,
You’re still engaging in cost-benefit analysis about people’s lives. Your claim that we can and do adequately compensate people who have risky jobs makes sense if and only if you assume that cost-benefit analysis is possible and appropriate when it comes to letting miners die.
Pentamom,
Exactly! The cost-benefit analysis of what steps we’re going to take to prevent deaths within one group includes lives in other groups. The number of people who live longer or better as a result of electricity balances out the number of miners who die providing that electricity. This is not different from the cost-benefit analysis discussed above. We only have finite, scarce medical resources. If entitlement programs spend all their money keeping 90 year old vegetative people alive, that’s that much less money they’re going to have to spend elsewhere. If the ratio of med students specializing in gerontology instead of pediatrics changes, that’s that many fewer doctors taking care of children. The result of pretending to refuse to do a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to Ms. Wolff is that you’re doing a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to everyone else, in favor of Ms. Wolff and people like her. The cost of spending millions of dollars extraordinarily keeping Ms. Wolff alive longer is not spending that missions of dollars on others (or that much more debt we take as a nation). Either we spend infinite money on health care (and provide infinite healthcare personnel), or we do a cost-benefit analysis. You can’t avoid the cost-benefit analysis.
May 25th, 2012 | 8:00 am
Death Panels are not all that bad. He extrapolates his own trauma of caring for his mother to make his case.
It seems to me he has detached the woman he loved from the “thing” he is okay with killing, and has never successfully integrated the two images into a coherent whole.
This suggests to me that he may not be ‘over’ the issue enough to be rational. However much he uses the language of a grown-up, it is the child that is arguing – or should I say defending himself? – justifying his attitude toward the “thing” that used to be his mother: “it is too okay that I behaved so miserably toward my own mom. That isn’t my mom! My mom is already gone!”
It’s been my experience that where there is defensive justifications, there is also guilt.
This is a case where the family needed support but they never got it. A real “deliverance panel” would not “fix” the problem by simply making the mother go away, but would provide grief counseling and other emotional support, care for practical concerns, and assist with all the other end-of-life issues.
May 25th, 2012 | 1:48 pm
You’re still engaging in cost-benefit analysis about people’s lives. Your claim that we can and do adequately compensate people who have risky jobs makes sense if and only if you assume that cost-benefit analysis is possible and appropriate when it comes to letting miners die.
No, I’m not.
My argument is that you are saying that because we are all guilty of exploitation, that makes murder okay.
Your argument goes like this:
premise 1: X deliberately causes ABC.
premise 2: Y sometimes results in ABC…
conclusion 1: …therefore Y is no different from X.
premise 3: Even though Y causes ABC, it is still considered acceptable.
conclusion 2: Therefore, since Y is deemed acceptable, X must also be acceptable.
Both conclusions are false.
May 25th, 2012 | 4:36 pm
Murder? Who’s talking about murder? Withholding extraordinary care isn’t murder.
I’m saying that the argument above – that making healthcare choices under a cost-benefit rubric is evil – is stupid. Withholding extraordinary care because the cost exceeds the benefit is not only not murder, it’s the only moral choice.
You’ve misstated the nature of my argument. I’m not saying that intentionally causing someone’s death is the same as doing something that might cause someone’s death. I’m saying that making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die is the same as making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die. It’s not about exploitation. It’s about the fact that people die, no amount of money can fix that, and at some point, you must do a cost-benefit analysis: Is the marginal cost of saving/prolonging the marginal life worth the marginal benefit?
Let’s consider Ms. Wolff, specifically. What if keeping her alive costs $1 Trillion per day, when that same $1 Trillion, could be used to save any number of other lives. Should we pull the plug? Absolutely. There are millions of better uses for that $1 Trillion dollars. If it’s Ms. Wolff’s money, and she or her children want to waste it that way, I’m not saying we should stop them, but if it’s a public $1 Trillion? We should let Ms Wolff die, and use that $1 Trillion – and the finite medical resources it would buy – to save others, especially if Ms. Wolff is just barely alive. By refusing to engage in a cost-benefit analysis, you’re ensuring that Ms. Wolff gets a disproportionate share of Medicare money and finite healthcare resources.
Even with fiat currency, wealth is more or less finite. We can only spend so much. We cannot avoid doing a cost-benefit analysis when it comes to human lives. There are only so many doctors, and only so much money that we can spend on healthcare. If we refuse to make a cost-benefit analysis about our treatment of people like Ms. Wolff, either doctors or the medicare system are going to incur more debt than they can bear. The result will be an impoverished future medical system. I’m not saying we should just take the old out back and shoot them. I’m saying there’s a point where keeping them alive just doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know exactly what that point is, but there is a dollar figure above which keeping someone alive is at best stupid and at worst evil, since that’s that much money that’s not going to be used to improve the lot of future generations.
Since you like abstract terms. There is X money in the world, and Y doctors, and Z people. The amount we spend on healthcare can’t exceed X. The amount we spend per person, on average, can NOT exceed X/Z, and shouldn’t exceed some fraction thereof. The number of doctors we have treating each person, on average, can’t exceed Y/C. At some point, we have to make rational decisions about how to allocate X and Y among Z. If we don’t make a cost-benefit analysis, we have no rational way to allocate X and Y among Z.
But thank you for linking me to an introduction to logic. That’s very helpful, and in no way obnoxious.
May 26th, 2012 | 10:01 am
I’m saying that making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die is the same as making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die.
I give up.
May 26th, 2012 | 10:02 am
I’m saying that making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die is the same as making a choice that is statistically certain to cause some people to die.
I give up.
No, I won’t give up – I will check back one more time, to see if you’ve actually engaged with my arguments, or whether you continue to simply repeat what you’ve already said, ignoring the rebuttals I’ve already made.
May 26th, 2012 | 6:08 pm
What have you rebutted? You’ve rebutted that because we let some people die sometimes, murder is acceptable. Great. You haven’t rebutted any positions taken by anyone. Who’s talking about murder?
If I grant, arguendo, that I am advocating the murder of the elderly, or that I believe someone from on high should decide who lives and dies, then your argument is right. I haven’t, from your view, engaged with your argument because I don’t think murder is connected at all to anything anyone is talking about. I’m not talking about killing, I’m talking about letting people die. We let miners, truckers, construction workers, etc. die all the time. When deciding what safety precautions to take, we do a cost-benefit analysis. We could avoid causing fewer deaths (that is, there are acts or omissions we could do or not do, but for which these miners et al. wouldn’t die), but we don’t do that, because the costs (e.g., no electricity) are less than the benefits (a few more living miners). I’m not saying we should go around murdering coalminers. I’m saying that if the choice is letting coalminers die as a result of coal mining, or turning off electricity, pretty much everyone is in agreement that we should let them die. I apologize for rephrasing my arguments; I’ll give up when you stop insisting that I’m talking about murder.
Or to put it a different way: 1) At what point do Mr. Wolff, the doctors, and the taxpayer (through medicare) discharge any moral or proposed legal duty to help Ms. Wolff cling to life? 2) How much of their limited resources must they divert from other uses to rescue Ms. Wolff? Must they spend a million dollars on her? Ten million? If a doctor in the same hospital tends to a sick child, during which time Ms. Wolff dies, did that doctor commit murder by letting Ms. Wolff die? You, and Cantirino, would seem to say yes. If we shouldn’t or can’t subject human life to cost-benefit analysis, the failure to devote any less than all of our resources should be, to you and to Cantirino, the same as murder. But this is absurd. Even the good samaritan only gave the innkeeper 2 denarii, not millions.
May 27th, 2012 | 12:25 pm
What have you rebutted? You’ve rebutted that because we let some people die sometimes, murder is acceptable. Great. You haven’t rebutted any positions taken by anyone. Who’s talking about murder?
Until and unless the laws are changed, what you are proposing is in fact murder.
You want to kill old and sick people for reasons that are primarily about how inconvenient and/or expensive you find them.
Whether you’re doing the murder actively (putting a bag over their head) or passively (through neglect/elder abuse), the fact is that refusing life-saving treatment to someone because you want them to die is murder.
Intent really can’t be made insignificant, no matter how much your argument needs it to be insignificant. McDonalds had to pay $2.7 million dollars to a woman who spilled her coffee on herself because the court found that McDonalds knew that their change of coffee temperature would cause scalding but thought financial considerations were worth more than safety considerations.
If you could prove that the miners who were killed in 2010 were killed because the mine owners knowingly and deliberately opted to save money at the expense of worker safety, then you could argue that they are guilty of murder – but that still doesn’t make the person who buys electricity guilty of anything.
And even if it did, it wouldn’t prove that two wrongs made a right: you can’t prove that because we purchase electricity, therefore it’s okay to make “the right to life” into a conditional statement (especially when the conditional is based on your opinions of just when and whether a thing costs “too much” money). If we as a society have an obligation to provide health care to citizens, then such an obligation requires that we provide health care to all comers – there is no justification for enabling some people to decide when and whether other people are no longer entitled to the right to life.
Although I will grant that your argument is a good case against universal health care, since apparently when we say “universal” we mean “universal, except when we don’t think it’s worth it”.
May 27th, 2012 | 7:22 pm
But our resources are limited! We have a duty to provide healthcare to folks, but we don’t have a duty to use our resources recklessly. Every dollar the federal government spends on Ms. Wolff through medicare is a dollar we don’t spend on sick or starving children, or another dollar we borrow from China, which requires turning a blind eye to China’s human rights abuses. That is, it isn’t an abstract question of how much to pay for Ms. Wolff – if we had an infinite resources, then letting her die would be murder (and cost-benefit analysis would never point to letting anyone die). Our resources are FINITE. They are limited. Our social duty to provide healthcare for all is limited by our resources.
Let’s say you have a pizza, with 8 slices, and if you have 8 people who will starve to death if they don’t get a slice each, and a ninth person who will starve to death if he doesn’t eat all 8 slices. Would you murder 8 people for the one? Or would you do a cost-benefit analysis, and save 8 to let one die? In a world of limited, finite pizzas, that’s the choice we can’t avoid when it comes to Ms. Wolff.
However, if it’s possible to visit your magical world of unlimited resources, let me know. Meanwhile, in this world, it’s misguided to the point of probably murderous to give Ms. Wolff billions of dollars at the expense of dying children in America.
May 28th, 2012 | 8:30 am
Also, the coffee case was about negligence, not intent. The plaintiff’s theory of the case is that MacDonald’s was on the wrong side of a risk-utility balance.
Under the law in America, withholding life-saving medical treatment is not only not murder, it’s not even negligence. There’s no duty to affirmatively act to save anyone, unless, e.g., you start helping them. Even then, you only have a duty to reasonably help people, not to waste millions of dollars to keep someone’s heart beating. So, until and unless the laws are changed, what I’m talking about is not murder. Withholding of life-saving care is only murder if there’s a special relationship that imposes a duty, and the withholding was grossly unreasonable. This is quasi tangential, but your statements about the law are flatly wrong, unless you live in a Civil law country, in which case, I have no idea whether they’re right or wrong.
It is worth thinking about why the law doesn’t impose a duty to affirmatively save others, and why, when that duty exists, it doesn’t impose a duty to provide unreasonable care. The law recognizes that resources are limited. Imposing unreasonable duties makes people allocate their resources unreasonably. Forcing private individuals, doctors, hospitals, or the government to bankrupt themselves to keep someone’s heart beating for a few weeks is an unreasonable allocation of resources, which is why that duty isn’t imposed. Is it a little cold-blooded? Sure. But do you really want to put people in jail for choosing to use their limited resources to, e.g., feed their children instead of keeping Ms. Wolff alive?
May 29th, 2012 | 10:06 am
[...] Cantirino responds pithily at First Things: Perhaps that feared “culture of death” isn’t so exotic or hyperbolic, after [...]
May 30th, 2012 | 6:41 am
Also, the coffee case was about negligence, not intent. The plaintiff’s theory of the case is that MacDonald’s was on the wrong side of a risk-utility balance.
I mentioned the coffee case only in relation to a single point, which is that if the coffee had spilled accidentally, there would have been no lawsuit.
This point cannot be stretched too far – it has nothing to say on whether it is or is not murder to withhold medical treatment from someone – but it does point out that there is a difference between a thing happening accidentally vs. a thing that happens because of intent.
The original argument relied on pretending that deliberately withholding medical treatment is somehow the same as buying electricity. The argument is not only wrong but ridiculous, because it relies on insisting that a deliberate action is no different from an accident.
But the difference between a deliberate action as opposed to an action is a significant difference, as well as a relevant difference.
If it is true that we do not “owe” medical service to all people, then one of two statements must be true:
1) it is therefore not true that universal healthcare is a moral imperative (in fact, even laws insisting that emergency rooms must treat all comers are wrong and must be repealed);
OR
2) the Constitution is wrong; there is no right to equality under the law (in fact, the entire foundation upon which our society is built is wrong – we do not in fact “hold these truths to be self-evident”, that we are all created equal).
You can either hold us all equal – and none of us is entitled to health care above and beyond what we can pay for, even if it results in our death – or we are all entitled to health care.
There is no way to set yourself up as the guy who is qualified to decide which people don’t deserve life-saving care under a system that honors the principle of equality under the law.
May 30th, 2012 | 9:08 am
By the way, I should mention – in case you’re unfamiliar with the details of the case – that a key piece of evidence in the McDonald’s coffee case involved proof that McDonald’s did a cost-benefit analysis that assumed that raising the temperature of their coffee would cause serious injuries, but that the profit from the “improvement” would make it worthwhile to simply pay off.
This is why the punitive damages were so high (to discourage this line of reasoning, which had already become notorious through the Ford Pinto “but it’s cheaper to pay off dead peoples’ families than to relocate the gas tank” episode).
Of course, in no case are McDonald’s or Ford’s customers in any way responsible for the deaths or injuries involved, just as customers who buy electricity are not responsible for any deaths caused by improper safety precautions.
May 30th, 2012 | 12:53 pm
The punitive damages wouldn’t have survived appeal, which is why the plaintiff entered into a confidential settlement with McDonald’s between trial and appeal.
Are you saying McDonald’s intentionally poured coffee into the plaintiff’s lap? Of course it was an accident. If it was on purpose, it would have been battery, not products liability. It would’ve been a slam-dunk case, and would never have even reached trial. McDonald’s and the court did a cost-benefit analysis. The courts’ analysis disagreed with McDonald’s. That’s how products-liability / negligence works (strictly speaking, products liability and negligence are different, but for the most part they’re effectively the same). You’re making factual and legal claims that just have no relationship to reality. McDonald’s ACCIDENTALLY burned the plaintiff. No matter what the coffee’s temperature was, if they had intentionally burned her, they would be liable.
When someone bought a Pinto, they saved ca. $11 relative to the cost of a safer Pinto. If Pinto customers were willing to pay an extra $11 for their car, those people wouldn’t have died. The whole assumption behind products-liability is that by making manufacturers liable, manufacturers can pass the full costs of their products on to their customers, shareholders, and insurers. Causally, every Pinto-purchaser, in a small way, contributed to every Pinto related death.
Because we’re all equal before the law and before God, none of us is entitled to more than our fair share. If giving someone life-saving medical care results in costs greater than its benefits (e.g., if keeping Ms. Wolff barely alive for 2 weeks requires diverting resources away from keeping 2 children alive into adulthood), then the only way to treat people as equal is let Ms. Wolff die.
The world has limited resources. We only have limited resources available to us. We have to use them reasonably.
Assuming, arguendo, that our resources can be used to give everyone all the life-saving treatment they’ll need at any cost, then your position is right. It would be murder to withhold life-saving treatment. If you can make a compelling argument that our resources aren’t limited, then I’ll agree that you’re right. So explain to me how we can spend billions of medicare dollars on people like Ms. Wolff without diminishing, by billions of dollars, our ability to take care of medicaid children, or to lobby China, our chief creditor, on things like forced abortion and other human rights abuses. If we can spend that billions of dollars at no cost, then I’ll agree with you.
I really hope you come up with an answer, but I know there’s no way you can.
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