I have a piece in the Daily Caller describing another in a long series of articles in professional journals arguing that it should be acceptable to kill for organs. From “The Killing-for-Organs Pushers:”
If you want to see where our culture may next go off the rails, read professional journals. There, in often eye-crossing and passive arcane prose of the medical intelligentsia, you will discover an astonishing level of antipathy to the sanctity of human life — to the point now that some advocate killing the profoundly disabled for their organs.
In this example, the method of getting from A to Z is to deconstruct the wrongness of killing:
Case in point: “What Makes Killing Wrong?” an article published in the January 19, 2012 edition of the Journal of Medical Ethics. The authors argue that death and total disability are morally indistinguishable, and therefore harvesting organs from living disabled patients is not morally wrong. Bioethicists Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, of Duke University, and Franklin G. Miller, from the National Institutes of Health’s Department of Bioethics (which should really get the alarm bells ringing!) arrive at their shocking (for most of us) conclusion by claiming that murdering the hypothetical “Betty” isn’t wrong because it kills her, but rather, because it “makes her unable to do anything, including walking, talking, and even thinking and feeling.”
They then change the scenario:
…Betty is not killed but severely brain damaged to the point that she is “totally disabled.” But their definition of that term encompasses hundreds of thousands of living Americans who are our mothers, fathers, children, aunts and siblings, uncles, friends and cousins — people with profound disabilities like that experienced by Terri Schiavo and my late Uncle Bruno as he lived through the late stages of his Alzheimer’s disease:
Betty has mental states, at least intermittently and temporarily, so she is not dead by any standard or plausible criterion. Still, she is universally disabled because she has no control over anything that goes on in her body or mind.
Since Betty “is no worse off being dead than totally disabled,” they opine, it is no worse “to kill Betty than to totally disable her.”
That definition, in which the patient has a mental state, is the key, because at the end of the article, the authors apply their theory to patients who are today considered legally dead (but which they claim, wrongly in my view, are really alive), which has the effect of muddying the waters. But their definition of univeral or total disability would encompass people who are today, legally alive, and they believe it is not wrong to kill them because they are not thereby harmed:
…according to the authors, “there is nothing bad about death or killing other than disability or disabling,” and since she is already so debilitated, then nothing wrong is done by harvesting her organs and thus ending her biological existence. And thus, in the space of not quite five pages, killing the innocent ceases to be wrong and the intrinsic dignity of human life is thrown out the window, transforming vulnerable human beings into objectified and exploitable human resources.
I also quote a litany of other articles calling in different ways for opening the door to killing the profoundly disabled for organs. I conclude:
It is important to note here that transplant medicine remains an ethical enterprise and that doctors are not yet doing the deed. But if we want to keep it that way, it is important that these proposals not be allowed to germinate. Here’s the good news. Sunlight is the great disinfectant. Most people will oppose killing for organs. Thus, the best way to prevent this dark agenda from ever becoming the legal public policy is to expose it in popular media every time it is proposed.
Hence, I will continue to do my best to bring every one of these articles out of the shadows of academia/arcane journals and into the light of day.
February 11th, 2012 | 8:05 am
[...] Continue… 0 [...]
February 11th, 2012 | 8:50 am
I recall making that very argument, in reverse, fifty years ago as a member of a university student pro-life group. At the time, the pro-abortion crowd was arguing that the criterion for humanity was human awareness. The unborn, being unaware, could be killed at will. I suggested that if human consciousness was the only criterion of our humanity, then being rendered unconscious was indistinguishable from being killed. Unconsciousness would make one eligible to become an organ “donor”. There were groans as I said it, of course: how could the pro-life side be that dense?
In many of these arguments, the pro-death side assess our situation in terms of measurable scales. These are often linear scales such as “IQ” or “strength” or “life satisfaction”. We pro-lifers, on the other hand, speak in terms of categories.
In order to be useful, scales are utterly open at one end, and often at both ends. Categories, to be useful, must be closed or as nearly closed as possible.
I suggest here that Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller make murder sound “reasonable” by placing it on a scale. They are merely nudging Betty along the scale. Surely you can’t say that a few millimetres in this or that direction is wrong?
Let all good pro-life persons polish up our categories: Sinnott-Armstrong and Miller want to categorically murder Betty.
February 11th, 2012 | 10:45 am
After he killed my mother, the doctors’ comment was “Well after all she was 93, don’t you think she lived long enough?”. And so it goes. We are virtually fighting for our lives.
February 11th, 2012 | 12:28 pm
Fly in this lethal ointment:
Suppose the profoundly disabled person had, in better times, explicitly refused to be an organ donor?
More and more people are wakening to the idea that maybe signing that donor card just isn’t in their best interests. I know a number of people who have decided not to be donors, some of whom had been before. Keep it up, academics, and no one will voluntarily donate—and try forcing the issue.
February 11th, 2012 | 3:01 pm
When man can decide what it means to be human, the definition – being arbitrary – can and will be changed whenever the people with the power find it convenient to do so.
When “all men are equal” gains the asterisk, it loses the protection.
February 11th, 2012 | 3:44 pm
We defeated the Nazis militarily but permitted the slow seepage into our own culture of the concept of life-unworthy-of-life. Perhaps the Nazis are winning after all. A victory from the grave is a victory still.
February 11th, 2012 | 11:10 pm
The Justice and Peace Commission of the Philippine Episcopal Conference has launched an alarm. “Organ trafficking has nothing to do with charity, altruism, compassion and love. It’s just a kind of self government, instigated by the thirst for wealth. ” The Commission has recognized that “the sale of kidneys is already widespread and largely silent in poor communities in urban areas”, for the benefit of European patients or rich countries, at an average cost of about $ 50 000.
Filipino bishops have condemned the traffickers who propagate the sale of kidneys to people who are in economic difficulty, encouraging them with easy enrichment, remembering that in this way families will not come out of poverty. In addition, the donor’s health conditions often get worse and the situation of families is growing. “The body is not an object but a gift from God,” the bishops have said, insisting on the dignity of the whole human person, made of body and soul.
The bishops asked the government for 4 years to adopt legislation to monitor and severely punish trafficking in organs.
In organ donation is ethical to consider three budgets: 1: Through altruism, people are able to engage in the needs of others; 2: The human body can not be assessed in mercantilist terms, or what is the Also, the donation of organs should be free, and 3: The grant will represent not ever harm the donor.
It is false that it is necessary to kill patients in coma or legalize the sale of organs. The Spanish rate of donors stands at 34.2 per million population, twice the EU average (16.8) and well above countries like the U.S. (26.6), Germany (15.1 ) or UK (13.2).
By region, four of them (Asturias, Cantabria, Basque Country and the Canary Islands) and the autonomous city of Melilla (which achieved a record 57.1) last year exceeded the 40 donors per million population.
In addition, Spain has reached 7% in living donor kidney transplant and is moving in the liver, although to a lesser extent by the limitations to be a partial donation. Also cardiac transplantation has undergone a large increase (20%), with a total of 292 compared to 241 made in 2007.
According to data from the ONTs, Spain makes 6% of all liver transplants worldwide and 3% of all of riñón.Así, donors over 60 years continue to rise and now represent nearly 45% of the total.
The ONT has pioneered the Global Alliance for Transplantation, endorsed by the World Health Organization (WHO), which considers the transplant as a universal need that should be available to all. However, in countries such as Asia or Africa, organ donation is almost nonexistent and the possibility of alternative treatments, as in the case of dialysis, are unsustainable for its enormous costs.
In Spain, the donation and transplantation are regulated by law
The transplanted organ is donated free of charge and without discrimination on grounds of birth, race, sex, religion, social or economic status of the patient receiving the órganos.Aunque in Spain declined organ donation, mainly because they are less fatal accidents traffic, remains the country with the highest rate of transplant-made órganos.Y all altruistic.
February 11th, 2012 | 11:33 pm
While in rich countries the donation is considered a gesture full of love and altruism, in the poorest trafficking has become a desperate act. Sell a body part to survive. Nancy Scheper-Hughes, a professor of antrologia of your country, a member of Organs Watch, an independent research group at the University of Berkeley (California), explains in an article in The Lancet that in the global market is paid for a kidney Indian $ 1,000 or Africa, the Philippines, 1,300; in Moldova or Romania, $ 2,700. A Turkish or Peruvian kidney costs about $ 10,000. In the hospital where the transplant finally, patients, transplant tourists end up paying between 10 and 20 times higher than these values.
“This is a business intermediary? said Luc Noel, in charge of issues relating to transplantation of the World Health Organization (WHO). In the U.S. there are supporters of the sale of organs under surveillance, which would, according them, increase donations and dismantle the illegal business. “I strongly disagree, ethically, the human body can not be commercialized in any way? concludes Matesanz from the ONT. The truth is that the organ trade shakes one of the principles of the donation: altruism. “If you can sell, who is going to convince people that giving is altruistic? If allowed, the entire transplant system goes down?, Concludes Matesanz.
http://elpais.com/diario/2009/05/03/eps/1241332014_850215.html
February 12th, 2012 | 6:19 pm
Having just re-read sci-fi writer Larry Niven’s 1968 novel, A Gift from Earth, Wesley J. Smith’s article is extremely troubling.
Niven’s tale is set within his “Known Space” series of stories and one of the key themes is the use of the organ-bank as the means of executing felons. Initially used for executing the most evil of criminals, the public’s demand for extending their lives through transplantation sees more and more “crimes” classified as carrying the death penalty. In fact, the death penalty is revived across the world as a consequence. The end-point of this expansion of “crimes” carrying the death sentence is found in one of Niven’s short stories, “The Jigsaw Man”. Here a convicted felon tries to escape having been sentenced to death for jumping three red-lights. The lack of donors also gives rise in Niven’s stories to the “organ-legger” – someone who kidnaps a person and breaks them up to sell, organ by organ, on the black market – and already an element of urban mythology.
But Niven’s tales are just that: tales. Aren’t they?
It is not too hard to see that the type of arguments being made in these medical journals represent a significant step along the path to the dystopian future that Larry Niven extrapolated in his sci-fi writings nearly half a century ago. Niven’s warning of the consequences of making organ transplants easier whilst the death penalty remains on the statute books is reinforced by Wesley J. Smith’s disturbing but important article. We need to path more attention if we don’t want to see a future involving death by organ-bank (or the rise of the organ-legger).
February 14th, 2012 | 2:01 pm
But Niven’s tales are just that: tales. Aren’t they?
Science fiction has always been concerned about ethics and anxiety.
Go back and reread Frankenstein, or The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. The genre has always taken as its subject that point where science contains powers that tempt mortal man to violate ethical limits.
People make a big deal out of how “good” science fiction writers (namely, Jules Verne) write about things that later come true. But it seems to me that the best science fiction writers write about things that we hope don’t come true. They are not just telling us tales, they are also offering those tales as a moral compass – for us to heed or dismiss, but their message seems to be that we should at least think about where we’re going before we go there.
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact