Here the story line typically ends with either an elderly grandmother barely clinging to life, or a cold, stainless steel vat of frozen human embryos. You get the drift. So, who is it? Grandma or the embryos?
I’ve seen a similar story line retold in a Christian resource speaking to embryonic health care issues and I’ve asked myself, Why don’t we mix it up a bit? Why don’t we add another person to the scenario, say, a thriving, outgoing seventh grader, eagerly anticipating her performance in the next school play? Now, whom do you choose? Give up?
The trouble with thought experiments such as these is that there is hardly enough context in order to make a rational, informed decision. Most likely, none of us will run into the blazing scenario I just mentioned, so we’re off scot-free. Yeah, we may have to decide when to turn off the respirator. But that’s a different story.
There are some, though, who enjoy such experiments and use them supposedly to prove their case. Case in point: enemy of man, Princeton bio-”ethicist” Peter Singer. Here’s a quote from Singer’s article, Why We Must Ration Health Care, from the July 15 The New York Times:
As a first take, we might say that the good achieved by health care is the number of lives saved. But that is too crude. The death of a teenager is a greater tragedy than the death of an 85-year-old, and this should be reflected in our priorities. We can accommodate that difference by calculating the number of life-years saved, rather than simply the number of lives saved. If a teenager can be expected to live another 70 years, saving her life counts as a gain of 70 life-years, whereas if a person of 85 can be expected to live another 5 years, then saving the 85-year-old will count as a gain of only 5 life-years. That suggests that saving one teenager is equivalent to saving 14 85-year-olds. These are, of course, generic teenagers and generic 85-year-olds. It’s easy to say, “What if the teenager is a violent criminal and the 85-year-old is still working productively?” But just as emergency rooms should leave criminal justice to the courts and treat assailants and victims alike, so decisions about the allocation of health care resources should be kept separate from judgments about the moral character or social value of individuals.
Set aside your gag reflex for a moment; Singer is no dry statistician from the corporate office. But what Singer is suggesting, of course, is health care rationing, determining what treatments are available for which patients with what illnesses, all based on perceived, statistical outcomes. Although the health care system in Germany is not bad, I’ve seen first hand how even a government private/public scheme can reduce the quality of health care.
As Wesley J. Smith notes, the notorious Singer is at his core a utilitarian–what works for the most people with the least harm is always the solution. (Singer may define “harm” differently that you or I.) Which is why, since many Americans utilize this philosophy (utilitarianism is, after all, extremely “practical”), many of his readers will resonate with a lot of what he says. Which is extremely sad.
Because, at the end of the day, human beings are being devalued.
By the way, Singer’s argument falls upon its own sword. “Judgments about the moral character or social values of individuals” is especially at play when health care is rationed. It’s just that, in Singer’s mechanistic universe, every widget is the same: if it’s broken, throw it away.
HT: Wesley J. Smith at Secondhand Smoke.
