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March 29, 2005
Disposable When Broken?
I admit I've never immersed myself in the details of the Terri Schiavo saga. It's not that I don't think they're important, I do. My way of looking at this is to ask where we are and where we're headed.
If some bioethicists have their way, the future's not a pretty sight:
Wesley Smith: Bill, do you think Terri is a person?Smith explains the implications of his question to the bioethicist:Bill Allen: No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does.
If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case — the “first principle,” if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether “a being” or “an organism,” or even a machine, is a “person,” a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as “non-persons.”Allen’s perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that “minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood” — although he doesn’t say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isn’t sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.”
Today the person in a "persistent vegitative state", tomorow the patient with advanced Alzheimer's.
Wesley Smith: If Terri is not a person, should her organs be procured with consent?Harvest. As if we were talking about soybeans.Bill Allen: …Yes, I think there should be consent to harvest her organs, just as we allow people to say what they want done with their assets.
On Sunday Michelle Malkin wrote about how an Associated Press story compared Terri to "Kismet", a robot:
To understand the emotional reaction to the tapes of Terri Schiavo, one need only spend a few minutes with Kismet.When robots break, we discard them. Are we now to do that with people as well?People who spend time with the robot at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab walk away feeling like they've made a new friend. Kismet is nothing but a mechanical head made out of metal and plastic, but it has been cleverly programmed by scientists to mimic human social interactions.
Sit down across from Kismet and it gives you a pleasant smile. Step too close and it jumps back with a startled expression on its face. Introduce yourself and it waits patiently for you to finish talking, then replies with a few syllables of speech that sounds like a higher-pitched version of the language spoken by the teachers in 'Charlie Brown' cartoons.
Kismet is no more conscious than a dishwasher or a microwave oven...
People in persistent vegetative states are no more aware than Kismet, but they retain a handful of primitive reflexes that are naturally misinterpreted as conscious behavior.
Posted by Tom at March 29, 2005 8:52 PM
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