Re: Please Try and Help Terri......
From: Peter T. Breuer (ptb_at_lab.it.uc3m.es)
Date: 03/29/05
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Date: Tue, 29 Mar 2005 21:32:28 +0200
In alt.os.linux Stan Goodman <SPAM_FOILER@hashkedim.com> wrote:
> [ptb]
> > No it doesn't, and anyway, giving somebody the label of not being
> > "human" is not a licence to kill them. It's reprehensible. Whether you
> > think her life is good enough ("human"!) or not it's not for you to kill
> > her.
>
> It isn't that it isn't good enough. Nobody has suggested that severely
> handicapped persons ought to be dispatched.
You've suggested that this one in particular should be starved to
death. That seems to be hat I as talking about. You may wish to
generalize the debate, but I wuld note first that you start by
designating her NOT a "severlely handicapped person", but a person
with "no life in any meanigful sense".
> It is that she has no life in
> any meaningful sense.
I differ. Her parents differ. Lots of people differ with you. Her life
makes sense to me. She's alive. People care for her. She moves. She
smiles. She squawks. She feels sensations. Sounds and looks alive to
me, and I don't care for you choosing to say what's life and what's
not.
> It is not that she has become severely retarded, she
> has no mind whatever.
Nonsense - she has a mind. It's just not up to your standards.
> Her responses are autonomic responses.
So are most of mine! Or are you suggesting I have to think about
standing up the whole time? I don't view the lack of a capacity to
think symbolically as meaning a lack of life!
> That is not
> life,
It most certainly IS!
> any more than the frog leg in the highschool biology lab is alive when
> it jumps in response to an electrical potential.
That's alive in many senses too (dying, but aren't we all). But it's
much LESS alive than she is. It can't breathe, for one thing. It can't
say "Ahhh! Wahhh"". I think everyone would place it's degree of
liveness at less than 0.1% of what TS has.
> > What a person wants other people to do is not necessarily something that
> > ought to be carried out. Yes, obviously any will, living or not, can be
> > immoral. A living will need not be immoral, and a dead will need not
> > be moral. It depends what wishes they express.
>
> That's why conventional wills have to be probated before execution, and why
> living wills as well have to conform to legal prescription. Usually the
Well, I'm sorry, "kill me if I develop bad hair" is not a morally
defensible position. Neither is "kill me if I go mad". Neither is "kill
me if I can't tell you to". Neither is "kill me if I don't tell you not
to". Nor is "kill me if you think I would like to die".
Simply, killing is not moral - the church takes that view, JC took that
view, many, many people take that view. If you do it, you had better
have an overriding reason that entails the good of many versus the bad
karma of a few. Killing because you think the person involved would
like that is not moral (not to me! I won't do intrinsically evil things
just because somebody asks me to), particularly since you _believe_
"she" is already dead and the present inhabitant of her body is not her,
and you believe that she is not suffering.
I can't see any moral defense! What right does the TS you think already
died have to kill the present remnant inhabitant of her body? Let alone
what right you have!
> family has to be involved, and medical authority has a say in the outcome
> too. Nobody can make unsupervised wills andexpect them to be carried out.
So why expect me to pronunce on their morality, per se? I can only tell
you that killing is barbaric, particularly when the killee is not
suffering, and is being looked after, and has people who like her and
love her the way she is.
> > No, it would not be ethical for other people to kill her, and it would
> > also not be ethical for her to kill herself and the legal situation is
> > correlated with those judgments in most places of the world ("suicide is
> > illegal" - try it and see if you don't believe me, or put "suicide is
> > illegal" into google if you like to try these things by proxy instead).
>
> But that is exactly what a "living will" is. I don't know what you think is
> meant by the term,
An instruction to kill oneself should one become unable is not even
remotely moral, when there is no greater good served by it. If you were
a spy and had the secret of the atom bomb, maybe you might leave
instructions like that. If you were an ordinary person and feared being
overcome by pain, well, ask for morphine.
> but it is precisely an instruction about what to do when
> one's situation is hopeless and unbearable.
But her situation is not hopeless nor unbearable. She's alive and happy
within her parameters. She is in no pain. She has a comfortable life.
> Your paragraph above is
> inconsistent with your concession that a living will may be moral.
A will, whether to be applied when living or not, is moral or immoral
independently of other considerations. Killing a helpless being just
because its body once belonged to you, and you've mostly died, is immoral.
It's the rest of you - it has your characteristics. Self-mutilation is
not moral, nor is suicide, unless a greater good is served. What
greater good?
> > > The brutal fact is that all the attributes that make a person human are gone
> > > from her.
> >
> > No they aren't, and even if they were, so what? Use "life form" instead
> > of human. Treat the aliens as you would wish them to treat you.
>
> That is meaningless. You know as well as I do that it is impossible to apply
> the same rules to all life forms. I don't need to point out obvious
> exceptions.
Well, she's a life form that looks perfectly alive to me, and I see no
reason to kill her, especially NOT on the sayso of a person who is not
her and is merely talking about a couple of words she might have once
let drop, even if it were true. And evven if it were her will, I would
not be able to claim that starving her to death were ethical!
> > TS is not in pain and according to your diagnosis, she already died.
> > According to you the thing that exists is not her and according to me it
> > has a life-force of its own that deserves respect.
>
> But my uncle also had a "life force", which is, you say, your only
> criterion, so that the pain doesn't enter into your equation.
She feels no pain, according to you too! Let it enter into the
equation.
> You are now
> telling me that it was wrong to permit him to terminate his life,
The criteria must always be that a greater good be served. In your
uncle's case, it saved him pain (I don't see why - pain management is
a medical science; we can turn off the sensors). In TS's case, it saves
her no pain.
> and for my
> father, a saintly man, to confirm his decision to the physicians. Therefore
> my uncle should have been forced to take it on the chin until the bitter
> end. In the service of what?
Your father saved your uncle pain, which is good. Your uncle merely
wanted to save himself pain. Your uncle had nothing to live for that
made it worthwhile for him bearing the pain (or having it managed).
But TS is not in pain, and her living would serve the function of
pleasing her parents. I see nothing but bad being done by killing her
- which makes it imoral in itself, to say nothing of the
barbarous manner.
> No, the case at hand doesn't involve pain, as far as we know. It doesn't
There you are.
> involve any other feeling either: we're told that her brain (only the
> cerebellum, do you think?) is gone and the cavity is filled mostlywith
> fluid.
I say the cat scans. I saw plenty of brain. Black areas there were, but
plenty of brain too.
> I don't know what "life force" means. I do know that different cultures
> regard this question differently, and few of them make absolutist statements
> about it (including, for example, the word "never"). It is not unlike the
> matter of abortion, which is why it is no surprise to see anti-abortion
> groups in the forefront of the already-lost battle to "save Terri".
I do not view it as the same thing. I cannot see how one would protest
saving a brick, on the grounds that it MIGHT "grow up" to be the Taj
Mahal. On the other hand, I can certainly protest killing off the
Colloseum in Rome, ruined shell of its former self that it is.
> > Tell that to the law, not me. But yes, it is illegal to assist a
> > suicide. Also immoral, according to all church doctrines that I know
> > of, not that I am a churchman myself.
>
> There is an implied "never" in the above.
Then substitute it by "almost never" in your mind. One can do an
immoral thing if it creates a greater good.
> Life, whether we like it or not,
> is not algorithmic. It isn't like a computer program, in which all the
> branch points are defined. "Never" is rarely a meaningful term in
> descriptions of it. That seems to be your sticking point.
It isn't, so forget it.
> Your knowledge is limited, I can inform you that it is not always immoral
> according to all religious doctrines, any more than that all abortions are
I can perfectly well believe that the Church of Satan promotes killing
of oneself and others just because one wants to. I am not a religious
man! But I know that almost all churches hold exactly the opposite
view, and always have.
> rejected by all church doctrines. I do not wish to get into a discussion of
> which churches are which.
Nor do I, since I don't care and wouldn't know them from Adam.
> > Random quotes (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040326.html) ...
> >
> > The Christian opposition to suicide hardened starting with
> > fifth-century theologian Augustine of Hippo, who argued that offing
> > yourself is never justifiable because it violates God's injunction
> > "thou shalt not kill." Suicides were deemed to have committed a
> > mortal sin and denied Christian burial. Church law influenced civil
> > law, and by the tenth century suicide in England was considered not
> > just a crime but a felony. English common law distinguished a
> > suicide, who was by definition of unsound mind, from a felo-de-se or
> > "evildoer against himself," who had coolly decided to end it all and
> > thereby perpetrated an infamous crime. Such a person forfeited his
> > entire estate to the crown. Furthermore his corpse was subjected to
> > public indignities, such as being dragged through the streets and
> > hung from the gallows, and was finally consigned to "ignominious
> > burial," as the legal scholars put it--the favored method was beneath
> > a crossroads with a stake driven through the body. Other European
> > states established similar laws, ...
>
> In fact, "Thou shalt not kill" is a mistranslation. What the commandment
> says is "You will not murder". Hebrew, like English, has different words for
> the two concepts. And the concepts are not the same and not equivalent. It
> is hyperbolic to describe what is happening now as murder,
Looks like it to me - some people are starving another person to
death, even though third persons are pleading to be allowed to supply
her sustenance. Murder, in my book.
> although I am
> confident that you will do that.
Good. I'd also describe killing by the state as murder.
> Most people, including most lexicographers,
> would agree that one cannot murder oneself.
In this case, they would be mistaken, according to your argument. After
all you claim that the being that was TS ceased to be many years ago,
yet you also claim that it is by her will that the being now lying in
hospital be killed. So that looks like the killing of one being by the
will of another, which is murder, and the people helping do it are
therefore guilty of the same crime, by association.
> There are many confusions like
> that in biblical translations to European languages;
Seems like "Though shalt not commit murder" is perfectly acceptable as
a translation to me. Though perhaps it might be "Thou shalt not get
away with murder".
> that's because
> Hieronymus, who translated it to Latin, learned Hebrew in a quicky course
> expressly for the purpose, and turned it out in record time. It isn't
> surprising what the product is like. Some of the errors of language are real
> buffos, and some have caused bloody wars (so much for "thou shall not kill).
The church managed to justify wars. Kings always asked the church to
dream up a justification for their intended war.
> With all respect, not everyone subscribes to the dicta of Augustine of
> Hippo. If he were alive today, and dragged a suicide's remains through the
> streets, I dare say that he would be locked up, and the kinfolk would sue
> the crap out of him.
Common law has been codified.
> I have to repeat my previous advice to you: This is a knotty question,
> exactly because it is a very emotional one. You should consider avoiding
> making absolutist statements about it until you are in an unsupportable
Then consider none of them absolutist. I see a life form who is being
starved to death, while her corporeal parents want to give her
sustenance and preserve her present state. The state is not painful to
the life-form. The life-form moves, utters syllables, can respond at
about the level of a clockwork canary¸ etc. Worst of all, killing her
will do no "greater good". On the contrary, it is hurting people, and of
course the life-form. It's cruel.
> > Oh - I see where your confusion comes from:
>
> Probably not.
>
> > In the U.S. suicide has never been treated as a crime nor punished by
> > property forfeiture or ignominious burial. (Some states listed it on
> > the books as a felony but imposed no penalty.)
>
> It isn't clear what a condign punishment could be. The felon has already
> tried to kill himself.
The classical punishment was to disinherit their offspring, and claim
their estate. Also refuse a christian burial, etc. I'm sure you could
come up with something - maybe they get to be stuffed and mounted on
a Planet Hollywood wall for all eternity? Plus all the disinheritance
and stuff. Be inventive.
> > No wonder the US is viewed as a place where people like to kill and be
> > killed.
>
> That is perhaps a bit off the wall.
What can one say about a state that kills its own citizen prisoners?
That's barbaric. Thou shalt not commit murder, sayeth the bible, and
they didn't mean "because a guy in a wig says you can, that makes it
alright". Ask JC.
Peter
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