Humanize | Page 18

I write in National Review this morning on the latest push to make euthanasia lawful: If you want to see what may soon go wrong in public policy, just read the professional literature. Bioethics journals are particularly illuminating in this regard because many of the leading voices in the field long ago discarded the sanctity/equality of life for the utilitarianish “quality of life” ethic, which grants higher value to some over others based on invidious distinctions such as disability, age, and health. An advocacy article in the current Clinical Ethics provides a case in point. In, “Counting the Cost of Denying Assisted Dying,” an academic bioethicist and a business management professor support legalizing euthanasia… You’ll have to read the full piece to understand Read More ›

Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign is over, but I want to return to something Bloomberg once said that was brought up by reporter Peter Hasson during Bloomberg’s most recent campaign that speaks to a fundamental issue in healthcare issue: Billionaire and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg said in a 2011 video that some elderly cancer patients should be denied treatment in order to cut health care costs. He drew on a hypothetical example of a “95-year old” with “prostate cancer” to signal an openness he would have to reform how Medicare provides treatment. “All of these costs keep going up, nobody wants to pay any more money, and at the rate we’re going, health care is going to bankrupt us,” said Read More ›

The Australian state of Victoria made it lawful to commit assisted suicide last year. The number of those who have killed themselves since “voluntary assisted dying” became legal is more than four times higher than the Victorian government had anticipated. Xavier Symons reports : The Voluntary Assisted Dying Review Board’s first Report of Operations, released on Tuesday, provides information on how Victoria’s euthanasia legislation is being enacted, including details of how many people have been issued with a ‘VAD permit’, as well as information on some of the barriers preventing people from accessing the scheme.  According to the report, permits to access the lethal medication were issued to 70 patients between June 19, when the scheme first started, and December 31. Overall Read More ›

The 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green featured several shocking moments, including overpopulation riots and men calling women “the furniture” required for sex. But the most disturbing scene showed Edward G. Robinson entering a euthanasia clinic, choosing to be put down rather than live with his existential anguish. What was once fiction is becoming reality. Assisted suicide, unthinkable then, is popular now. Since the movie was released, many have come to view human existence as a relative, rather than absolute, good. The sanctity of life ethic has been replaced by the drive to eliminate suffering, even if this requires eliminating the sufferer. And the raw power of this logic has led directly to suicide clinics and a right to death on demand—since no Read More ›

Human exceptionalism imposes duties as well as rights. A crucial obligation of each and every one of us is to treat each of our human brothers and sisters as equals. Hence, slavery is evil and the antithesis of human exceptionalism because it treats equals as unequal and human beings as objects to be exploited for the benefit of those with the power to control the enslaved. Ditto, forced labor camps filled with people imprisoned due to political or religious persecution — as occurs with appalling efficiency in the “Fourth Reich” that is Communist China. Internationally prominent companies are being charged in the media with benefiting from forced labor in China. From the AFP story: China is transferring tens of thousands of Uighur Read More ›

The logic of euthanasia/assisted suicide has always pointed towards a right to death-on-demand. Assisted-suicide activists deny it for reasons of expediency. But the logic is irrefutable. If there is a “right to die,” how can it be limited to restricting categories? Well, the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany’s highest judicial body, has gone there and without equivocation. In overturning a legal ban on “professional assisted suicide,” i.e., by doctors, the court ruled that there is virtually an unlimited right “to a self-determined death” — and to also receive help from others in achieving that end. From the AFP story (my emphasis): Judge Andreas Vosskuhle at the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said the right to a self-determined death included “the freedom to take one’s life and seek Read More ›

Animal rights activists continue to try to “break the species barrier” between human beings and animals, such as with this failed lawsuit to have an elephant declared a person. The bad news is that the judge wanted to rule in favor of “animal personhood,” but couldn’t because of precedent. But she really wanted to, as she wrote in her decision: This court is extremely sympathetic to Happy’s plight and the NhRP’s mission on her behalf. It recognizes that Happy is an extraordinary animal with complex cognitive abilities, an intelligent being with advanced analytical abilities akin to human beings… The Court agrees that Happy is more than just a legal thing, or property. She is an intelligent, autonomous who [note the “who”] should Read More ›

Transhumanism is a utopian futuristic social movement that denies the intrinsic dignity of human beings in a quest for incorporeal immortality. At National Review, I profile transhumanism’s most energetic popularizer, and along the way, explain why transhumanism should make anyone who believes in human exceptionalism queasy. From, “A Transhumanist Runs for President:” Why should we take any of this seriously? After all, transhumanism is hardly mainstream and Istvan doubts his candidacy — which is mostly self-funded — will last much beyond Super Tuesday (although, knowing him, he will find some other way to harness the centrifugal energy of the presidential contest to boost himself and his ideas). Here’s why. Istvan is just the popularizer; behind him, some of the world’s richest Read More ›