Periodically, people write emails to me disputing the point in my profile that medical ethics is such a troubled field with such low standards for professionalism that all it requires is feeling contrary to star in it.

Then examples like this come up:

Lady Warnock said: "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

"I'm absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there's a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they're a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.

"Actually I've just written an article called 'A Duty to Die?' for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there's nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself."

She went on: "If you've an advance directive, appointing someone else to act on your behalf, if you become incapacitated, then I think there is a hope that your advocate may say that you would not wish to live in this condition so please try to help her die.

"I think that's the way the future will go, putting it rather brutally, you'd be licensing people to put others down."

And now, the followup question: Baroness, should we have licensed someone to put YOU down? If not, why not?

Any takers on the bet that she wouldn't be able to do more than be "offended by the question"?

This sort of stupidity is useful to put a point to Steven Pinker's weird objections to people trying to make sure that human dignity was respected.

I've just finished finding out more about medical ethics than I wanted to. Suffice it to say that the utilitarian hacks currently masquerading as ethical philosophers should be treated as the envoys of evil they are, rather than the possessors of knowledge that they pretend to be. Foolishly, I had assumed that utilitarianism had succumbed to the many, many arguments against it after my stint in college, and that no respectable person still held the opinion. I have found differently.

For those who wish to know more, I pass on my friend's recommendation: Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America by Wesley Smith. Beware, though: it may spark a few nightmares. This mishmash parading as thought has been tried before, under other names, and garnered support from leaders of society. Sometimes, it's up to those who know the truth to respond to these maniacs. Now, of course, they are granted tenure at Princeton. I'd settle for an introductory adjective: "and now, a word from the advocate of evil, Professor ...." I believe proper introductions also have a place.

For those who want a more recent tour of the horizon, check this out: Architects of the Culture of Death. You might come away with a different view of the people mentioned.

And for the most prosaic of reasons. Everyone who reads any classical author learns that the purpose of ethics is happiness. This is long forgotten by most ethics advisors (including, of course, the despicable medical ethicists), who have various cute systems for summarizing their rules, and argue over who has the best summary.

But then, life intrudes sometimes and reminds even the forgetful that the point is happiness and what leads to it.

Quoted, due to link rot in link above:

Lutnick said his dealings with the families -- and his own family -- since September 11 have changed his attitude to life.

"I never thought about this at all. What I thought you did was wake up in the morning, work your tail off, then you took care of your family and what did you do tomorrow? Wake up in the morning and worked your tail off. You know, the classic Type A personality, working hard," he said.

"I have learned through talking with so many families or loved ones ... that the most important thing is to seek happiness."

Lutnick said this had changed his investment advice. If someone sees happiness in a nice car and clothes, then he advises how to work for them, but if life on the beach is a client's idea of nirvana, he tailors his advice accordingly.

"Whatever makes you happy colors our investment advice. This was never the case before," when the focus was solely on making money, he said.



Update: Thinking is catching on, it seems.

Just ask an atheist who had to masquerade as an Orthodox Jew to keep alive.

"Dr. Death" was just one of several. A new resident appeared the next day, this one a bit more diplomatic but again urging us to allow my father to "die with dignity." And the next day came yet another, who opened with the words, "We're getting mixed messages from your family," before I shut him up. I've written extensively about practice of bioethics--which, for the most part, I do not find especially ethical--but never did I dream that our moral compass had gone this far askew. My father, 85, was heading ineluctably toward death. Though unconscious, his brain, as far as anyone could tell, had not been touched by either the cancer or the blood clot. He was not in a "persistent vegetative state" (itself a phrase subject to broad interpretation), that magic point at which family members are required to pull the plug--or risk the accusation that they are right-wing Christians.

I complained about all the death-with-dignity pressure to my father's doctor, an Orthodox Jew, who said that his religion forbids the termination of care but that he would be perfectly willing to "look the other way" if we wanted my father to die. We didn't. Then a light bulb went off in my head. We could devise a strategy to fend off the death-happy residents: We would tell them we were Orthodox Jews.

My little ruse worked. During the few days after I announced this faux fact, it was as though an invisible fence had been drawn around my mother, my sister and me. No one dared mutter that hateful phrase "death with dignity."



Read the whole article. Note that once again Bioethics is exposed for the sham it is. So, you don't have a job? Need a title that will impress someone? Just call yourself a "bioethicist" or "medical ethics professional" -- the standards are low enough that you qualify, and it sounds prestigious.

The Telegraph had an interesting article on euthanasia.

Here's the pull quote:

To allow medical killing, when a person still has up to six months of natural life left, is to invite a flood.

Such prognoses are notoriously inaccurate and would include some who actually live for a year or more. This stretches the term "terminally ill" far beyond credibility.

The Bill overturns without a thought the medical ethic of avoiding malevolence and the criminality of assisting suicide. In effect, black is considered white, or at least only grey. Apparently the end justifies the means. We consider that legitimising assisted suicide on grounds other than those linked to terminal illness would logically follow.

The media profile patients who are so incapacitated that they cannot commit suicide. This Bill makes no distinction between those who are still able to effect suicide for themselves and others.


Time to read slowly, and think empathetically.