The demented should want to die or feel guilty

Baroness Mary Warnock led the British ethics committee (named after her) which couldn't quite decide the status of human embryos, but allowed destructive research on them. (See this LifeEthics essay on the Baroness' 2007 apologia concerning the deliberations of her committee.)

This year, the Baroness told British journalists that she believes that the demented are wasting the lives and resources of other people and that they should be euthanized. According to the Daily Mail, she now supports a "duty to die."

Lady Warnock, 84, was the head of the committee which during the 1980s opened the way for legal research on human embryos.

Influential in education as well as in medical ethics, she became an open supporter of euthanasia after her ill husband was helped to die by his doctor in 1995.

She told the Church of Scotland's magazine Life and Work: 'I've just written an article called A Duty to Die? for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there is nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself.'

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

There's more of the same at the BBC News.

Ignore the fact that a large part of our economy depends on the jobs created by the need to take care of people who can't take care of themselves, at all ages.

Please note that the Baroness is worried about the "wishes" of people that she dismisses as incompetent. She's proposing that other people determine when and how those wishes are implemented.

However, she also suggests that society should actually decide to go down the slippery slope of pressuring people into feeling guilty enough that they chose euthanasia.

Human dignity: What it is

Whether it's a genetic result of evolution or the way we are designed by a Creator, even very young children seem to have a sense that it's important to understand that there are consequences to infringing rights of other people before they can express "That's not fair!."

My attempt a couple of days ago to discuss the foundations of conservative philosophy and human dignity is not nearly so elegant as this one from Professor Francis Beckwith, associate professor of philosophy and church-state studies at Baylor University:

It is the view that human beings have intrinsic dignity by nature that is not a consequence of their size, level of development, environment or dependency.

and

"We don’t become less intrinsically valuable because others think it is in their interest to destroy us.

The Professor's letter addressed the controversy over abortion in Waco, Texas the home of Baylor. It might also give the editors of the American Journal of Bioethics a better understanding the base of the conservative philosophy and human dignity.

Admittedly, the result can be risky for people, individually and in groups. This is where government comes in and why it's vital to educate the public about the nature of rights as endowed to each human individual from the beginning of life until death. The danger comes from other people who discriminate between which human individuals fit into artificial categories smaller than the species category. The re-defining and discrimination - and the distraction by adding adjectives and qualifiers - is the beginning of the infringement of rights, whether the categories are according to physical or political power, race, status, location, development or function.

Thanks, to Jivin' Jehosaphat for the link to the Beckwith editorial in the Waco Tribune-Herald.

Christian Docs' Ethics on The Moral Worth of Human Life

Yesterday, at the annual meeting of the House of Representatives of the Christian Medical and Dental Association, three statements on ethics were approved. I don't have all of the text or the final versions of any of them at this time and will report on them in more detail later, but I would like to brag on the our Ethics Commission and the work of the House. (I'm the Chair of the Family Medicine Section.) Watch for more here and - hopefully - in the Press. I'll post links as soon as they're published on line.

The Chair, Dr. Robert Scheidt also gave one of the workshops on Conscience issues, which I'll discuss after I get home. At the meeting, he introduced statements on "Abuse of Human Life," "Human Stem Cell Research and Use" and "Human Life: Its Moral Worth."

These are statements from an unabashedly Christian world view - with strong logic and historic background. And some of the most elegant language on "person," the image of God, and the moral worth of human life. Here's a bit of the wording - draft version:

Every being of human origin is a person. A person is not a Homo sapiens with the superadded quality of "personhood." Some, however would attempt to withhold moral worth from human beings unless they "qualify" as persons. The status of "personhood" cannot be conferred by society.

The beginning and continuity of the moral worth of human life are concurrent with human life itself. Human worth begins with the one-cell human embryo and lasts lifelong. A living human being is an integrated organism with the genetic endowment of the species Homo sapiens. . . . Thus a human being, despite the expression of different and more mature secondary characteristics, has genetic and ontological identity and continuity throughout all stages of development from formation of the human being until death.

There is beautiful language on the image of God, the sacred nature of human life, and the love of God. I will post these more fully as soon as I get home. Now, I have to go catch a 7 AM plane.