I appreciate your concern, but it's misplaced. Euthanizing someone who's clearly suffering and whose actual life is over wouldn't keep me up at night.
What if that person is me?
To put it simply, if "you" are incapble of something resembling cognition and communication, and there's no hope of recovery, that "person" isn't "you" anymore in any way that I recognize, and so I don't feel that your wishes are really a consideration, because you're already gone. I don't have to worry about what you'd want for dinner if you're not there, I don't have to ask you how to deal with any other problem. I don't see why your wishes come into play when the rest of us are trying to figure out how best to dispose of the twitching mass of nerves and organs that used to house your personality after your personality is gone.
I distinguish between an absolute (or infinite) value and an inherent value.
I don't tend to distinguish between absolute and inherent value, though I don't equate absolute with infinite in this context. An absolute value is a value that is fixed and independent of social context and other considerations, in other words, inherent to the object, being, or state and not dependent on the degree to which someone actually values it.
An inherent value is one that we are morally obligated to acknowledge independently of its use for other goods.
I don't think such a thing exists. ultimately, the value of anything is entirely dependent on its utilitarian value in achieving some goal, and there is no moral obligation to consider any goal universal or absolute, though generally societies that don't share a few basic goals (whatever they may be) tend to fall apart, and so in practical terms it behooves each of us to find a community with whom we share common goals so as to be able to share in all the benefits of cooperation and so on.
My individual happiness is inherently valuable whether or not it positively contributes to a just social ordering.
I disagree. You may feel that your individual happiness is important to you, but no one else is obligated to acknowledge any value to it at all. It only becomes valuable if other people value it, and to that end you may find it helpful to convince others to essentially enter into a reciprocal contract with you whereby they agree to value your happiness in exchange for you choosing to value theirs, in which case, welcome to society and the social contract, with all the benefits and restrictions inherent in that.
I believe the only consistent libertarian position that can be taken on life-and-death issues is that the individual, and only the individual, has an absolute right over hir own body and hir own life (and, to make this possible, the only limit to that is that ze absolutely and categorically has not got a right over any other individual's body or life).
Two points:
1) You seem to be presuming that it's a given that we're interested in finding a consistent libertarian position on life-and-death issues. Why?
2) More importantly, at what point does the individual cease to exist? Is it a hard-and-fast point, or is it more nebulous?
I think both end of life and beginning of life issues are frought with problems of definition. Whether or not a fetus, or, say, Terri Schiavo, is a person really depends on what your definition of a person is, which criteria are crucial and which are incidental. Unfortunately, like every other definition, it's entirely subjective, ultimately arbitrary, and dependent on both general consensus and the willingness and ability of the community to act according to that consensus.
My argument is that we have no moral obligation to define life in any way that is not useful to us, because the whole reason we agree to play along with the fiction of "natural rights" in the first place is that we get useful outcomes in so doing.
And, regardless of my argument, that's how it actually works in practice. People can bitch all they want about rights and morality and whatever, but they require the cooperation of other people in order to enforce their visions, and people as a collective ultimately act in their own perceived self-interest. The whole Enlightenment concept of natural rights and individual liberties was a byproduct of the emergence of new economic systems and new technologies which favored individual liberty. We ultimately began to believe we had inherent rights because it became economically advantageous to live in a society which acts as if we did.
If the person in question has no capacity to consent or no ability to communicate, as in the case of a small child (such as Charlotte Wyatt) or a person who is unconscious or in a vegetative state (such as Terri Schiavo), then IMO the presumption has to be in favour of life - because, if the person's desire, were they conscious or able to consent/communicate, was to die, then they would be being kept alive against their will, but they would not be in a state to know or express that will, whereas if their desire, were they conscious or able to consent/communicate, was to live, and they were "allowed to die", then they would be being killed against their will - and the only word for that is murder.
This is what the question comes down to. You look at Terri Schiavo, and decide whether or not to pull the plug.
In these cases, I think there's no compelling reason to argue in favor of life support and the presumption has to be to terminate. It is useful to support the basic autonomy of individual persons, but it is not useful to anyone to define Terri Schiavo as a person.
OK, i accept that, but what that really boils down to is the fairly universal truth that, if rights require resources to uphold them, and resources are finite, then the extent to which rights can be upheld is also finite. I am, however, very wary of using criteria like "how likely someone is to recover from their current condition" to decide whose rights are to be sacrificed, since mistakes can be and are made about that, and "miracle" (or rather, supposedly impossible or very unlikely) recoveries do happen.
It's always possible to make mistakes, or rather, it's always impossible not to make mistakes. People die who could probably have been saved, people are kept alive when it would probably make more sense just to let them die. That's life. You don't judge a system by the types of mistakes it makes on a case by case basis, you judge it on a larger scale. Getting emotional about individual cases tends to just blur the issue.
It's not about finding the most "just," "fair" resolution to every individual case, but rather about finding a strategy that works well enough for society most of the time. Some people are going to get screwed by that, but some people always get screwed.
I was born very prematurely, one of my best friends more prematurely still - at that time, at a stage when it was considered pretty much impossible for a baby to survive - but she did survive, and is disabled as a result, but if there wasn't a presumption of "always try to save life" (to which I, as a libertarian, would add "unless the patient has capacity to consent and communicates otherwise", but that's not a necessary addition here), then they might not have bothered to try to save her (or me, for that matter).
OK, but not to be a jerk or anything, but why does that matter to me, or to society in general? There's no single life we can't afford to lose.
So as not to think I'm picking on you, let's put it this way. My mom was pregnant with me in 1975, after Roe v. Wade in the US. She was single and working at a job that really couldn't support her and a baby, and so she was forced to be dependent on her parents, moving in with them, etc. I have no problem advising any other young women in similar situations to abort, even though I would not exist had my mom done so. Though I love my life, when I take my own self-interested emotionalism out of the picture, I think she made the wrong call, frankly, and I think we as a society should argue that we should always default to abortion. |
