October 18, 2005
From the desk of Jane Galt:How humane
Orac has a long post on the history of euthanasia, pointing out that until the Nazi atrocities were revealed, a movement to kill the "feebleminded" seemed to be gathering steam in America. Only the association of such actions with the Holocaust stopped the trend in its tracks.
If it hadn't been for the Holocaust, we might very well now have an active program of disposing of disabled children, at least the ones that weren't aborted. And the moral force of peer pressure being what it is, I'm willing to bet that most of us would endorse it as humane and right. Makes you think, doesn't it?
Posted by Jane Galt at October 18, 2005 10:55 AM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksI also saw content in the RSS feed. And so I quote:
Orac has a long post on the history of euthanasia, pointing out that until the Nazi atrocities were revealed, a movement to kill the "feebleminded" seemed to be gathering steam in America. Only the association of such actions with the Holocaust stopped the trend in its tracks. If it hadn't...
I presume there was more.
Is there anything other than the moral force of peer pressure that makes you think euthanasia isn't humane and right?
Jane - I think that CMN just proved your point.
The Holocaust may have stopped it in the States, but it carried on in Sweden for decades.
An otherwise sensible relative of mine quite a few years back surprised the daylights out of me by expressing frustration that the eugenics movement had been essentially derailed by the Nazi death camps. She was of the opinion that preventing "the unfit" from breeding was very important to preserving the human race, and argued it in Darwinian terms. She didn't go so far as to argue for painless death for the "unfit", mind you, but clearly was in favor of surgically sterilizing the retarded and some suffering from profound physical defects. This relative had a background in microbiology, was quite ethical and as I mentioned above, otherwise levelheaded.
It is interesting how many women and mothers in Germany supported the original Nazi program of painlessly killing the retarded...
I wonder how many women who revere Margaret Sanger even to this day have actually read what she wrote, especially on the importance of pushing birth control on the "inferior races"?
And the moral force of peer pressure being what it is, I'm willing to bet that most of us would endorse it as humane and right.
I doubt it. Most people don't think that abortion is right*, and fetuses are much less obviously living human beings than mentally disabled people are.
*(yes, most people are pro-choice, but many pro-choice people still think that abortion itself is wrong)
CMN asks,
Is there anything other than the moral force of peer pressure that makes you think euthanasia isn't humane and right?
Yes, CMN, there is. It's the love I have for my autistic son. It's easy to dismiss these things when you talk in the abstract, but remember, these are real people with lives, families, and always the hope of better days. Think about it.
The nauseating mixture of bad science and politics was the basis of Crichton's "State of Fear" about global warming- his end note summarizes the eugenics beliefs of the early 20th century- and it wasn't just Sanger, Justices Brandeis and Holmes, 20+ states passed laws supporting 'eugenics', etc.
I've noted before that we hung doctors at Nurenburg for what the Dutch are doing now.
we hung doctors at Nurenburg for what the Dutch are doing now.
Um, which doctors were hanged at Nuremburg?
Three generations of imbeciles is enough?
We wouldn't just "endorse" it, we'd probably demand that Supreme Court nominees swear fealty to it.
I can't prove it, but I am very uncomfortable with abortion and, while I can see the arguments for euthenasia for the extremely ill (without necessarily agreeing with it), the retarded and handicapped are people who can live happy lives (or even unhappy lives). Without being able to magically determine that somone will be miserable for their whole life, I'm not willing to kill them just because they might be.
Plenty of physically and mentally "normal" people are quite miserable for much or all of their lives. Should we terminate them, as well?
I find a lot of Peter Singer's arguments for such things to be weak and internally inconsistent. He's supposed to be a brilliant and thoughtful proponent of a logical system of ethics but is, in fact, just as driven by his irrational biases as anyone else (no surprise, he's a human being).
I have a friend who is a pediatric cardiac anasthesiologist. They perform surgery on infants (premature, newborn, and older) to correct horrifying and astounding heart defects. Many of these kids will ultimately not grow up. Some will. I'd rather we try and fail than just write them all off and kill them so we can focus on efficiently delegating our medical resources. My feeling might be different (but I doubt it) if I though that we would really be able to more efficiently delegate our medical resources somehow, but since doing so would require government intervention, the "efficient" part of it would be a lost cause...
EI
"we hung doctors at Nurenburg for what the Dutch are doing now."
Can you name any such doctors? The doctors I remember who were tried at Nuremberg, whether or not they were hung, were tried for horrendous experiments performed on the allegedly inferior, not for painlessly killing them or the aged.
Anyone remember when China announced their eugenics policy in the 1990s? They were so proud of themselves for adopting a scientific policy for strengthening the race and were taken aback when international reaction was negative. So they renamed it their 'family' policy or something like that, since they figured out that as long as they didn't call it eugenics, no one would mind.
As usual in China, the bad policy was worsened by corruption and incompetence. The policy was enforced at the local level (probably with quotas, similar to the quotas on executions during Strike Hard campaigns), and the local Party leaders often didn't know much about genetics. There were all kinds of stories of people being denied permission to have a child because they had a sibling who was in a wheelchair, even though the sibling had been hurt in a car accident, which is hardly an inherited disease.
And remember, this is in a country where anyone who supports democracy can be put in an insane asylum. Thanks to the eugenics policy, such political dissidents can also be forcibly sterlized, along with orphans who are sometimes put in asylums when they grow up because no one knows what else to do with them. The Nazis may be gone, but many of their policies are alive and well in communist countries.
In Britain doctors will now perform a late termination of pregnancy on the evidence of, for example, cleft palate.
Brittain 33-
The trials were split into several groups, the first being "Major War Criminals", Goering et al- the next were Military Tribunals, the first being trials of I believe 23 doctors, eleven guitly and seven sentenced to death. I looking for the actual findings but at least some of the charges included the killing of disabled or 'feeble' infants. I agree that they were also guilty of other acts but I'm just terribly troubled when I sense we're heading back down this particular slope.
Jay: It sounds to me like you're saying that if someone is tried for burglary and for murdering 15 people and sentenced to death, he's been sentenced to death for burglary...
I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that even without the Holocaust, medical and biotechnology and knowledge would have continued to advance such that we would still have seen earlier and earlier dates of viability for fetuses, more and more long-term survival among people with profound congenital illnesses and deformities, greater understanding of the very small and largely cosmetic differences among "races," etc., etc. I have (less than complete, but still present) confidence that our society would have reached the same conclusion about eugenics as most of us have now, even in the absence of the terrible "eugenics=death camps" lesson of WWII. After all, we no longer put lead in makeup or paint, we no longer consider beating with a stick or a belt an acceptable child discipline method, we no longer teach that humans have 48 chromosomes... There are other paths to the moral conclusion than millions dead in mass graves, though I think the Holocaust has had the single positive effect of causing right-thinking people to recoil in horror at the idea of eugenics pretty much by reflex rather than only after consideration. (I consider that effect to be God's way of making some small good out of an epic evil.)
The thing I wonder about is, have humans opted out of natural selection? Actually, clearly we have - I shouldn't have lived past my first encounter with the blurry smudge that would have been the predator that killed me - but what will the effect on the human race be? Are we up to the task of maintaining our viability by intelligence alone, if we continue to succeed in cheating the physical side of cruel Nature? Or are we going to be the agents of our own extinction?
(Ahem. I doubt it. But it's interesting to consider.)
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