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March 31, 2005
Compassionate Liberalism
WWB turned me on to an opinion journal article about the decline of compassion in liberalism. Here are some exerpts and my responses:The strong have a duty to protect the weak": Didn't that use to be a liberal sentiment?
Was Terri’s will to die. How is keep someone alive against their will "protecting the weak"? Protecting the weak is still a liberal sentiment and that's precisely what the Schaivo case illustrates. Who's more powerful, the religious right, the brothers bush, and congress or one man who wants to do right by his wife? It's good spin, but ultimately empty.
Bush:The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak. In cases where there are serious doubts and questions, the presumption should be in the favor of life.
This bothers me. I don't think that the default position should be life. I realize it sounds awful, but I'd choose death in an ambiguous situation. Is that because I hate people in a persistent vegetative state? No, it's because I care about them as human beings. Where oh where has my compassion gone?
Mrs. Schaivo was neither on life support nor brain-dead; she was unable to swallow and in a persistent vegetative state, which means she lacked higher cognitive functions, but her brainstem was not substantially damaged. But for many, that's enough to declare that she was no longer a person.
Who's claiming this? We're not claiming she can be killed without due process or treated like an animal. It's because we regard her as a person that we're taking care with her life before ending it. Further her being a person is integral to the left's argument. If her life were the equivalent of, say, a cat's then we would let her be a cat. But she's not; she's a human whose mental processes have been reduced cat-level, a condition under which many humans, including Non-Fat Latte Liberal, would rather die than be in. So, even if one doesn't believe she said she would like to die if she were in this situation, letting her next of kin decide shows more compassion than forcing an outside decision on him. And yes, the parents’ decision is an outside one, Next of Kin power of attorney works.
In a fascinating essay for The Weekly Standard, Eric Cohen argues that what went wrong in the Schaivo case was that "procedural liberalism"--the respect for Mrs. Schiavo's right to make her own decisions--gave way to "ideological liberalism"--the presumption that because she was unable to make such decisions, her life was worthless.
This is silly. No one claims her life is worthless. They simply acknowledge that she may want it ended. It is that we value her life and her will, as best we can manifest it, that we pursue this course of action. Death is scary, yes, but it is a welcome release for many and it is compassionate for those people to be allowed to die.
Autonomy and compassion are both important values, and there are dangers in overvaluing either at the expense of the other.
This frames the debate in a wholly disingenuous light. Her autonomy creates the problem of determining consent. I've never heard of liberal wanting someone killed against their will because they were autonomous, that ridiculous.
Conservatives should at least make a cursory to attempt to understand the liberal argument to let Shaivo die before disputing it.
The primary assumption of this line of reasoning is that the liberal positionis inhumane and teh conclusion they reah? Liberal are becoming less compassionate. Gosh, I could've done that in a lot fewer words.
Posted by conryf at 05:36 PM | Comments (0)