A CULTURE OF SADISM?

Let me start off by making it clear that my choice of heading is hyperbolic – I do not think most anti-choice people actually derive pleasure from the preventable suffering of others, although there may be some exceptions, particularly when some people believe that the suffering in this life will win them or others eternal bliss in an afterlife.  But I think the reader will allow me some hyperbole given that lawyer Mark Said, in his opinion piece entitled “We have devalued life”, describes (presumably not at all hyperbolically) people who are pro-choice and pro-euthanasia as proponents of a “culture of death”. Count that as just one of the numerous unsupported assertions he bandies about as if they are undeniable and self-evident truths. 

Given that his whole opinion piece is just a case of saying much but really saying nothing at all – no substance whatsoever – I will only provide a cursory response.  An evidence and argument based response to most of his blanket assertions have already been provided elsewhere in my blog anyway.

Said starts off by saying that “It is disturbing that the value of a person’s life comes down to nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis”, while showing an apparent ignorance of the fact that virtually all our life’s decisions involve conscious or sub-conscious cost-benefit analyses – or at least they should. Let’s take the decision on whether to bring into existence a new human being through procreation as just one example. Unless procreation is taken lightly, and unless procreation happens unintentionally, responsible and moral people will make a cost-benefit analysis to determine whether they – or the new being they would bring into existence – would benefit by a pregnancy and a birth at that particular point in time. A completely altruistic consideration would question whether a person brought into existence at that particular point in time could be afforded the necessary care and resources to give the newly created being at least a reasonably good life if not the best life possible. Would Said consider this altruistic cost-benefit analyses disturbing? I think the exact opposite is the case.

Said then goes for embryo genetic testing which, in his words, “leads to discarding defective embryos or giving them up for scientific research” and is often, again in his words, “hailed as offering a lower risk of miscarriage and increased chances of having a healthy baby and a lower probability of going through several IVF cycles”. Without even going into the merits of arguments about personhood, sentience, consciousness, interests, etc (which I have dealt upon extensively elsewhere in my blog, so I won’t repeat my arguments here), not even to refute them, he simply asserts that although “most people would not openly admit to believing that unborn children have a negative value (a baseless straw-man from Said)”, all these efforts (embryo testing and research) “(support) their destruction” and “the subliminal message (a culture of death) has been woven deep into the fabric of our society”.

So apparently, Said would oppose embryo genetic testing and the discarding of defective embryos (that are not persons in the morally relevant sense given that they are neither sentient, nor conscious, nor self-aware, nor even aware of their existence – making them only potential persons) to deny us a choice between bringing into existence a sentient, conscious and aware being that will be burdened with preventable suffering, and bringing into existence another person or no person at all.  Where would Said draw the line? Would Said deny us genetic testing if it could (hypothetically or actually) detect Anencephaly (a serious birth defect in which a baby is born without parts of the brain and skull, giving it at the most a few days of life)? Would Said oppose embryo genetic testing if such testing were to indicate that some embryos would develop into persons afflicted with acute suffering throughout their whole lives, when this could be avoided? Does Said actually subscribe to a culture of sadism?

Said tells us that “since the Enlightenment, many secular ideologies have contributed to the devaluing of human life by arguing that human life is the product of chance processes. This has led to the erosion of the Christian sanctity-of-life ethic, spawning the present ‘culture of death’, where many intellectuals advocate abortion, assisted suicide and euthanasia”.  Of course, Said does not back up his assertion that the secular science-backed philosophies are nothing but a “culture of death”. Nor does he provide any argument in support of his entirely faith-based “sanctity of life ethic”. Perhaps he should read some contemporary philosophy before uttering such absurdities.

Then, after some incoherent assertions also devoid of any kind of argument, Said provides us with a blatant non sequitur. Said states that “our line of reasoning today is based on the premise that being human is not enough. It is for that reason that (abortion and euthanasia) seem to have little in common. But we need to look more closely. The human status of the early embryo has become more and more difficult to deny”.  Let me rephrase this. Said says that the reasoning today is that being human is not enough. And how does he refute that reasoning? By saying that the human status of embryos is difficult to deny. I hope it is unnecessary for me to point out Said’s obvious non sequential line of though, so I’ll leave it at that.

Said goes on to say that “not long ago, there were those who tried to claim that the first two weeks of human development involve a ‘pre-embryo’, a largely disorganised mass of cells with no individuality. But scientific data have caused serious problems for this claim, showing that later landmarks in embryonic development are only manifestations of events occurring much earlier. Indeed, human development is a continuum from the one-celled stage onward”.  Said completely misses the point. That embryonic development is a continuum from a one-celled stage onward is an undeniable fact. The salient fact Said misses is that the word "pre-embryo" is only used in ethical contexts to refer to a conceptus between fertilization and implantation. Whether one calls it a “pre-embryo” or a “pre-implantation embryo” does not change the scientific fact that implantation may begin at about six days after fertilization and can last for about a week. During that period there is a potential for the conceptus to split into identical twins prior to implantation, which, prior to that point, makes it impossible to determine whether one should regard the conceptus as one potential human being or more. This, to give one consequence of this fact, creates a problem for those who believe ensoulment occurs at conception – do twins share one soul? – but I’ll leave such worries for believers such as Said. But perhaps Said should concede that far from the term “pre-embryo” being “simply ridiculous”, it does have its practical usages. That it does not serve his faith-based agenda well is beside the point.

Then, as if the above was not enough to show that Said is unfamiliar with contemporary philosophy, he asks the question that has already been addressed countless times in the best scholarly books on the topic. Said asks: “What about those sick and elderly people who can no longer be kept active and healthy? If they want to end their suffering through assisted suicide, is that not respect for their personhood and autonomy that should drive our society’s efforts to grant them their wish?”

I will not waste any time repeating arguments that have already been made by experts in the relevant fields (see my Suggested Reading page for some such books). I’ll just say that there is a significant difference between a suffering person who is terminally ill, and a suffering person whose suffering might be temporary; and there is also a significant difference between temporary depression and suicidal thoughts by persons going through a rough patch but whose lives could improve in the future, and people who have absolutely no hope that their excruciating suffering could ever go away but are denied a dignified death by the proponents of a faith-based culture of sadism such as that apparently proposed (and imposed) by the likes of Said.

Said concludes by saying that according to him, “it is a disturbing trend in our society that the value of a person’s life comes down to nothing more than a cost-benefit analysis. With that logic, it is easy to understand how the culture of death is gaining such a stronghold in our culture”. I actually find much more disturbing the morally obsolete faith-based ideology of ignoring other people’s costs and benefits just to satisfy one’s own religious prejudices, and the persistence in proposing and enforcing through legislation a culture of sadism that is mostly based on the faith-based belief that we must impose preventable suffering in this life just for the sake of an evidence-lacking belief in everlasting bliss in an afterlife.