Culture of Death
A terminally ill baby at Children’s Hospital of Austin will have at least 18 more days before he is taken off life support after lawyers for the hospital and the boy’s mother agreed Tuesday to give his mother more time to seek another hospital to care for him.
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/03/21/21emilio.html
When have come to a point in time where if someone says on his blog “Perhaps we should not kill babies by starvation and dehydration” it is regarded as controversial, and likely to start a heated debate.
Let us reason with each other then. Consider this: When the Spartans threw a child into the Apothetae they did not pretend they were not killing a child found worthless to the needs of the state. They admitted, nay, boasted, that the human life itself was of no innate value in their philosophy; the only value was his potential to serve. If we lived with the austere military discipline and spartan poverty of the Spartans, we might have an excuse for adopting their attitude toward human life.
Instead we live in a pleasure-loving and pleasure-seeking age, a pornographic age, Paris Hilton age, where nothing is worth fighting for, no higher principles, aside from self-actualization, self-love, and the politics of whining. We want to feel good about ourselves. This spongey philosophy govern our thinkers, our media, our popular entertainments. The Spartans at least were hard, cold-faced men with hearts of iron; their laws were hard and stern. What excuse do we have for our Apothetae?
Someone asked me once whether I was a libertarian. My answer is: not quite. A true-blue libertarian is as cold-eyed as a Spartan, and says, “if this brown woman cannot afford to pay for her brown baby to have a respirator, then let the child perish, and decrease the surplus population of the world.” I say a Christian commonwealth has a moral obligation to support and sustain the honest poor, to the degree it can do so without endangering its liberties or addicting its dependants to permanent dole.
Non-libertarians need not comment on the economy of letting the expensive baby die. Only libertarians are ideologically pure enough to make that argument with a straight face. If we compare the cost to the government of keeping the doomed baby alive as long as possible, to, for example, the Nation Helium Reserve Fund, National Public Radio, or even the cost of maintaining lifelong-prisoners in jail who should by rights be swinging from a hemp noose, the comparison will make a mockery of arguments based on thrift.
Christians, who believe that life on Earth is vain and transitory, place a value on human life: we regard all men as imago dei, the image of God. Freethinkers, who believe that life on Earth is the only existence that there is, place no particular value on human life, but regard it as a means to an end. Ponder the meaning of that paradox, if you will.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
