Sat 30 Apr 2005
Andrew Sullivan comments here on a Weekly Standard article by Eric Cohen ‘99, who also spoke at the Heritage Foundation two weeks ago.
For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives–as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri’s desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.
I wonder if there are any professors at Williams who would agree with Cohen’s take on the issue.
April 30th, 2005 at 11:24 am
It is not at all clear that many conservatives will agree with Cohen. Libertarians will obviously resist the idea that individuals do not have control over the most fundamental terms of their life and death (see Andrew Sullivan on this point). And social conservatives are by no means squarely behind Cohen’s rather extreme position. In the Catholic tradition, for example, there had been a long-established notion of allowing someone to die; long-established, that is, until JPII intervened in the Schiavo affair. I know Commonweal is seen as a “liberal” Catholic magazine, but this editorial calls upon that long-established Catholic tradition:
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php?id_article=798
In a talk I will be giving at Bennington College in May, I will argue that Confucian and Taoist thinkers would agree with one element of Cohen’s argument (that we are not as autonomous as traditional liberal thinking assumes) but would disagree with his implication that there can be a universal answer that would apply to all such end of life decisions. Confucians and Taoists are both contextual in their ethics. Beyond that similarity, Taoists would probably come down with the “let her die” argument; while Confucians might agree to “keep her alive,” not for the reasons Cohen asserts, but out of deference to her parents’ wishes and the good that could come from their ritual care of her.
April 30th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Of course, the next step is adoption of the proposition that society is obligated to provide the resources to ensure that dignity and those rights. Ergo - a new class of social entitlement.