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Friday, March 02, 2012

Infanticide: coming to a hospital near you

The Bones has a good post about the way the eugenicists float 'shocking' ideas, wait for the fuss to die down, and then impose the reality. They get people used to the idea of contraception, abortion, screening for the disabled, euthanasia, by endless debate, and their chums in the media are always on hand to keep the defenders of the status quo on the back foot. The matter is never settled until they get their way; when that happens, suddenly it is very settled indeed, one might think it was handed down from the Almighty, the fuss they make about 'attacks on abortion rights' and so on.

This procedure is aided enormously if the response of Catholics is not to oppose the evil with arguments from Natural Law, but to beg to be allowed to shelter Catholic institutions and Catholic medics from having anything to do with it. The progressives are always willing to make this concession to win the main issue, after which they can remove our precious protections at their leisure. This has happened so often now it would be tedious to list the cases, but it started with Cardinal Heenan reining in opponents of abortion in exchange for a 'conscience clause' which in the long term has proved totally worthless.

There is another aspect of the progressive strategy which is worth highlighting. The Catholic Medical Quarterly has just published a short paper of mine, which the editor commissioned, on the widely used medical textbook by Beauchamp & Childress. This was first published in 1979, and is now in its fifth edition. It is a truly appalling book, a disgrace to academia, deriving not from serious moral philosophers but a self-regarding group of 'applied ethics' people who find it very easy to get grants and sell books without actually thinking anything through clearly.

The Catholic Medical Quarterly very decently lets people download pds of articles, and you can read mine here. One very striking thing about the Beauchamp and Childress approach is that they encourage medics to view every decision as a matter of balancing considerations. Not, as you might imagine, medical pros and cons to a proposed treatment, or anything as sensible as that, but 'on the one hand, Kantian ethics would suggest option (a); on the other, the patient wants (b); and then again my feeling is that we should go for (c).' This describes what may indeed be the reasoning of a medic with absolutely no ethical formation; Beauchamp and Childress want to keep medics that way, even after they've done a course in 'medical ethics'. Instead of making a decision on the basis of a coherent account of ethics which is itself subject to rigorous debate, they want medics to balance innumerable such accounts against each other and against inchoate feelings and even social pressure.

The genius of this account is that it can disguise the victory of materialism and utilitarianism indefinitely. One of the most powerful arguments against these theories is that they have extreme implications which are completely implausible. Murder five innocent people to save six? Cause great pain to one to save a large number from pin pricks? Give extra food to an indolent epicure while ignoring the needs of contented paupers? Instead of confronting these cases and concluding that Utilitarianism is simply wrong, Beauchamp and Childress say: keep it in the background, just balance it against your intuitions. So as time goes on, and healthy moral intuitions are undermined by relentless Utilitarian propaganda, not least in medical ethics courses, it can continue its relentless advance. The unthinkability of contraception, abortion, IVF, screening, euthanasia, and infanticide disappear one after the other because it hasn't been made sufficiently clear that the only reason to ignore these traditional moral prohibitions is a moral theory, Utilitarianism, which no sane  person would actually adopt, without massive and arbitrary conditions, in real life.

7 comments:

  1. Dear Dr. Shaw,

    I'm glad that you've posted about this book; it is very much a standard text used in the education of medical and allied health profesionals. Since I may end up teaching a module on ethics to such students next year, I've been pondering what to do about the book. I'm afraid a conflagration is out as far as the modern university is concerned, but do I ignore it or do I confront it head on?

    The whole approach of the book appears to be somewhat Rawlsian: everything's a matter of concensus between nice liberal folk like us; and we must let nasty extremists have a voice.

    David Oderberg has an interesting essay on the awful state of medical ethics as a discipline on his website; do you know of it?

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  2. oops, that shold read:

    "and we must not let nasty extremists have a voice."

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  3. This is a nice little exposition regarding the "Principles" book. I am afraid that this is the sort of "ethics" which allowed a child to be aborted directly in a "catholic" hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. Perhaps this is why morality ought to be stressed over ethics?

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  4. Wonderful post, and wonderful blog! :) God bless, Joseph.

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  5. Dear Dr. Shaw,

    I couldn't find your email, so I've just posted this here. I don't know if you have come across this yet, but I found a petition to give Richard III a Catholic, and not a Church of England, burial. It only has 10 signatures now, including my own, but I was hoping that perhaps you could publish it.


    Here is the link:
    http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/38533

    If you could post it on your blog, I would greatly appreciate it. It would be wonderful to see Richard III re-interred according to the rites of the Church. Also, if you know any other Catholic bloggers who might post it, if you could pass it on, that would be great.

    Many thanks,
    Elizabeth

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  6. Anonymous11:48 am

    Dear Joseph,
    I have found your blog, which I really like it. Enjoyed to read your posts and book reviews.
    I was wondering if you would be interested in sharing your posts and ideas on Glipho? It's a quite new social publishing platform for bloggers, where you can connect to every social network accounts.

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  7. I have family who don't go to the hospital when they are due to deliver. It seemed a bit odd in the past, but with Obamacare looming it now seems it may be quite reasonable. We could be heading for a situation a lot like the Hebrews found themselves in at the beginning of the book of Exodus, which Pharoah Obama commanding the midwives to kill all the male Christian babies.

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