"Better Off Dead?" What Kind of Fool's Thinking is That?

THE CONSEQUENTIALIST CALCULATION OF "having a life" suffers from serious problems. In assessing the "having a life" formula, we have seen in prior postings how the consequentialist has significant impediments in judging the value of life, viewed instrumentally, from the subjective perspective of the proposed victim whose fate these consequentialists have in their mind's hand. We have seen also that the objective efforts to measure the value of life is fraught with insurmountable problems. The third part of the consequentialists' efforts to measure the value of life relates to how that particular life affects third parties. This may be called the "side effects" test, and is both the most absurd and the most heinous of the "having a life" formula.

In evaluating what is to be done under his calculative imperative the consequentialist must consider the particular value he seeks to maximize (reduction of pain, or increase in pleasure, or whatever X is) from the perspective of the victim as well as those that will be affected by the victim's death or the victim's continued living.

The consequentialists' reckless disregard of life

All people have to be given equal consideration, so that all that matters is the maximization of an impersonal state of affairs--the greatest balance of X over not-X must be achieved for the world as such, not for any specific person. Let the X-chips fall wherever they may: what matters is that enough of them fall!

Oderberg, 163. In assessing this part of the consequentialist's ethos, we confront the consequentialist's double visage. We see what may be both their most foolish, buffoonish visage and claptrap, and, on the other, their most hideous face and gravelly voice. To be sure, they masquerade as intellectual clowns in one sense. But in another sense, they are sort of like the phantom of the opera who hides his corruption behind his clean, white mask of innocence. The clown-like thinking of consequentialists comes from their belief that a person who is unable to "have a life" is better off dead. We shall assess the consequentialist absurdity that the victim, whose life the consequentialists are assessing, benefits by his own death. Is there any meaning to the proposition that John, say, who has done nothing to merit death, is better off dead?

One Face of Consequentialism

For one, as Oderberg points out, the question of whether a person is better of dead is absurd or "incoherent" when asked from the perspective of the one dead. Oderberg, 163. How is the dead man the beneficiary of his death, when, by definition, one has to be alive to benefit from anything, any good, including--one would suppose without a reason for thinking otherwise--life?

[I]f a person must exist in order to receive all those things that can be benefits in the ordinary course of events, how can it be that death is an exception--that a person can himself benefit by being dead? . . . [We are left] in the original position that the dead cannot themselves benefit from anything, including being dead.

Oderberg, 163-64.

Apparently, the deep wisdom of the consequentialist foolish sage blithely ignores what must be the most obvious truism in the experience of man: You can't take any natural human good with you when you die.

Thus since the perpetual possession is given to none,
and one man’s heir urges on another’s, as wave impels wave,
of what importance are houses, or granaries;
or what the Lucanian pastures joined to the Calabrian;
if Hades, inexorable to gold,
mows down the great together with the small?

Sic quia perpetuus nulli datur usus,
et heres heredem alterius velut unda supervenit undam,
quid vici prosunt aut horrea?
quidve Calabris saltibus adiecti Lucani,
si metit Orcus grandia cum parvis, non exorabilis auro?

Horace, Epistles 2.2.175-79

No one comes to the house of Hades with his possessions.

χρήματ’ ἔχων οὐδεὶς ἔρχεται εἰς Ἀΐδεω.

Theognis, 726

You won't carry any riches to the waters of Acheron:
fool, you will ride naked in the hellish boat.

Haud ullas portabis opes Acherontis ad undas:
nudus in infera, stulte, vehere rate.

Propertius 3.5.13-14.

The rich man's shade will carry nothing to his grave.

Nil feret ad Manes divitis umbra suos.

Ovid, Tristia 5.14.12.

Snatch, heap up, carry off, possess: it must be left behind.

Rape, congere, aufer, posside: reliquendum est.

Martial 8.44.9.

We brought nothing into this world: and certainly we can carry nothing out.

Oὐδὲν γὰρ εἰσηνέγκαμεν εἰς τὸν κόσμον, ὅτι οὐδὲ ἐξενεγκεῖν τι δυνάμεθα.

1 Timothy 6.7.

Even the Allman Brothers, immersed in the haze of drug use, recognized the truth that apparently slips by the consequentialist's absurd maxim that a man who cannot "have a life" may be better off dead because he enjoys something after death.

Can't take it with you, everybody knows
Can't take it with you, when you go
Can't hide your love away, save it for a rainy day.
You can't take it with you when you go.

Shall we reject the entirety of Western, nay the entirety of human wisdom, indeed shall we ignore reality itself, and give the consequentialist an exception to the rule that you cannot take any benefit of life, including life itself, with you when you die?

The absurdity of the consequentialist formula is readily apparent. To argue with the consequentialist that someone is better off dead is not to enter into reason's dialectic, but to enter into realm of burlesque intellectual jokery and jestery. Jokery and jestery, a person may add, in very bad and very morbid taste.

The Frightening Visage Behind the Consequentialist Mask

We may therefore be tempted to laugh at the consequentialist's buffoonery, but we must not think them harmless jesters. Because behind the incoherent and silly notion that, from the perspective of the dead man, a man is better off dead, lies the real impetus behind the consequentialist argument. The real impetus is that those who are alive may be better off with another man dead, even if that man is entirely innocent.

We have seen how the consequentialist thinking that a person may be better off dead is an incoherent, ridiculous argument. It means nothing in and of itself. But it does mean something important when viewed in light of the consequentialist's "side effects" argument which is part of the "having a life" analysis they engage in.

What it means is that the consequentialist's real focus is whether the rest of us may be better off by having a person dead.* All consequentialists, we learn, have the morals of Caiaphas the high priest, morals of expediency.** It is better for one innocent man to die so long as we are all better off. When we get to this stage, argument, even dialogue, ceases because there is no longer any morality, no longer reason, but only corruption. These folks walk another way, they are on the road to perdition. Of these we can only say with Confucius:

With those who follow a different Way,
It is useless to take counsel.

Analects, xv.39. No, there is no use in taking counsel with these advocates of death. These sorts of arguments by the consequentialist moral monsters demand outrage on our part.

The reason the very thought that someone might be killed because others would be better off if he were dead is repugnant and offensive to morality is that the protection of the innocent, if it means anything, requires that the desires, preferences and feelings of other people in respect of that person must be reasonable. . . . On the traditional view of morality, when the life of an innocent person is at stake, the desire of third parties are of secondary important and must conform to the primary principle that the right to life of the innocent is inviolable. Desires evoked by threats or duress, generated by lack of concern, other priorities, self-interest real or imaginary--all of these are per se unreasonable if they in any way form part of a process of reasoning that seeks to justify the killing of the innocent or other actions that constitute a direct attack upon an innocent's well-being . . . . The side effects test of whether a life is "worth living", then, is as untenable as any other test . . . . [as it issues] in conclusions that deny the most basic protection to the most vulnerable members of society--the young, the sick, the disabled, the elderly, the comatose, and many others besides. If, as traditional morality holds, it is a mark of a civilized society that it protects the innocent--if, indeed being an innocent has any claim whatever on our moral sense--then a society that based its attitude to human life of the concept of a "life worth living" could never call itself civilized.

Oderberg, 165,167, 168.

To the extent that we have swallowed the consequentialist anti-Gospel, its kakangelion or "badspel," we have, it would seem, lapsed into barbarism, a barbarism whose prophets were John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) and Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and whose modern apostles, among many others, includes Peter Singer and his ilk. What is fearful of this modern barbarism is that it enjoys the power of modern science and the tools of the modern state. The modern barbarian holds neither sword nor scimitar, and sports not a beard as of old. Instead, the modern barbarian flies jets, can drop H-bombs, and may be clean shaven. The only thing the old barbarian and the new have in common, it would seem, is that neither speak Greek.
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*In fact the common good may require a person who is not innocent, that is one guilty of a heinous crime (e.g., rape and murder of children) or serious moral offense (e.g., genocide), be put to death. In that sense, the common good may be better off as a result of the death. But that question is an entirely different one from the one tackled here. Viewed from a moral perspective, is the common good ever better off by the killing of an innocent man? The response of traditional morality would be an exceptionless no.
**Cf. John 11:50: ". . . quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat." ". . . it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not."

Life under the Microscope: Life v. The New Fates of "Having a Life"

SOME OF THE OPPONENTS OF THE SANCTITY OF LIFE distinguish between life (which they equate generally with merely biological process) and "having a life." (e.g., James Rachels in his book End of Life, quoted by Oderberg, 159.). This effort at measuring the concept of "having a life" is the consequentialist effort at objectifying the determination of when life is no longer worth living from the perspective of the potential victim. Once again, we have here a notion of life which is instrumental--life as a backpack, not as the hub of a wheel.*

"Having a life" to these folks means the panoply of "biographical" aspects of a person, the "plans, projects, aspirations, memories, desires, preferences, making choices, fulfilling ambitions, and so on" that humans all enjoy and value. Oderberg, 159. It is the latter only that we value, say these folks, and not the biological life which is their carrier or their host; hence, they argue, biological life has no real moral import. It is what we value that is morally important. Those who merely subsist in biological life--the comatose, the ancephalic, or those whose suffering prevents, in any real sense the "biographical" aspects from developing--perhaps even the deaf, the dumb, the blind, those with severe physical or mental handicaps, the bedridden, the senile, the list could go on and on depending on who's doing the defining--do not really "have a life" in any moral sense.

Those persons that make this distinction seize on, and take advantage of, the psychological horror that can accompany suffering of those of our less fortunate brothers and sisters. Who, after all, would prefer (if he had a choice) a life of constant pain, or life in a coma, to a life of ordinary flourishing? Who would ever want the life of St. Lydwine of Schiedam? (And yet look what she did with it.) But that preference and that question are entirely different from the question of whether the life of the unfortunate person who suffers from these disadvantages is to be regarded as of less value to the point where he can be considered dispensable. The question of flourishing or the question of tragedy in life is a different question from the question of life, but the opponents of the sanctity of life doctrine would have us confuse the two, and then capitalize on the confusion. One could almost speak here of a "consequentialist fallacy," a fallacy in logic which jumps from flourishing or lack of flourishing to living and not living.

The extra moral theory that critics [of the sanctity of life doctrine] almost unanimously add to their judgments about a "life worth living" is one or other version of consequentialism, the theory that what matters is, purely and simply, the maximization of good effects, the greatest possible balance of good effects over bad. Since the test of maximization is an objective one it is, the critics believe, a natural ally in the devising of an objective test of whether a life is not "worth living."

Oderberg, 160-61. The problems that the advocates of such "objective" calculus face, are, of course, the same which any consequentialist theoretician faces. And they are insurmountable. What facts to we include in our universe of consequentialist calculus? What are our time boundaries? How do we measure the subjective components of the person whose life we, like some sort of modern version of the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, spin into a thread, measure its length, and then cut it with "th'abhorred shears," to slit "the thin spun life"? (John Milton, Lycidas, l. 75)

The Modern Consequentialists: Would-be Clothos, Lachesises, and Atroposes?

We might scoff: Who died and made the consequentialists judge? The consequentialists' assumption of the office of the Fates, the Moirae, is hubristic, if nothing else, though it may also be be objected to as entirely arbitrary because their measurements are of impossible complexity.

Exactly what factors, in what degrees . . . and in what combinations? No answers to these crucial questions are forthcoming. . . . Consequentialism promises to come to the rescue, since it professes to offer a single, precise formula for reducing the various factors to a "common currency" that can be weighed and calculated . . . [b]ut there is . . . no agreement as to what that common currency is . . . .

Oderberg, 161.

Judge not lest you be judged, Oh ye consequentialists who would assume the role of masters of our fate! For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. (Cf. Matt. 7:1-2.) Perhaps we ought to consider that it is not those who suffer who do not "have a life." Perhaps it is those who would assume the mantle of the Fates, who would don the role of a measurer and cutter of life's thread, who do not "have a life," for they seem to have exploited it, commercialized it, cheapened it. In exchange for their filthy lucre--thirty pieces of their common consequentialist currency--they have sold life away, including their own, in a Faustian bargain, a vicious trade not unlike the one Judas made twenty centuries ago. Where is the Potter's Field that this blood money will buy and upon which the modern Vernichtungslagern and Todeslagern, the new consequentialist death camps, shall be built? This is not hyperbole. There are some already built as far away as Holland, and some are being planned in places as close as the State of Oregon. There are some who say that these are found in semine and in appropriately washed form in the two thousand or so pages of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the law that ushered in Obamacare and which will ration care against the interests of the terminally ill in favor of the young and robust. There is a frightening inhumaneness in the notion that government bureaucrats will be making consequentialist calculations on health care using using consequentialist-driven concepts such as those of the Quality-Adjusted Remaining Years (QARY) system. Under QARY, health care decision-makers seek to “amortize” the cost of treatment for a patient--say $120,000 for a hip replacement for an overweight 80 year old suffering from diabetes--over the remaining “quality years of life” likely for that patient--suppose three years for our example. Under our consequentialist-driven QARY calculation, the $40,000/year calculation suggests the treatment is contraindicated. Is this really how we want to be making these decisions?

Quomodo cecidisti de caelo, consequentialitarius? How art thou fallen from heaven, consequentialist? (Cf. Isaiah 14:12.)

Life under the Microscope: The Tomfoolery of "Life Worth Living" Advocates

THE HORRIBLE DOCTRINES OF THOSE messengers of death that find life to be an instrumental good, and therefore subject to moral commerce and exchangeable for worth, are foul to sight and insulting to reason. To trade with life, to give it up like some old shoe when worn or an undergarment when soiled, is morally abhorrent. It is very close to, in fact it may be a form of, an implicit blasphemy, because it is an assault on being, on existence, and created being is very nigh to God who is the self-subsistent being from whom all created being comes.

The proponents of "life worth living" doctrines generally formulate arguments with both subjective and objective components. The subjective component looks at the person whose life is being analyzed from that person's perspective (an "internal perspective" test). The objective components are broken down into two: an objective valuation of the person's whose life is being analyzed (an objective analysis of the subject's life), and the effects of his death (or continued living) on others ("side effects test").

These doctrines will be explored, beginning, in this posting, with the subjective test which considers continued living from the standpoint of the person whose life is at issue. The next blog postings will address the objective prongs of these "life worth living" doctrinaires. All the "life worth living" advocates view life as instrumental, as a backpack whose use is only to hold or carry other goods, and when it is unable to carry these other goods well, it ought to be considered to be refuse. Thus human life is a vehicle for consciousness, or a vehicle for knowledge, or pleasure, etc. And if it is no longer able to support consciousness, or knowledge, or pleasure, etc. it ought to be gotten rid of. So the subjective test, in the words of Jonathan Glover, is an effort to see a person's life "from his own point of view and to see what he gets out of it." Oderberg, 155 (quoting Glover, Causing Death and Saving Lives, p. 191).

We immediately confront problems in figuring out how to mix and measure the pottage of ingredients, the vast and complex matrices, that come with life, the "plans, projects, desires, preferences, feelings, memories, sense of identity, and so on," that are part of even the most ordinary life. How do we identify what ought to be present, and in what proportion, and in what combination? Who has the right recipe of life, if there is one recipe? And if there are recipes, then who has the right recipes? Who and how measure the so-called quality of life?

The "life is worth living" advocates are remarkably flippant about these questions. Given the value at stake--human life--one would have thought that these advocates would spouse something other than "a retreat to vagueness of such massive proportions." Oderberg, 155. Have we collapsed into the realm of mere feelings, and irrationality with this test? If not, then were is the rational, principled standard? It is particularly in the hard cases, in the controversial cases, that some sort of rational, principled standard is required, and yet the advocates of such theories appear to come up empty handed.

Not only is the test horribly unprincipled and not rationally founded, it is hopelessly amorphous in terms of time. The advocates recognize that the decision must be made "over a fairly long stretch of time" so as to avoid the vulnerability to "temporary changes of mood." We ought not come to the conclusion, these advocates admit, that "life is not worth living" because we have had a bad day. The days must be bad, and must be bad for a fairly long stretch of time. But just how long? That's a question that the advocates of "life worth living" doctrines cannot answer. Moreover, how do we assess hopes for the future? Is an optimist's life worth more than a pessimist's life, than a realist's life? On what basis? The whole procedure is clearly unmanageable.

There is, however, a more fundamental question that these advocates cannot appear to answer, and which suggests that something's gone awry in their thinking of human goods, which includes human life. There would seem to be no other basic human good for which we would entertain such a subjective test. Why is there such a subjective test when it comes to the basic human good of life? And why only when the matter becomes controversial? If we were to apply the subjective analysis that these advocates apply to the basic human good of life to another basic human good, say knowledge, the foolishness of their enterprise comes to light.

Like life in general, knowledge in general is worth having. It is a basic human good. Yet we would never judge the value of knowledge based upon a "personal standpoint" or "internal perspective" of the knower. Is knowledge only worth having if the knower feels he is getting enough out of it, only if it seems worthwhile to him? So if someone feels that learning math, or history, or English grammar is a waste of time, he ought not be made to learn math, or history, or English grammar? No, we don't look at knowledge this way. And so the question naturally arises, why, then, should we look at the basic human good of life in this way? More, why should we look at the basic human good of life in this way when the question is a hard one?

Moreover, the subjective test appears to be sort of like an intellectual Deus ex machina which rescues the "life is worth living" advocate from his quandary when the question becomes controversial, difficult. No one would think of applying such a subjective standard to a man who has all the objective external signs of happiness and a flourishing life. Why, then, should this subjective test all-of-a-sudden be rushed in from stage left to solve problems when the problem becomes thorny, difficult, controversial? Is this thinking? Or is this what it appears to be: an anodyne for thinking?

Life under the Microscope: When, if Ever, is Life Not Worth Living?

HUMAN LIFE HAS ITS TRAGIC INSTANCES; at its extremes, life can appear checked at every turn from flourishing. It can be burdensome, toilsome, fraught with pain, suffering, and hopelessness. It is not difficult to encounter or to envision what the consequentialist or "preference utilitarian" Peter Singer, in his Practical Ethics, calls "lives not worth living."* Jonathan Glover, another consequentialist beau, reasons that it is not life, but "how much the person himself gets out of life," that is crucial in the moral decision-making process. Oderberg, 153 (Oderberg gives no source). Opponents to the sanctity of life seize on these instances to carve exceptions to the law of the sanctity of life. Hard cases make bad law. While that may be true, there are hard cases, and there must be law even in hard cases. Hard cases do not take us into lawlessness. But that is where these sorts of consequentialists would have us go. They do not ask what is right or what is wrong, they ask such questions as:

• Is the life in question "worth living"?
• What effect does the effect of killing the life not "worth living" have on other people
• Would the preference of these other persons be satisfied?
• Would these other persons be traumatized by the continued existence of the life not "worth living"? Would they be relieved? etc., etc.
  

This is a collapse from law to expediency, from morality into barbarity. The lawlessness into which these "life-not-worth-living" folks would take us is apparent even to them. They acknowledge that it is difficult, if not impossible, to delineate with any sort of adequate precision when a life is "worth living," and when a life is "not worth living." Yet this sort of stuff is bandied about in the halls of academia, and in the board rooms where ethics are discussed, where decisions about life and death of some of the most vulnerable and suffering of our brothers and sisters are made.

German Euthanasia Propaganda Poster**

One might point out the frighteningly parallel thinking of the Nazi moralists who, in arguing for euthanasia in the 1930s (Aktion T4), spoke about "life unworthy of life," lebensunwerten Lebens. Are the likes of Singer and Glover dogs returning to their own vomit? In the matter of moral reasoning on euthanasia, if in nothing else, are they Nazi bedfellows?

It would seem so, and they are carrying many with them. But the apparent similarity between the apologists of the Nazi Euthanasia Program and modern proponents of euthanasia is not the only reason for rejecting these folks' reasoning. Perhaps we would be accused of engaging in an ad hominem attack. So we might also show that their moral reasoning is not objective reasoning at all--though it purports to offer some objective tests to determining when life is "worth living" and morally and legally protected, and when it is not "worth living" and may be dispensed with. In fact, the whole enterprise is a collapse into subjectivism, which is cousin to arbitrariness, which is the same thing is being lawless. To get to those whose life these folks deem is not worth living, these folks have laid the laws prohibiting murder all flat.

And when the last law was down, and the hard case turned round on you,
Where would you hide, Dr. Singer, the laws all being flat?
This county's planted thick with laws from coast to coast
Man's laws, not God's--and if you cut them down--
And you're just the man to do it--
D'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?
Yes, I'd give the hard case benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.***

We will get into these folks' reasoning in a little greater depth in our next blog posting.
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*Singer would allow for the putting to death of a child with hemophilia, or even a mature handicapped, but well-adapted adult. What must be maximized in his utilitarianism the desires and preferences of people. So if the desires and preferences of one group of persons weighs greater than the preferences of a single individual, the desires and preferences of the many overcome the desire and preferences of the one, to the disadvantage of the one. So it is that the hemophiliac child or the handicapped adult can be put to death, since preference utilitarians "must allow that a desire to go on living can be outweighed by other desires."
**The poster reads "60000 RM kostet dieser Erbkranke die Volksgemeinschaft auf Lebenszeit. Volksgenosse das ist auch Dein Geld. Lesen Sie Neues Volk Die Monatshefte des Rassenpolitischen Amtes der NSDAP." Translated: "60,000 Reichsmarks is what this person suffering from hereditary defects costs the German Community during his lifetime. Fellow Citizen, that is also your money. Read Neues Volk, the monthly magazines of the Office for Race Politics of the NSDAP." [NSDAP = Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei = Nazi party]
***Compare Roger Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York: Random House, 1990), 66.