Why we cannot compromise
By Wesley J. Smith
Supreme Court of Canada
The other day,
I read a column in the
National Post
that made my stomach turn. It wasn’t the quality of the writing, which
was quite good, but the content. The writer celebrated a recent Canadian
Supreme Court ruling that determined lethal-injection termination is a
charter right. As a result, euthanasia will soon be bureaucratized and
normalized—made banal—in Canada:
[S]ooner or later, death will
become a civil servant. He will operate in the open, during business
hours, with a budget and a boss. His work will be humanized and
bureaucratized. Death will be licensed, regulated and empowered by law
to solve a public policy problem—the unacceptability to certain people
of certain types of dying. This marks a major shift in the meaning of
death, from ineffable human destiny to legislated human right….
This argument elevates absolute personal autonomy and the prevention
of suffering to the highest purposes of human society. That such a value
system includes eliminating the sufferer is seen not as a vice, but as a
virtue.
This positive view of euthanasia is antithetical to everything I
believe. I first described my views about medicalized killing in a 1993
Newsweek column, in reaction to the suicide of my friend Frances under
the influence of the Hemlock Society’s pro–assisted suicide literature:
It is a cause I now deeply despise. Not only did it take Frances, but
it rejects all that I hold sacred and true: that the preservation of
human life is our highest moral ideal; that a principal purpose of
government is as a protector of life; that those who fight to stay alive
in the face of terminal disease are powerful uplifters of the human
experience.
My purpose in today’s column isn’t to convince readers to adopt my
opinion. Rather, I intend to illustrate why the West is increasingly
incapable of engaging in true debate, achieving broad consensus, and
reaching compromises about our most important controversies.
A debate, it seems to me, requires a baseline commonality of
fundamental values and desired goals. Sharing a common ethical
understanding and seeking mutually compatible ends, debaters contest the
best means to attain the mutually desired goal. For example, in my
youth, there were many debates—some of them quite bitter—between
liberals and conservatives, “doves” and “hawks,” over how to win the
Cold War. But there was no fundamental disagreement about the imperative
of our prevailing over the Soviet Union.
Contrast those Cold War debates with the current discord over
euthanasia. Where is there room for debate or compromise between two
incompatible worldviews? Those arguing about euthanasia are speaking two
different moral languages.
Let me give an illustration of what I mean. Several years ago, I was
invited to an international bioethics conference as a panelist on
euthanasia. My co-panelist was a Dutch ethicist who supported his
country’s liberal legalization regimen. We sparred courteously for an
hour, and although the discussion remained cordial, we found no points
of agreement, either on means or ends.
At the end of the convention, one participant—a UN bureaucrat—told me
angrily that many people were upset because I was not willing to engage
in “conversation.” I was surprised. “I flew 6,000 miles to engage in
conversation,” I replied. “I have respectfully listened to opposing
views and been civil in presenting my own opinions.”
“But you refuse consensus,” he complained. That’s when I realized
that I hadn’t been invited to discuss and defend my viewpoint. Instead, I
was brought there to reach an agreement, to find a compromise, by
accepting “a little euthanasia” as the middle ground. But that was a
fool’s errand—for me, a little euthanasia is still euthanasia.
Give-and-take is possible when the subject is something technocratic,
like tax rates or the proper speed limit, or when the debaters agree on
ends. But for matters involving bitter differences over fundamental
values, or, to borrow a term, issues that derive from or impact “first
things”—abortion, religious liberty, sexual and gender controversies,
the death penalty, terrorism and war—“compromise” is unachievable,
because accord would require one side to surrender its moral views to
the other.
That leaves us tolerating different opinions—increasingly our default setting—rather than engaging in fruitful debate as a
true community.
But we aren’t that community anymore. This does not mean that our
estrangement will last indefinitely, but it does mean that society will
have to choose between contesting and incompatible worldviews.
As Lincoln put it so well about the slavery crisis that roiled his
time: “I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease
to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.”
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s
Center on Human Exceptionalism. His next book, Culture of Death: The Age
of “Do Harm” Medicine, which will be published in 2016/
Source: NRLC News
A
pregnant British woman is furious that a man who stabbed her nine times
in the abdomen in a frenzied three-minute attack was convicted only of
grievous bodily harm, not attempted murder. The baby of the unidentified
woman miraculous survived the assault which left the child’s mother,
who almost bled to death, with serious injuries.
Our last posts of the day are ordinarily short. This one will be no exception.
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