Wesley J. Smith has published this excellent article in the National Review:
My debate about Terri Schiavos case with Florida bioethicist Bill Allen on Court TV Online eventually got down to the nitty-gritty:Wesley Smith: Bill, do you think Terri is a person?If you want to know how it became acceptable to remove tube-supplied food and water from people with profound cognitive disabilities, this exchange brings you to the nub of the Schiavo case the first principle, if you will. Bluntly stated, most bioethicists do not believe that membership in the human species accords any of us intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether "a being" or "an organism," or even a machine, is a "person," a status achieved by having sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who dont measure up are denigrated as "non-persons."Bill Allen: No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does.
Allens perspective is in fact relatively conservative within the mainstream bioethics movement. He is apparently willing to accept that "minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood" although he doesnt say that awareness is determinative. Most of his colleagues are not so reticent. To them, it isnt sentience per se that matters but rather demonstrable rationality. Thus Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as "a creature capable of valuing its own existence." Other bioethicists argue that the basic threshold of personhood should include the capacity to experience desire. James Hughes, who is more explicitly radical than many bioethicists (or perhaps, just more candid), has gone so far as to assert that people like Terri are "sentient property."Indeed, the dignity of human beings is intrinsic to the kind of entity we are and does not depend on attributes like size, skin color, age, or mental capability.So who are the so-called human non-persons? All embryos and fetuses, to be sure. But many bioethicists also categorize newborn infants as human non-persons (although some bioethicists refer to healthy newborns as potential persons). So too are those with profound cognitive impairments such as Terri Schiavo and President Ronald Reagan during the latter stages of his Alzheimers disease.
[snip read it all]
Know this: There is a direct line from the Terri Schiavo dehydration to the potential for this stunning human strip-mining scenarios becoming a reality. Indeed, as Arnold and Youngner put it so well, If a look into such a future hurts our eyes (or turns our stomachs), is our discomfort any different from what we would have experienced 30 years ago by looking into the future that is today?
Cross-posted at BlogsforTerri
