Tea at Trianon: Learning From Charlie Gard

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Learning From Charlie Gard

From First Things:

Those who held power over Charlie decided that his life was not worth living. They reached this judgment on the basis of his expected mental disability. They denied him treatment, and ordered his ventilator removed, not because of the burden of the treatment, but because of the burden of his life. In a cruel act proposed by doctors, approved by courts, cheered by the press, and blessed by certain high clerics, Charlie Gard was euthanized. It was euthanasia by omission, but it was euthanasia all the same.

This fact was not lost on Julian Savulescu, the Oxford ethicist and student of Peter Singer, who asked: If Charlie’s life is not worth living, why shouldn’t we directly kill him? The answer is uncomfortable for those who supported the UK decision. There is no moral difference between aiming at the deaths of infants like Charlie by omission and aiming at their deaths by direct action. No logical barrier prevents those who supported the UK’s decision from endorsing outright infanticide. This is precisely what many supporters of the direct killing of infants argued in an “infanticide symposium” published by the Journal of Medical Ethics in 2013.

How we come to view Charlie Gard’s case has direct import for how we will view the direct killing of infants, an ancient and barbaric practice that has been reintroduced in the Netherlands in deceptively civilized guise as the “Groningen protocol.” This protocol allows the killing of infants of less than one year of age; the victims are very often disabled. (Read more.)