Category: Ethics

An expert on palliative care recommends that Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide laws not be taken as a model for any practice in the UK. In sum: (1) Patients with suicidal thoughts need evaluation and treatment for depression. (2) Palliative services are more freely available in the UK than in Oregon. (3) The reasons death advocates present in favor of PAS laws are not the reasons why real patients actually kill themselves using PAS:

It is also commonly assumed that patients who carry out PAS must be suffering terrible pain.
However, the patients who use PAS in Oregon are generally not in pain, but wish to use PAS simply so that they can control the timing of their death.
The report found the major concerns of those undertaking PAS were loss of autonomy, being less able to take part in activities they enjoyed and loss of dignity (86%).[…]
Oregon physicians describe patients requesting PAS as having strong personalities, characterised by determination and inflexibility.[…]
The question here is not one of the patient’s right to commit suicide, but whether this small group of people who have an exaggerated need for control have any right to demand the involvement of doctors, nurses and pharmacists in their suicide.

An atheist writer is fed up with eco-correct clergymen and the New Atheists, who agree on one thing: that man is just another animal among the animals. I wonder whether he’s seen Pope Benedict’s words from the World Peace Day address:

7. The family needs a home, a fit environment in which to develop its proper relationships. For the human family, this home is the earth, the environment that God the Creator has given us to inhabit with creativity and responsibility. We need to care for the environment: it has been entrusted to men and women to be protected and cultivated with responsible freedom, with the good of all as a constant guiding criterion. Human beings, obviously, are of supreme worth vis-à-vis creation as a whole. Respecting the environment does not mean considering material or animal nature more important than man. Rather, it means not selfishly considering nature to be at the complete disposal of our own interests, for future generations also have the right to reap its benefits and to exhibit towards nature the same responsible freedom that we claim for ourselves.

(emphasis added)
Now that’s a statement: not only is man in first place among the critters, he’s of “supreme worth vis-a-vis creation as a whole.”

In more than one case, the population-controllers have been imposing vaccines on poor countries that cause infertility. (ALL has info on UNICEF/WHO programs exposed in 1995 and 2004.)
Now Merck’s HPV vaccine distributed in the US turns out to contain two troublesome chemicals: a roach poison and a chemical associated with infertility in rats.

Sure, let’s posit that Keivin Cohen wanted to have children; he wanted to be a father. That doesn’t necessarily mean he wanted to be a sperm donor after his death.

Mark Shea is accusing Michael Ledeen of National Review Online of encouraging “murder.” As many commenters point out, this is a complete misreading of Ledeen’s words. Essentially, Ledeen is agreeing with a Ralph Peters article, which argues that terrorist thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq should be killed in almost all circumstances.
On Catholic Light, I’ve consistently argued for this position, more or less. There is nothing wrong, legally or morally, with killing illegal combatants. There should be a just mechanism for determining whether they are illegal combatants, if there is a doubt in particular cases. But they should be killed to deter others, and because justice demands it.
Morally, there is nothing wrong with killing terrorists who wield lethal force with the intent to overthrow a legtimate state. The reservations expressed about the death penalty in the Catechism are not really applicable outside the West and other settled, civilized countries. In Iraq and Afghanistan, truly there are no alternatives to killing those who would destroy any possibility of a just society.
Legally, there is absolutely no reason to respect anything other than the basic human rights of terrorists. That includes treating these thugs like adults, i.e., rational human beings capable of choosing their vocation of murder and mayhem. The Geneva Conventions have never been construed to include people who blow up marketplaces, mosques, and commuter buses. Yet we see the spectacle of well-educated, seemingly reasonable people arguing that terrorists should be treated like forger apprehended by the FBI.
The people arguing this, almost exclusively, are members of the New Class — they will not enter military service themselves, nor will their children, nor will hardly any of their relatives. Terrorists in the Middle East and Central Asia will not threaten their upscale lives. Their sentiments are the secular equivalent of “cheap grace” — it costs them nothing to shed tears over the fates of detainees, but it gives them that frisson of moral superiority they crave.
Yet Mark Shea is not a member of the New Class. I’ve given up trying to analyze his motivations when he uncorks a bottle of fresh malice and pours it out on his blog. You all are welcome to speculate as you wish. I do think it’s ironic that Shea is fond of hurling wild accusations of malefaction while misrepresenting what other people say.