The Wrong Questions

Posted by J. Mark Bertrand
on Tuesday, March 29, 2005
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If some governing body of evangelicalism had the power to award knighthoods, Ken Myers would spend a good portion of his time on his knees being struck by the flat of a sword. It's hard to imagine anyone who has done more to promote the life of the evangelical mind than Myers. Case in point: his round-up of opinion titled "Terri Schiavo and our Moral Confusion." I haven't written about this topic before, mainly because others have covered the network of "issues" -- right to life, right to death, rule of law, federalism and more besides -- so well. There is nothing more I can add. In addition, I have a feeling that there are layers to this thing and that a lot of work needs to be done pulling apart the rhetoric and seeing it for what it is. My frustration -- and I'll admit, moral confusion -- over the whole thing stems from the fact that, often enough, as I listen to the various cases being made, I have a feeling that the wrong questions are asked. Myers links to an article by Eric Cohen that confirms this feeling: "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo." Myers' summary goes to the heart of the matter:

Cohen is unhappy with the liberal idea that volition is the defining characteristic of the human: "[T]he real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are."

Cohen observes that liberalism's celebration of liberty as autonomy, as independence, distorts the meaning of the human and establishes "a set of assumptions about what makes life worth living and thus worth protecting" according to which we regard "incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living."

The interesting thing about this is that I've been lectured by far more Christians than unbelievers about the glories of free will and how all meaning evaporates in its absence. They are convinced that this is a biblical, not a modern liberal, convention. Approaching the issue through Cohen's lens, I would expect them to be more sympathetic than they are to Michael Schiavo's case. Perhaps this dilemma, in addition to sparking an upsurge of living wills, might also prompt some second thoughts about basing our concept of what it means to be human so firmly on the soil of autonomy. Wherever you find yourself in this morass, I encourage you to read both Myers' overview and Cohen's article for some much-needed perspective.

UPDATE: Interestingly enough, Christopher Hitchens, whose praises I have sometimes sung (granting him "most favored unbeliever" status), articulates the other side of the case for Slate in a way that seems tailor-made to facilitate Cohen's argument, refering to Terri Schiavo as "this now non-human entity" and pointing out that "the rest of us also have lives to live."