In the Star Trek episode The Conscience of the King, Capt. James T. Kirk meets a fellow survivor of the Earth colony, Tarsus IV. A fungus attacked the food supply of that planet. The governor of the colony declared martial law and he separated the 8000 colonists into two groups: those who would live and those who would put to death. Four thousand colonists were killed. The governor came to be known as Kodos the Executioner.
The survivor, who has lost half his face as a remembrance of that dark time twenty years earlier, has recognized the voice of Kodos in Anton Karidian, a Shakespearean actor. The episode is about a search for justice, as Kirk attempts to prove that Karidian is Kodos.
Yes, it is a fictional tale and a morality play. The episode clearly intended to invoke the shade of the Holocaust during World War II. When the episode aired, it was a time when the lines between good and evil were sharper and more distinct. It was obvious that whatever excuse Kodos could use, it would fail to justify the horrendous action taken.
Kodos did offer that excuse, "Kodos made a decision of life and death. Some had to die that others might live." But twenty years earlier he was more verbose:
"The revolution is successful, but survival depends on drastic measures. Your continued existence represents a threat to the well-being of society. Your lives means slow death to the more valued members of the colony. Therefore I have no alternative but to sentence you to death. Your execution is so ordered. Signed, Kodos, governor of Tarsus 4."
The lines were clearer in 1966 when the episode aired, but I have my doubts about 40 years later. "Some had to die that others might live" has a seductive raw utilitarian logic to it. It's not hard for me to imagine that quite a few would take up Kodos's banner.
Yesterday I wrote of the Right to Privacy and compared suicide with abortion: "For example, a mother's right to her body gives her the right to destroy the living human being in her womb. A natural extension of this privacy right would be -- and this holds true as far as I've observed -- the right to kill oneself." I also posted a variant of this essay at Right Minds Forum. I had a hunch about a member's views there, and it turns out that I guessed correctly. That member supports a woman's right to an abortion in limited circumstances, but believes that suicide is sinful.
Without addressing the apparent contradiction between the two views, that member of Right Minds detailed a case in Florida about a severely mentally retard woman who is a ward of the state. Additionally, she is pregnant and allegedly the pregnancy will be difficult, possibly life threatening. The challenge is made: choose!
I may appear to be contradictory here, but that choice is Hobson's choice. The very idea that I must choose is Hobsonian; the avenue of not choosing is closed.
The whole of the abortion debate -- as the pro-choice side seeks to leverage the pro-life side -- centers about the hard cases. It's been largely successful. The common exceptions to the pro-life position are abortions in the cases of rape or incest or in the case of the mother's health. Yet, the raison d'être of the pro-life position is to protect the life of the unborn. Once exceptions are made, the full effect of the pro-life position is lost. Do you really mean to protect the unborn when you make exceptions? Pro-life with exceptions is a subjective position.
It's easy enough to address the cases of incest or rape. They are common enough, and can be found easily on the Internet. While all may regret the victimization created by the first event (the incest or rape), we cannot allow a second victim, the unborn child, to suffer the loss of his or her life.
The exception for a mother's health is more difficult to deal with.
If I must choose between mother and child, then I should ask which value system is to be used in making that choice. We've disregarded the traditional Christian position of pro-life, and it seems disingenuous to depend on it for other values. Perhaps a utilitarian value system would suffice: a severely mentally retarded person is of dubious value to society and it is a definite drain to society's resources; perhaps we should take a chance on the child. I doubt that Planned Parenthood or NOW would enjoy this line of reasoning, but they've no defense against it. Lucky for them, pro-lifers don't use it, but that won't stop someone else from using it. The day will come.
Or I might decide that the Christian Tradition is flawed in only this case -- a dubious proposition, it calls the entire Tradition into re-evaluation -- and if I make an exception, then perhaps I can call up a more compassionate example than the previous paragraph. Although killing is considered morally wrong, killing in self-defense is acceptable. Appealing to self-defense is seductive, I admit, but it is flawed. It presumes the unborn child is an attacker and it presumes that the attack is likely to be successful.
And here's the salient point. It pits mother against child as much as it pits four thousand against four thousand on Tarsus IV. It's easy to miss the subtle point I'm making here and I rely on Evangelium Vitae cover the nuance:
There is an even more profound aspect which needs to be emphasized: freedom negates and destroys itself, and becomes a factor leading to the destruction of others, when it no longer recognizes and respects its essential link with the truth. When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds. Each one wishes to assert himself independently of the other and in fact intends to make his own interests prevail. Still, in the face of other people's analogous interests, some kind of compromise must be found, if one wants a society in which the maximum possible freedom is guaranteed to each individual. In this way, any reference to common values and to a truth absolutely binding on everyone is lost, and social life ventures on to the shifting sands of complete relativism. At that point, everything is negotiable, everything is open to bargaining: even the first of the fundamental rights, the right to life.
Thus brother is pitted against brother. Much as the poor are pitted against rich, the stronger (the mother) is pitted against the weaker (the unborn). It is three wolves and a lamb voting on what's for lunch. It is might makes right. And it appears after all, that the excuse of "self-defense" is really a utilitarian argument (a wolf in sheep's clothing). "Some had to die that others might live."
The social bonds disappear once the weak become legitimate targets. The compact is broken. Democracy becomes a mob, and gives way to authoritarianism.
The answer to the challenge is that the choice cannot be made. I am not willing to set myself up as Governor Kodos and decide who must live and who must die. No one can -- no matter what subjective value system one decides to use.
It is better to decide that both must live and direct societal and medical efforts to that end.
Posted by Bob at May 22, 2003 07:12 PM