And here is the guy who was sooooo offended because susnfx wondered why Republicans all seem so afraid; on the grounds that it was an impermissible generalization.
Jim: Although I most often disagree with your side of a discussion, I have always respected the majority of them for there well-reasoned thought, as it allows me to look at a different perspective.
Not that you care what I think, but your post here was a cheap shot. Talk about scare tactics. It saddens me to see you go down this road. The C&F community as a whole has lost out.
All the Best, Tom
The principle is called the principle of charity. It is now pretty widely accepted that explicable falsehood is to be preferred in interpretation to inexplicable truth but since I’m not claiming that for you to utter a truth would be inexplicable I simply remind you of this point. I suggest you drop the misleading way of expressing your claim so there is no room for misinterpretation.
You have just ‘supported’ a slippery slope argument with two further slippery slope arguments. The slopey fears of your mates are not evidence for your slippery slope arguments; they are not evidence for anything.
The claim that the Nazis slid into genocide from euthanasia, even non-voluntary euthanasia, is prepostrous and surely you know this by now. None of the early killings by Nazis in hospitals and asylums was done for the benefit of the patient or to alleviate suffering, it was done for the good of the Volk. None of it was voluntary. There is a double irony here. First, the defenders of life simply haven’t done their homework on genocide. Second, all these years after the holocaust, the Nazis are still getting away with using the term ‘euthanasia’ as a euphemism for what was always genocide; the Nazi spin doctors have the last grim laugh. Don’t take my word for it, read Robert J. Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors where you’ll find lots of hard evidence on the casues of genocide but no slippery-slope arguments.
I’m not really in a position to comment on the claims that follow since they seem largely anecdotal other than to say that I don’t see mention of a mechanism which would take us from voluntary euthanasia to murder without our gratuitously importing a presumption of malevolence that you provide no evidence for. If that malevolence is really there then I would be worrried whether or not voluntary euthanasia were legalised.
I made it clear that I don’t think killing Downs cases at any point in their life, simply because they have Downs, would count as euthanasia.
I agree that this thread took an unfortunate turn. I do think, however, that the only sensible place to complain about it is here. I’ve done my complaining.
I would like to request that this discussion take a break from sweeping generalizations and theoretical, slippery slope arguments and focus on something a bit more specific.
Jim, as far as I can see, you’ve never addressed one of Dale’s main objections.
Please post credible documentation of exactly how many Down’s syndrome infants have been starved in American hospitals. Until you do that in a believable way, I have to look at what you’re saying as nothing more than urban legend and unsubstantiated fear- and hate-mongering. I don’t rule out the possibility that things are as bad as you say, but you do your arguments an injustice by not providing the factual basis to make them believable.
You’ve done this before. There have been several instances where you confidently posted statements presented as established fact, but which then turned out to be completely invented and untrue.
As someone with academic credentials, which you invoke from time to time to indicate that your statements and methods of argument should be taken especially seriously, and as one who affects a highly sophisticated argumentative style, your postings carry an aura of authority. I let my guard down again and again, then rediscover that I can’t depend on your information being factually correct.
As I’ve said before, I would like to be able to take you seriously, but you’ve lost considerable credibility in these discussions, at least as far as I’m concerned, by being less than conscientious with your facts.
Again, I’m asking you to convince me, and I’m quite willing to be convinced. As I said earlier in this thread, you’re shooting yourself in the foot again and again by posting in ways that cause you to lose credibility and to lose the sympathy of the very people you should want to draw to your side.
This raises a question about your true motives in such discussions. It doesn’t appear that you are serious about really wishing to change people’s minds, since you address your audiences in ways that tend to alienate them, and you do this repeatedly. It appears plausible that you savor the argument for argument’s sake, and you savor the idea that there are all these horrible people out here who are hopelessly attached to their horribly unenlightened ideas. This is the only way I can make sense of fact that you formulate your arguments so that the people you purport to be trying to convince are actually driven away.
Best wishes,
Jerry
Thank you, Wombat, for this. Just to remind us, here is “reading an argument charitably” Jim-Stone style (this is from the Political thread, around pages 257-259). The first quote is for context.
This is where it ended up:
True that Jim doesn’t tire of recomending his principle of charity, but he doesn’t operate by it. And did you notice the “I would be cautious … about qualifying my generalizations, on grounds of fairness and civility” part?
Sorry, gang, I can’t keep up with you all. Here is my response to
Dale’s post. I’ll probably
leave it at that and retreat to the political thread, as people
are suggesting; too many
cavalry in these woods for a solitary Indian. Dale begins:
I preface by saying that I regard jim stone as a friend and I respect his views more often than not.
jim stone wrote:
This is one of the reasons I (and, I daresay, George Will) are Republicans.
Whereupon this thread was hijacked.
From Jim: Hijacking is in the eye of the beholder, Dale. George Will was active in the Baby Doe controversy. It was said at the time that his love for his Down Syndrome son motivated him to defend Reagan’s effort to protect children like Jon. The piece you quoted reminded me of all this, it was a controversy in which I was publicly involved, too, and I think of it often, especially because of my efforts to protect my brain-damaged sister. So there was a real connection in my mind, anyhow, between the piece you posted about Jon and the Baby Doe cases, which in turn had to do with my becoming a Republican. So I don’t see this as a hijacking, personally; the issue was raised inadvertently and I do appreciate that
some folks may not want to talk about it. But I do.
Quote:
In the early 80s, Down Syndrome newborns, like Jon, were being starved to death in American hospitals.
I worked in hospitals from 1981 through 1997. Apart from one often-cited case in Bloomington, Indiana, I never heard of this practice. In any case, the language here suggests a widespread practice and I’d like to see evidence. I just did a google search and everything I’ve found so far refers back to that single case in Indiana.
From Jim: I don’t know how widespread it was, but it went far beyond the Bloomington case. ‘Conservative treatment’ was becoming standard practice at the Yale New-Haven teaching hospital. I saw another documentary about a Down’s child being starved to death in New York state; took two weeks to die. There were other handicapped children involved, a spina bifada child in CA whose parents refused the routine surgery to close the lesion in the spine, inviting a lethal infection. Here’s what George Will himself said about the attitude when Jon was born: “The fact that Jon is striding into a productive adulthood with a spring in his step and Baltimore’s Orioles on his mind is a consummation that could not have been confidently predicted when he was born. Then a doctor told his parents that their first decision must be whether or not to take Jon home.”
What do you think, Dale, happened to the children who didn’t go home?
Here’s a quotation from Anthony Shaw, "Doctor, Do we have a choice?’ The New York Times Magazine, Jan. 30 1972, p. 54. Note that this is about the time that Jon was born, a decade before
the Baby Doe cases gained noteriety. Shaw describes Down’s syndrome kids born with intestinal blockage. Sometimes the parents and the doctor will decide not to operate and ‘let the infant die.’
“When surgery is denied…natural forces sap the baby’s life away. …It is easy at a conference, in a theoretical discussion, to decide that such infants should be allowed to die. It is altogether different to stand by in the nursery and watch as dehydration and infection wither a tiny being over hours and days. This is a terrible ordeal for me and the hospital staff–much more for the parents who never set foot in the nursery.”
My heart goes out for this unfortunate man, whose heart bleeds at his suffering at watching the baby starve to death but never seems to ask the obvious humane question: What about the baby?
Note the description of infanticide by starvation as merely ‘allowing the baby to die.’ So here we have, in 1972, a decade before the Baby Doe controversy, a physician publicly acknowledging the practice of starving these kids to death. It was there all along, Dale, and it was increasing in the early 80s and becoming an emerging medical practice.
Against this background philosophers and bioethicists were arguing vigorously that no infant has a moral right to life. Michael Tooley, Peter Singer, Joel Feinberg, Mary Anne Warren maintained this, among others. (Some sources on that controversy are Jim Stone “An Exchange on Baby Doe,” The New York Review of Books (June 14, 1984), 48-49. (with Peter Singer, Helga Khuse) and Jim Stone"An Exchange on the Morality of Abortion," The New York Review of Books (February 13, 1986), 43-44. (Jonathan Glover); Glover was arguing for the permissibility of abortion on the ground that newborns lack a right to life.
Infanticide of handicapped newborns, Dale, was an idea whose time was about to come.
Quote:
Of course it was plain where this was going: it threatened the wide scale killing of the handicapped, and it was unlikely to stop with newborns once it got rolling.
This implication that non-pro-lifers would advocate the “wide scale killing of the handicapped” is, respectfully, bullshit. And “unlikely to stop with newborns once it got rolling” is the worse kind of inflammatory slipperly slope argument.
From Jim: Concerning your first sentence here, James Rachels writes: ‘Or, if one thinks it better that such a baby should not live on, what difference does it make if it happens to have an unobstructed intestinal tract? In either case, the matter of life and death is being decided on irrelevant grounds. It is the Downs’s syndrome, not the intestines, that is the issue. The matter should be decided…on that basis, and not be allowed to depend on the essentially irrelevant question of whether the intestinal tract is blocked.’ (Active and Passive Euthanasia’ 1975, please note the year.) Rachels point in this widely collected and influential article is that the real reason we are starving the child to death is that he’s handicapped, so THAT should be the ground for the decision. It doesn’t matter if he has intestinal blockage. What matters is his being retarded, that’s why we’re ‘euthanizing’ him. And, Rachel maintains, it’s madness and cruelty to withhold the lethal injection in such cases. In short,
what flows from this is a parental option for the lethal injection for all handicapped children BECAUSE they are handicapped. This was argued for too by Peter Singer, and, in the exchange I had with him in the NYRBs,
others chimed in about the humanity of the lethal injection rather than starvation. Once you get these two pieces in place, given the economics and the long history of violence against handicapped newborns, the widespread killing of handicapped newborns becomes a very real possibility, as has certainly happened in the past. I’m surprised that you do not see the danger, Dale. I made no claim that ‘non-prolifers would advocate the widespread killing of the handicapped,’ surely many would not, though some did; the claim was that the threat it would happen to them was real.
As to the alleged ‘inflammatory slippery slope argument’ that the killing would not stop with newborns, I promise, Dale, that if you are dealing with a severely disabled person who cannot speak effectively for herself, the fear that it would not stop with the handicapped newborns was well-founded. It is very hard to keep my sister alive as is. She has been repeatedly no-coded against her wishes, when she was neither sick nor dying. Dale, these people are already in serious peril; they consume medical resources and give nothing back. They are unsightly, surely they are better off dead! You just add widespread ‘euthanasia’ of the handicapped newborns and see what happens to Azlheimers patients (there will be quite a lot of them soon, how shall we afford them?), to the demented, to people like my sister who cannot speak for herself. My sister’s daughter recently took over her care and immediately no-coded her without consulting her; Michele is neither sick nor dying nor old nor unhappy, and she has always wanted to stay alive. She just wasn’t asked. Do you seriously believe that active euthanasia exercised by a proxy, once it has become an option for handicapped newborns, won’t become an option for many more handicapped people, like Michele? After all, it isn’t as though well-meant measures like these haven’t jumped the tracks in the past! As a proxy can now, without evidence that it is her wish, starve to death a comatose patient who isn’t suffering or dying, on the ground that it is in her ‘best interest,’ as it’s plain that the lethal injection will be deployed in this case too once it’s used on newborns, and as constraints like the patient’s suffering or being terminal or giving consent thereby vanish immediately, the risks are palpable that economics will drive this pracitce to all sorts of ‘useless eaters, with insufficient quality of life, whose treatment we can ill afford.’
Quote:
(though of course there were occasional
murmurs that Jon et al are better off dead). One might as well call the typical abortion ‘euthanasia.’
I have heard extremists on the right occasionally murmur all kind of crazy nonsense. Stuff that jim stone would find total nonsense. That really shouldn’t be used to attack conservatives as a group.
From Jim: In fariness, I did not attack liberals as a group. The point Dale was that starving these kids to death was widely described as ‘euthanasia’ when it plainly wasn’t that at all. So, for example, James Rachels describes the starving to death of these children as ‘passive euthanasia.’ It was, of course, not that but infanticide. A great deal was said in the media bout how this was in the kids’ interests, how they were horribly suffering, so ‘allowing them to die’ was good for them. This was, in fact, sometimes used by the proponents of a parental right to liquidate handicapped newborns: sugar-coated infanticide.
Quote:
For now. The ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ agenda on social issues, while often motivated by compassion, can be dangerous. There are medically and socially vulnerable populations
clustered at the beginning and the end of life, with the handicapped all the way through it, who are perpetually at risk. I’ve seen close up for decades what it takes to keep a severely handicapped family member alive; it tends to make one a social conservative.
I confess I don’t even know what you are talking about. But here we are connecting infanticide to the “liberal” or “progressive” agenda. You’re painting with a brush about 2000 miles broad. As a moderate liberal who is right of center on right-to-life issues, I resent this.
From Jim: Your resentment is misguided. I’ve said this earlier. Let me repeat it for your benefit.
Many so-called ‘liberal’ social views, while compassionate, are risky to vulnerable populations clustered at the beginning and the end of life and the disabled all the way through it.
So it has been widely said, including by the AMA, that legal euthanasia might well endanger the disabled, Alzheimer’s patients, many people in nursing homes. I’ve quoted earlier in my response to Wombat some concerns from physicians, which are pretty mainstream. Concerning physician assisted suicide, another ‘progressive’ agenda, if we have it, every one will have a right to suicide but nobody will have a right to medical care. So for many, suicide will be the only choice they can afford. Further many requests will come from people who are clinically depressed, or who are in treatable pain, or who feel guilty about being a burden to their families. The idea that physicians will take the trouble to get to the bottom of these issues is unrealistic; for, among other things, many of these requests will come from nursing homes where a single physician will have hundreds of patients whom he barely knows and frankly cares less about. Indeed, it may become expected of the old and the disabled to ask to be put down, so as not to be a social and financial burden, which would be a moral tragedy. Also, as I observed earlier in this thread, the right to suicide will soon be followed by the right to be euthanized for those who are too sick or disabled to kill themselves. And that will be soon
exercised by proxy, along the lines I detailed earlier. One of the concerns about universal health care, Dale, has been that expenses are going to rise far faster than politicians predict, costs will be cut, and ‘cutting’ these vulnerable populations I mentioned will be, along some of the lines I’ve mentioned, a chief way of cutting costs. These are, once again, risks, not certainties, but one is hardly encouraged by a response that attacks the messenger. As mentioned above, there are items in the so-called ‘liberal’ agenda that I support, too.
If, Dale, you are truly a moderate liberal who is right of center on right-to-life issues, I hope not to meet the paradigm pro-choicer. I’m afraid that, when it comes to the crunch, you are that individual. I have in the past presented what I found the strongest arguments against your view, especially on abortion, and came away saddened because it seemed you simply hadn’t engaged them. I would be glad to send them to you again. I know that I cannot live that way myself.
Thanks for the conversation, everybody, Jim
Jim,
You’ve begun to answer the questions raised. Please continue.
I’m not so interested in all these long quotes from people you consider authoritative. I don’t know who they are or what axes they grind, so I’m not in a position to evaluate the usefulness of their remarks. Your heavy reliance on such quotations makes your arguments more difficult, rather than easier, to follow.
Again, please provide facts.
I get the impression from your addition of some more concrete information that there were some practices in the '70’s and '80’s that needed to be stopped. I would now like to know the outcome of the campaign against them. Is the starvation of Down’s infants still happening? You keep harping on your slippery slope arguments, but I don’t see a slippery slope at all. What I see is something that began to happen and needed to be stopped, and what I see, as far as I can tell from your comments, is that it was stopped.
I have to stand by my statements that your approach to these discussions tends to alienate the people you logically would want to bring to your side. I question whether you’re doing yourself any good at all in the way you’re going about this, and I continue to wonder what you’re really trying to accomplish.
Best wishes,
Jerry
No, please, take it to Political.
M
I’ve a story to tell of a family advocating for their child with Down syndrome, but I don’t have the time this morning to do it justice. I, too, would like to see the discussion of topics beyond Dale’s initial post head off to the Political thread at this point. It’s difficult to stomach a mix of heart-warming tales alongside political stuff.
I’ll check in later, and, if you’re all behaving yourselves, I’ll chime in with my tale. How’s that for a threat? 
Behave yourselves 
Jef
Fair enough.
I would, however, appreciate some more thorough answers. It’s too easy for Jim to stir up a hornets’ nest and then dismiss all remaining discussion on the grounds that he’s being driven away by people who don’t appreciate what he has to say.
Jim, please do continue. I really do want more information about this stuff, and I’m open to whatever facts you can provide. The political thread would be the place.
Best wishes,
Jerry
I had a neat experience with a family this year. They have two kids who were about to begin middle school in September, and a younger daughter, “Annie,” who was to start kindergarten. Although they’d been through the public system thus far, they were wanting to enroll the entire clan into a private religious school. This is a great school, and although they have some learning assistance and ESL help available to kids who need it, they have a very limited budget in this regard.
The parents have thus far followed Annie’s progress with typical parental zeal and pride. Her preschool experiences confirm that she is ready and eager to begin kindergarten, and in her particular case, her success is contingent on her receiving extra assistance due to the fact that she has Down syndrome. Annie will need a full-time Teacher’s Aide in the classroom to ensure that she makes the best educational progress. When the family applied to attend the school, they were told that Annie likely wouldn’t be permitted to attend because the school cannot afford the thirteen years of (potentially) full-time TA support that she’ll need. The decision was to be reviewed and finalized by the school’s board, and a spot would be held for her, but the family was told that the chances of getting her in were slim. It wasn’t an educational concern, they said, but a fiscal one.
And here, with their daughter’s future in mind, is where the parents went into overdrive. They prepared an A/V display about their daughter so that the board members would see her as a person, not a name on a sheet of paper. They enlisted the help of teachers (myself included) who had worked with such kids to write letters to the board explaining the merits of including them in the classroom. I met with a board member to pursue budgeting options. Every year the school runs a fundraiser for special projects, be it the need for a new computer lab, new instruments, PE equipment, or textbooks. Why not make the need for additional student support a fundraising goal? The school’s budget committee, which deals with specially targeted donations from time to time, was asked if there might be anyone who’d expressed an interest in helping out in such an area. Maybe, if the right person was tapped on the shoulder, some additional cash might pop up?
Well, to make a long story longer, the board agreed that Annie’s presence would be desirable, and that it was worth taking some special measures to find a way to fund her attendance. If, over the summer, the funding could be lined up, it would happen. Two donors, anonymous to all of us, made long-term commitments to fund a significant portion of the TA time. The school put aside a bit of cash to help with it, too. Another chunk of the money is to come from the yearly fundraising drive. Finally, the family’s church members got together and decided to top up their yearly support of the school with the final portion. As a result, the week before school was to start, the family got word that the final space in September’s kindergarten classroom had Annie’s name on it.
Tears of joy? You better believe it. And today, in that bustling little kindergarten classroom, there’s one beaming gem of a kid who is getting a great education. She’s not the only one being educated.
Jef
Thanks, Jef! That’s the kind of story that should be in this thread!
M
I agree it’s a swell story, Marguerite; still, I don’t think that closely-related stories about threats to the lives of the children involved are inappropriate
or that either of us gets to be the arbiter of what stories are the right
kind for this or that thread. I’ve defered to you out of personal
courtesy. Best
Doesn’t strike me as particularly courteous if you have to point it out like that. (And “swell story” either sounds like your dating yourself or you’re being flip.)
I am touched by these stories, both by Will and by Jeferson and the others. When I was a young teenagers, I spent a week in England at an international youth festival. There was an English couple there, helping with the organization. They had a down-syndrom child. He was always around. He was very very particular about his dress (always wearing a tie). He couldn’t speak much, but understood well enough to particpate in all activities and meals. When there was music He would run and dance by himself. By the end of the week, he meant a lot to all of us, even the ones who were in the throes of a teenage need to be cooler than cool (*cough).
What impressed me most, and what I remember most vividly is his mother and father getting up at the end of the week, at the last big assembly avent and speaking about their experience with their son. It was the most amazing and touching account of how they had not only managed to get by when they thought they would never, but a long list of all the incredible and beautiful things that had happened in this family’s life on account of their child’s birth. They did speak about the people they met, the beautiful things they saw that they would never have otherwise and so forth. Most impressively, however, they spoke about how their sense of life and living had changed and how in everyday life they now had an immediate sense of meaning and divine blessing. All the while they spoke, he was danceing up and down in the back of the dark church (St Albans), and I remember glancing back at him as if he was understanding it all very well and somehow not letting on to what was really happing in his life, their lives, and all of ours.
Years later I went and worked with handicapped children, all cases much more sever than down syndrom children. It shapes your outlook and awareness to be around handicapped and special needs children and adults, and I think it is wonderful that the school in Jefersons story thought to include them. It’s good that children should be around them, and grown-ups too for that matter.
Now that the circus has left town, this seems like a good place and time to mention a wonderful TV documentary I saw last night.
The subject was not a Downs case but a young 13-year-old girl suffering a relapse of acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. You get to see her struggle through the eyes of her mother, the medical and nursing staff and to some extent, Chloe’s own eyes, although I cannot even imagine what it would be like to suffer as she did. The reviewer in my TV guide describes this program as ‘convincing, confronting and compelling’ and as ‘the most demanding program I have ever watched on television or film.’ This is not hyperbole; I have never seen a program more moving or gripping. I’m not going to tell you the story; fully to appreciate this program you need to ride the rollercoasters with Chloe, her mother and her medical team.
The program is called Stories From a Children’s Hospital—Chloe. I suppose it is the first in a series, but even if all the others proved worthless this gem would warrant whatever effort it takes to get hold of it. I can’t believe that a documentary this good will not find its way to screens everywhere, but I have no idea whether quality product like this consistently makes it to free-to-air in the US, Britain or elsewhere these days. It is Australian-made by the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). My guess is that it will be available soon on DVD from ABC shops but that it won’t be available yet as this is its first showing in Australia. If anybody is interested, I’ll keep you posted and also report on whether the series maintains this standard.