This Is Bioethics. Udo Schüklenk. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Udo Schüklenk
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Медицина
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781118770733
Скачать книгу
would lead societies adopting those views down slippery slopes toward Nazi style atrocities (Schöne‐Seifert 1991; Wright 2000).

      3.41 Walter Wright describes both the argument from analogy as well as the slippery slope argument. Singer, as you will discover in greater detail in Chapter 5 on beginning of life issues, holds a number of highly controversial views resulting in him defending as moral the killing of certain severely disabled newborns. Significantly, he used language in this context that was identical to the language used by the Nazis.

      3.43 The Nazis, of course, had other ideas when it came to euthanasia and the destruction of human lives they did not consider worth living, and their ideas were quite different from those of the German academics, and they were certainly not analogous to Singer’s views. The Nazis liked Binding and Hoche’s terminology; in fact, ‘life not worth living’ was used extensively by the Nazis and their propaganda machine. It is fair to say that the Nazis did use pretty much the same vocabulary Singer uses. However, that is where the analogy ends. Their so‐called ‘euthanasia’ program was eventually directed at people who experienced pretty much any kind of mental illness, were homosexuals, drug users, or simply homeless. What occurred was plainly and simply the murder of people who would have considered their lives very much worth living. This then isn’t analogous to the case Singer makes in his argument.

      3.44 Unsurprisingly perhaps, when Singer was invited by German academics to lecture on this topic, disability rights and other activists protested and succeeded for some time in their efforts aimed at preventing Singer from speaking at German universities. As far as these activists were concerned, Singer propagated views that were analogous to what the Nazis did (Schöne‐Seifert 1991). In reality, while Singer’s views were and are controversial, as you have seen, the Nazi analogy is flawed. It was deployed on this occasion to end any further debate on Singer’s views with regard to the morality of infanticide involving the termination of the lives of certain severely disabled newborns.

      3.45 John J. Michalczyk, a medical historian, warns that ‘those who invoke the Nazi analogy in a broad or general fashion are pressing the limits of valid analogy simply because the broader the scope of their reference, the harder it becomes to understand exactly what they think the Holocaust was, and thus why it is of moral relevance to the current issue’ (Michalczyk 1994).

      3.50 Causal slippery slope arguments are much clearer in nature. They stipulate that if you do X, Y will invariably follow. The claim here is, of course, empirical. The inevitability is what typically is in doubt. ‘For example, opponents of genetic testing and screening say that there is no way to control the slippery slope from therapeutic uses of these new techniques to eugenic ones’ (Schüklenk 2011, 47). There are several problems with these kinds of argument. For starters, we do not know whether the empirical slope that is claimed here does actually exist. Is the inevitability of what is claimed truly inevitable, let alone likely? Given the slippery slope concerns raised would it truly be beyond our capacity to regulate and legislate against such outcomes? Even if there were actions that could be described as eugenic, would they necessarily be unethical? One problem with this line of reasoning is that it often is rhetorical in nature. A label is attached to a particular outcome, typically in a question‐begging manner, with the obvious aim being to persuade us to reject both the outcome and the slippery slope event that led to it. This we are supposedly only able to achieve by rejecting a particular proposed policy or action. Last but not least, there