- Feb 5, 2002
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UK lawmakers recently approved assisted suicide for those suffering with a terminal illness and given only six months to live. In considering medically assisted killing, O. Carter Snead provides valuable insight in his award-winning book What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics.
What does it mean to be human? Snead rejects views that fail to adequately appreciate embodied human existence. René Descartes reduced each of us to “a thinking thing.” John Locke thought of a person as “a thinking intelligent Being.” Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism gives rise to expressive individualism in which I am who I am choosing to be. In all such views, the “real me” is not a flesh-and-blood embodied individual. Rather, I am reduced to a rational mind and an autonomous will.
But, in fact, human beings are embodied, vulnerable, and interconnected. We cannot be reduced to our activity of reasoning or of choosing. As a newborn, I existed before I had rational thoughts. If I become cognitively impaired, I will continue to exist, albeit injured and temporarily or permanently unable to think. A single blood clot or a microscopic virus can force the strongest human being in the world to the door of death. We are embodied, so we are all vulnerable.
Continued below.
www.wordonfire.org
What does it mean to be human? Snead rejects views that fail to adequately appreciate embodied human existence. René Descartes reduced each of us to “a thinking thing.” John Locke thought of a person as “a thinking intelligent Being.” Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism gives rise to expressive individualism in which I am who I am choosing to be. In all such views, the “real me” is not a flesh-and-blood embodied individual. Rather, I am reduced to a rational mind and an autonomous will.
But, in fact, human beings are embodied, vulnerable, and interconnected. We cannot be reduced to our activity of reasoning or of choosing. As a newborn, I existed before I had rational thoughts. If I become cognitively impaired, I will continue to exist, albeit injured and temporarily or permanently unable to think. A single blood clot or a microscopic virus can force the strongest human being in the world to the door of death. We are embodied, so we are all vulnerable.
Continued below.
Assisted Killing Fails to Protect the Vulnerable - Word on Fire
The impoverished, aged, ostracized, and afflicted need our care the most. They deserve better than death by medically assisted killing.
www.wordonfire.org
