Not fit to judge

Tony Blankley, ©2005 Creators Syndicate

March 23, 2005

(Excerpt)

It seems that the smarter we get, the more morally confused we get.

A hundred years ago, at least we could distinguish between life and death: When a human stopped breathing, he was dead. Both science and law were clear. But as we got more clever we came up with the concept of a person being brain dead, while science kept the non-brain part of the human minimally functioning. So the law ruled being brain dead to be the equivalent of total death.

But to act on that assertion a human agency had to intercede to commit the coup de grace: the pulling of the plug. And that raised, for some, an ethical issue.

Now science has come up with another gradation of near death: permanent vegetative status -- not quite brain dead, but almost. This condition, to the untrained eye at least, looks distressingly like consciousness. And, inevitably more ethical red flags get raised. It is a tribute to the moral flame that still flickers in most of us, that while it may be called vegetative, the extinguishing of that entity's life seems different in kind from disposing of a head of lettuce.

Without overplaying the "slippery slope leading to Hitlerian conclusions" argument, it does seem that as science advances, and the law lumbers awkwardly behind it, even decent people are likely to be thrown into ever larger zones of moral confusion.

If mankind only studies man -- if we untether ourselves from the absolute injunction of our God to honor all human life -- we are very likely to further morally defile ourselves and our civilization, even with the very best of decent intentions.

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Read the complete article at townhall.com.