According to Baroness Warnock, doctors who refuse to help terminally ill patients kill themselves are "genuinely wicked."This is the same woman who said that dementia patients have a duty to die, so as not to be a burden on their families or the State.
As John Smeaton points out, her views on human fertilisation, embryology and stem cell research have already been incorporated into British Law.
How long before her views on euthanasia are similarly made law?
This is the same woman who said that dementia patients have a duty to die, so as not to be a burden on their families or the State.
ReplyDeleteTo which one should respond, "You first..."
I wonder how whe would feel about philosopher assisted suicide. As for helping people die, I help people die every day. I just don't kill them (which is a very inelegant solution to pain and suffering.)
ReplyDeleteHow can a utilitarian humanist use a term like "genuinely wicked".
ReplyDelete"Genuine" implies measurement against a standard of absolute truth. "Wicked" requires the acknowledgment of the concept of sin or transgression against an objective, external,Natural Law.
Surely she should restrict herself to a less metaphysical comment such as "doubleplusungood crimethink".
Who is this nutjob baroness, and why does her having a quaint title entitle her to a bully pulpit on these matters?
ReplyDelete- Kasia the Colonist
As the good lady Baroness is clearly demented as exemplified by the horrific anti-life policies she advocates, will she now do the right thing as she herself advocates and 'fall on her own sword'?
ReplyDeleteNo, I thought not - such policies are always for those 'others' who don't fit into the Baroness's criteria of what it means to be human - who are clearly so much less worthy of life, care and compassion that the rest of 'us'.
Keeping up this kind of 'pressure' to make the elderly and infirm feel that they really are a burden to their family, friends and society is what I would call 'wickedness in the extreme'.
And I question why this women is a 'Baroness'. In the land of King Mark she would be stripped of her title! ;-)
ReplyDeleteTo answer Kasia's question: Warnock's views carry weight because she's been a influential public thinker for decades, not because of her title. She's an academic philosopher, but has chaired two Committees of Enquiry: one into special needs education in the 1970s, and one into human fertility and embryology in the 1980s. The peerage was awarded for the help she'd been in making government policy seem philosophically respectable.
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