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Expendable People
Can we live comfortably in a society in which some human beings
are used, then discarded, for the benefit of others?
As CWR goes to press this month, the political world is buzzing with two different controversies. In Washington, the White House is under intense pressure to approve federal funding for the use of embryonic tissue in stem-cell research. In Italy, the people of Genoa are bracing for the unruly street demonstrations that have become routine whenever the leaders of the “G8” industrial nations gather.
The debate on embryo research has been marred by inaccurate reporting. To the best of my knowledge, no one objects in principle to stem-cell research; the question is whether the cells should be harvested from human embryos. These embryos are not potential human lives; they are living human beings, who will be killed when the cells are harvested. Although scientists have promised that stem-cell research will yield spectacular breakthroughs in medical treatment for a variety of ailments, the available studies consistently show those claims to be grossly exaggerated. And while scores of editorial columnists are recommending a compromise on the issue, any “compromise” would require the destruction of some human beings to the cause of medical research.
The critics of the “G8” leadership have raised the charge that powerful industrialists are engaged in a different form of exploitation. I confess that I have very little sympathy for the young people who stage their noisy demonstrations at every international summit meeting, or for the ideological causes they champion. But I am sensitive to their complaint that the global economic system is governed by a small elite, whose decisions the ordinary citizen cannot hope to influence.
Falling beneath the wheels
Gaetano Mosca, the 19th-century Italian sociologist, argued that every society is ruled by an elite minority, for the simple reason that most men are content to let others govern them. Therefore the distinguishing characteristic of a just society, Mosca argued, is that it offers ordinary citizens a “juridical defense”—a means of placing limits on the power wielded by the governing elite. In the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights acts as a form of “juridical defense,” protecting individual rights by placing restrictions on the scope of government authority.
During the past decade we have seen an alarming increase in the number of complaints that powerful individuals are abusing their positions. Politicians in Washington prey on young interns with apparent impunity. Law-enforcement officials break their own rules of conduct in pursuit of high-profile criminals.
For every abuse of power, there is a corresponding loss of individual freedom. In this issue, CWR reports on two different sorts of cases in which freedoms are threatened, despite the legal safeguards, in North America today. In Canada, the power of the gay-rights lobby has chipped away at religious freedom, so that Christians now may be legally blocked from citing certain passages of the Bible. In the United States (as this month's Essay points out), the cause of no-fault divorce and the rise of legal feminism have worked together with frightening force, so that a married man may suddenly find himself legally barred from communicating with his own children. In these cases, an ideological onslaught has swept aside legal and constitutional guarantees. The train of “progress” rumbles on, and only few people notice the unfortunate individuals who have fallen beneath the wheels.
Drawing the line
“Under capitalism, man exploits man,” an old Cold-War proverb ran. “Under communism the reverse is true.” In any form of human society, unscrupulous individuals will use others for their own ends. But when exploitation is endemic to the system, it is time to draw the line.
The G8 protestors in Genoa have some pointed questions for those of us living in the affluent West. Do we realize that our carpets were woven by children in Pakistan working 16-hour days, our clothes produced by illiterate peasants in the sweatshops of Honduras, our plastic toys molded by Malaysian workers who receive only starvation wages? Those are serious questions, but we face still more immediate moral concerns closer to home.
Will we vaccinate our children against the chicken pox, using a serum developed from the cells of aborted children? If we fall victim to Parkinson's disease, will we consent to treatments that require the use of embryonic human tissue? If our eyesight fails, will we accept a new cornea, taken from the sightless eye of an executed Chinese dissident?
These are no longer merely theoretical questions; they are issues we may soon be forced to address, in our own lives. Now that so many physicians and medical researchers have forsaken the Hippocratic Oath, we laymen may be forced to set the moral guidelines for our own medical care. “First, do no harm….”
—By Philip F. Lawler