I. The Right to Life
Generations of malleable Israeli children are brought up on the story of the misnamed Jewish settlement Tel-Hai ("Mount of Life"), Israel's Alamo. There, among the picturesque valleys of the Galilee, a one-armed hero named Joseph Trumpeldor is said to have died, eight decades ago, from an Arab stray bullet, mumbling: "It is good to die for our country." Judaism is dubbed "A Teaching of Life" - but it would seem that the sanctity of life can and does take a back seat to some overriding values.
The right to life - at least of human beings - is a rarely questioned fundamental moral principle. In Western cultures, it is assumed to be inalienable and indivisible (i.e., monolithic). Yet, it is neither. Even if we accept the axiomatic - and therefore arbitrary - source of this right, we are still faced with intractable dilemmas. All said, the right to life may be nothing more than a cultural construct, dependent on social mores, historical contexts, and exegetic systems.
Rights - whether moral or legal - impose obligations or duties on third parties towards the right-holder. One has a right AGAINST other people and thus can prescribe to them certain obligatory behaviours and proscribe certain acts or omissions. Rights and duties are two sides of the same Janus-like ethical coin.
This duality confuses people. They often erroneously identify rights with their attendant duties or obligations, with the morally decent, or even with the morally permissible. One's rights inform other people how they MUST behave towards one - not how they SHOULD or OUGHT to act morally. Moral behaviour is not dependent on the existence of a right. Obligations are.
To complicate matters further, many apparently simple and straightforward rights are amalgams of more basic moral or legal principles. To treat such rights as unities is to mistreat them.
Take the right to life. It is a compendium of no less than eight distinct rights: the right to be brought to life, the right to be born, the right to have one's life maintained, the right not to be killed, the right to have one's life saved, the right to save one's life (wrongly reduced to the right to self-defence), the right to terminate one's life, and the right to have one's life terminated.
None of these rights is self-evident, or unambiguous, or universal, or immutable, or automatically applicable. It is safe to say, therefore, that these rights are not primary as hitherto believed - but derivative.
The Right to be Brought to Life
In most moral systems - including all major religions and Western legal methodologies - it is life that gives rise to rights. The dead have rights only because of the existence of the living. Where there is no life - there are no rights. Stones have no rights (though many animists would find this statement abhorrent).
Hence the vitriolic debate about cloning which involves denuding an unfertilized egg of its nucleus. Is there life in an egg or a sperm cell?
That something exists, does not necessarily imply that it harbors life. Sand exists and it is inanimate. But what about things that exist and have the potential to develop life? No one disputes the existence of eggs and sperms - or their capacity to grow alive.
Is the potential to be alive a legitimate source of rights? Does the egg have any rights, or, at the very least, the right to be brought to life (the right to become or to be) and thus to acquire rights? The much trumpeted right to acquire life pertains to an entity which exists but is not alive - an egg. It is, therefore, an unprecedented kind of right. Had such a right existed, it would have implied an obligation or duty to give life to the unborn and the not yet conceived.
Clearly, life manifests, at the earliest, when an egg and a sperm unite at the moment of fertilization. Life is not a potential - it is a process triggered by an event. An unfertilized egg is neither a process - nor an event. It does not even possess the potential to become alive unless and until it is fertilized.
The potential to become alive is not the ontological equivalent of actually being alive. A potential life cannot give rise to rights and obligations. The transition from potential to being is not trivial, nor is it automatic, or inevitable, or independent of context. Atoms of various elements have the potential to become an egg (or, for that matter, a human being) - yet no one would claim that they ARE an egg (or a human being), or that they should be treated as such (i.e., with the same rights and obligations).
The Right to be Born
While the right to be brought to life deals with potentials - the right to be born deals with actualities. When one or two adults voluntarily cause an egg to be fertilized by a sperm cell with the explicit intent and purpose of creating another life - the right to be born crystallizes. The voluntary and premeditated action of said adults amounts to a contract with the embryo - or rather, with society which stands in for the embryo.
Henceforth, the embryo acquires the entire panoply of human rights: the right to be born, to be fed, sheltered, to be emotionally nurtured, to get an education, and so on.
But what if the fertilization was either involuntary (rape) or unintentional ("accidental" pregnancy)?
Is the embryo's successful acquisition of rights dependent upon the nature of the conception? We deny criminals their loot as "fruits of the poisoned tree". Why not deny an embryo his life if it is the outcome of a crime? The conventional response - that the embryo did not commit the crime or conspire in it - is inadequate. We would deny the poisoned fruits of crime to innocent bystanders as well. Would we allow a passerby to freely spend cash thrown out of an escape vehicle following a robbery?
Even if we agree that the embryo has a right to be kept alive - this right cannot be held against his violated mother. It cannot oblige her to harbor this patently unwanted embryo. If it could survive outside the womb, this would have solved the moral dilemma. But it is dubious - to say the least - that it has a right to go on using the mother's body, or resources, or to burden her in any way in order to sustain its own life.
The Right to Have One's Life Maintained
This leads to a more general quandary. To what extent can one use other people's bodies, their property, their time, their resources and to deprive them of pleasure, comfort, material possessions, income, or any other thing - in order to maintain one's life?
Even if it were possible in reality, it is indefensible to maintain that I have a right to sustain, improve, or prolong my life at another's expense. I cannot demand - though I can morally expect - even a trivial and minimal sacrifice from another in order to prolong my life. I have no right to do so.
Of course, the existence of an implicit, let alone explicit, contract between myself and another party would change the picture. The right to demand sacrifices commensurate with the provisions of the contract would then crystallize and create corresponding duties and obligations.
No embryo has a right to sustain its life, maintain, or prolong it at its mother's expense. This is true regardless of how insignificant the sacrifice required of her is.
Yet, by knowingly and intentionally conceiving the embryo, the mother can be said to have signed a contract with it. The contract causes the right of the embryo to demand such sacrifices from his mother to crystallize. It also creates corresponding duties and obligations of the mother towards her embryo.
We often find ourselves in a situation where we do not have a given right against other individuals - but we do possess this very same right against society. Society owes us what no constituent-individual does.
Thus, we all have a right to sustain our lives, maintain, prolong, or even improve them at society's expense - no matter how major and significant the resources required. Public hospitals, state pension schemes, and police forces may be needed in order to fulfill society's obligations to prolong, maintain, and improve our lives - but fulfill them it must.
Still, each one of us can sign a contract with society - implicitly or explicitly - and abrogate this right. One can volunteer to join the army. Such an act constitutes a contract in which the individual assumes the duty or obligation to give up his or her life.
The Right not to be Killed
It is commonly agreed that every person has the right not to be killed unjustly. Admittedly, what is just and what is unjust is determined by an ethical calculus or a social contract - both constantly in flux.
Still, even if we assume an Archimedean immutable point of moral reference - does A's right not to be killed mean that third parties are to refrain from enforcing the rights of other people against A? What if the only way to right wrongs committed by A against others - was to kill A? The moral obligation to right wrongs is about restoring the rights of the wronged.
If the continued existence of A is predicated on the repeated and continuous violation of the rights of others - and these other people object to it - then A must be killed if that is the only way to right the wrong and re-assert the rights of A's victims.
The Right to have One's Life Saved
There is no such right because there is no moral obligation or duty to save a life. That people believe otherwise demonstrates the muddle between the morally commendable, desirable, and decent ("ought", "should") and the morally obligatory, the result of other people's rights ("must"). In some countries, the obligation to save a life is codified in the law of the land. But legal rights and obligations do not always correspond to moral rights and obligations, or give rise to them.
The Right to Save One's Own Life
One has a right to save one's life by exercising self-defence or otherwise, by taking certain actions or by avoiding them. Judaism - as well as other religious, moral, and legal systems - accept that one has the right to kill a pursuer who knowingly and intentionally is bent on taking one's life. Hunting down Osama bin-Laden in the wilds of Afghanistan is, therefore, morally acceptable (though not morally mandatory).
But does one have the right to kill an innocent person who unknowingly and unintentionally threatens to take one's life? An embryo sometimes threatens the life of the mother. Does she have a right to take its life? What about an unwitting carrier of the Ebola virus - do we have a right to terminate her life? For that matter, do we have a right to terminate her life even if there is nothing she could have done about it had she known about her condition?
The Right to Terminate One's Life
There are many ways to terminate one's life: self sacrifice, avoidable martyrdom, engaging in life risking activities, refusal to prolong one's life through medical treatment, euthanasia, overdosing and self inflicted death that is the result of coercion. Like suicide, in all these - bar the last - a foreknowledge of the risk of death is present coupled with its acceptance. Does one have a right to take one's life?
The answer is: it depends. Certain cultures and societies encourage suicide. Both Japanese kamikaze and Jewish martyrs were extolled for their suicidal actions. Certain professions are knowingly life-threatening - soldiers, firemen, policemen. Certain industries - like the manufacture of armaments, cigarettes, and alcohol - boost overall mortality rates.
In general, suicide is commended when it serves social ends, enhances the cohesion of the group, upholds its values, multiplies its wealth, or defends it from external and internal threats. Social structures and human collectives - empires, countries, firms, bands, institutions - often commit suicide. This is considered to be a healthy process.
Thus, suicide came to be perceived as a social act. The flip-side of this perception is that life is communal property. Society has appropriated the right to foster suicide or to prevent it. It condemns individual suicidal entrepreneurship. Suicide, according to Thomas Aquinas, is unnatural. It harms the community and violates God's property rights.
In Judeo-Christian tradition, God is the owner of all souls. The soul is on deposit with us. The very right to use it, for however short a period, is a divine gift. Suicide, therefore, amounts to an abuse of God's possession. Blackstone, the venerable codifier of British Law, concurred. The state, according to him, has a right to prevent and to punish suicide and attempted suicide. Suicide is self-murder, he wrote, and, therefore, a grave felony. In certain paternalistic countries, this still is the case.
The Right to Have One's Life Terminated
The right to have one's life terminated at will (euthanasia), is subject to social, ethical, and legal strictures. In some countries - such as the Netherlands - it is legal (and socially acceptable) to have one's life terminated with the help of third parties given a sufficient deterioration in the quality of life and given the imminence of death. One has to be of sound mind and will one's death knowingly, intentionally, repeatedly, and forcefully.
II. Issues in the Calculus of Rights
The Hierarchy of Rights
The right to life supersedes - in Western moral and legal systems - all other rights. It overrules the right to one's body, to comfort, to the avoidance of pain, or to ownership of property. Given such lack of equivocation, the amount of dilemmas and controversies surrounding the right to life is, therefore, surprising.
When there is a clash between equally potent rights - for instance, the conflicting rights to life of two people - we can decide among them randomly (by flipping a coin, or casting dice). Alternatively, we can add and subtract rights in a somewhat macabre arithmetic.
Thus, if the continued life of an embryo or a fetus threatens the mother's life - that is, assuming, controversially, that both of them have an equal right to life - we can decide to kill the fetus. By adding to the mother's right to life her right to her own body we outweigh the fetus' right to life.
The Difference between Killing and Letting Die
Counterintuitively, there is a moral gulf between killing (taking a life) and letting die (not saving a life). The right not to be killed is undisputed. There is no right to have one's own life saved. Where there is a right - and only where there is one - there is an obligation. Thus, while there is an obligation not to kill - there is no obligation to save a life.
Killing the Innocent
The life of a Victim (V) is sometimes threatened by the continued existence of an innocent person (IP), a person who cannot be held guilty of V's ultimate death even though he caused it. IP is not guilty of dispatching V because he hasn't intended to kill V, nor was he aware that V will die due to his actions or continued existence.
Again, it boils down to ghastly arithmetic. We definitely should kill IP to prevent V's death if IP is going to die anyway - and shortly. The remaining life of V, if saved, should exceed the remaining life of IP, if not killed. If these conditions are not met, the rights of IP and V should be weighted and calculated to yield a decision (See "Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life" by Baruch A. Brody).
Utilitarianism - a form of crass moral calculus - calls for the maximization of utility (life, happiness, pleasure). The lives, happiness, or pleasure of the many outweigh the life, happiness, or pleasure of the few. If by killing IP we save the lives of two or more people and there is no other way to save their lives - it is morally permissible.
But surely V has right to self defence, regardless of any moral calculus of rights? Not so. Taking another's life to save one's own is rarely justified, though such behaviour cannot be condemned. Here we have the flip side of the confusion we opened with: understandable and perhaps inevitable behaviour (self defence) is mistaken for a moral right.
If I were V, I would kill IP unhesitatingly. Moreover, I would have the understanding and sympathy of everyone. But this does not mean that I had a right to kill IP.
Which brings us to September 11.
Collateral Damage
What should prevail: the imperative to spare the lives of innocent civilians - or the need to safeguard the lives of fighter pilots? Precision bombing puts such pilots at great risk. Avoiding this risk usually results in civilian casualties ("collateral damage").
This moral dilemma is often "solved" by applying - explicitly or implicitly - the principle of "over-riding affiliation". We find the two facets of this principle in Jewish sacred texts: "One is close to oneself" and "Your city's poor denizens come first (with regards to charity)".
Some moral obligations are universal - thou shalt not kill. They are related to one's position as a human being. Other moral values and obligations arise from one's affiliations. Yet, there is a hierarchy of moral values and obligations. The ones related to one's position as a human being are, actually, the weakest.
They are overruled by moral values and obligations related to one's affiliations. The imperative "thou shalt not kill (another human being)" is easily over-ruled by the moral obligation to kill for one's country. The imperative "thou shalt not steal" is superseded by one's moral obligation to spy for one's nation.
This leads to another startling conclusion:
There is no such thing as a self-consistent moral system. Moral values and obligations often contradict each other and almost always conflict with universal moral values and obligations.
In the examples above, killing (for one's country) and stealing (for one's nation) are moral obligations. Yet, they contradict the universal moral value of the sanctity of life and the universal moral obligation not to kill. Far from being a fundamental and immutable principle - the right to life, it would seem, is merely a convenient implement in the hands of society.
Death, Life and the Question of Identity
BY DR. SAM VAKNIN
What exactly is death?
A classical point of departure in defining death, seems to be life itself. Death is perceived either as a cessation of life - or as a "transit area", on the way to a continuation of life by other means. While the former approach presents a disjunction, the latter is a continuum, death being nothing but a corridor into another plane of existence (the hereafter).
But who does the dying when death occurs?
In other words, capturing the identity of the dying entity (that which "commits" death) is essential in defining death. But how can we establish the dying entity's unambiguous and unequivocal identity? Can this identity be determined by using quantitative parameters? Is it dependent, for instance, upon the number of discrete units which comprise the functioning whole? If so, at which level are useful distinctions and observations replaced by useless scholastic mind-warps?
Example: can human identity be defined by the number and organization of one's limbs, cells, or atoms? Cells in the human body are replaced (with the exception of the nervous system) every 5 years. Would this phenomenon imply that we gain a new identity each time this cycle is completed and most our cells are replaced?
Adopting this course of thinking leads to absurd results:
When humans die, the replacement rate of their cells is null. Does this zero replacement rate mean that their identity is better and longer preserved once dead? No one would say this. Death is tantamount to a loss of identity - not to its preservation. So, it would seem that, to ascertain one's identity, we should prefer a qualitative yardstick to a quantitative one.
The brain is a natural point of departure.
We can start by asking if one's identity will change if we were to substitute one's brain with another person's brain? "He is not the same" - we say of someone with a brain injury. If partial damage to the brain causes such a sea change in the determinants of individuality - it seems safe to assume that replacing one's entire brain will result in a total change of one's identity, akin to the emergence of another, distinct, self.
If the brain is the locus of identity, we should be able to assert that when (the cells of) all the other organs of the body are replaced (with the exception of the brain) - one's identity is still preserved.
The human hardware (body) and software (the wiring of the brain) have often been compared to a computer . But this analogy is misleading.
If we were to change all the software running on a computer - it would still remain the same (though more or less capable) computer. This is the equivalent of growing up in humans. However, if we were to change the computer's processor - it would no longer be the same computer.
This, partly, is the result of the separation of hardware (the microprocessor) from software (the programmes that it processes). There is no such separation in the human brain. The 1300 grams of grey matter in our heads are both hardware and software.
Still, the computer analogy seems to indicate that our identity resides not in our learning, knowledge, or memories. It is an epiphenomenon. It emerges when a certain level of hardware complexity is attained.
Even so, things are not that simple. If we were to eliminate someone's entire store of learning and memories (without affecting his physical brain) - would he still be the same person, would he still retain the same identity? Probably not.
In reality, erasing one's learning and memories without affecting his brain - is impossible. In humans, learning and memories are the brain. They affect the hardware that processes them in an irreversible manner. Still, in certain abnormal conditions, such radical erasure does occur .
This, naturally, cannot be said of a computer. There, the distinction between hardware and software is clear. Change a computer's hardware and you change its identity. Computers are software - invariant.
We are, therefore, able to confidently conclude that the brain is the sole determinant of identity, its seat and signifier. This is because our brain is both our processing hardware and our processed software. It is also a repository of processed data. A human brain detached from a body is still assumed to possess identity. And a monkey implanted with a human brain will host the identity of the former owner of the brain.
Many of the debates in the first decade of the new discipline of Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolved around these thought experiments. THE TURNING TEST pits invisible intelligences against one another. The answers which they provide (by teleprinter, hidden behind partitions) determine their presumed identity (human or not). Identity is determined merely on the basis of the outputs (the responses). No direct observation of the hardware is deemed necessary by the test.
The brain's status as the privileged identity system is such that even when it remain incommunicado, we assume that it harbors a person. If for some medical, logistical, or technological problem, one's brain is unable to provide output, answers, and interactions - we are still likely to assume that it has the potential to do so. Thus, in the case of an inactive brain, the presumed identity is a derivative of its potential to interact, rather than of any actual interaction.
Paleo-anthropologists attempt to determine the identity of our forefathers by studying their skulls and, by inference, their brains and their mental potentials. True, they investigate other types of bones. Ultimately, they hope to be able to draw an accurate visual description of our ancestors. But perusing other bones leads merely to an image of their former owners - while the scrutiny of skulls presumably reveals our ancestors' very identities.
When we die, what dies, therefore, is the brain and only the brain.
Death is discernible as the cessation of the exercise of force over physical systems. It is the sudden absence of physical effects previously associated with the dead object, a singularity, a discontinuity. But it should not be confused with inertia.
Inertia is a balance of forces - while death is the absence of forces. Death is, therefore, also not an entropic climax. Entropy is an isotropic, homogeneous distribution of energy. Death is the absence of any and all energies. While, outwardly, the two might appear to be identical - they are actually the two poles of a dichotomy.
So, death, as opposed to inertia or entropy, is not something that modern physics is fully equipped to deal with. Physics, by definition, deals with forces and measurable effects. It has nothing to say about force-less, energy-devoid physical states (oxymora).
Still, if death is merely the terminal cessation of all impact on all physical systems (the absence of physical effects), how can we account for memories of the deceased?
Memory is a physical effect (electrochemical activity of the brain) upon a physical system (the Brain). It can be preserved and shipped across time and space in capsules called books or or artwork. These are containers of triggers of physical effects (in recipient brains). They seem to defy death. Though the physical system which produced the memory capsule surely ceases to exist - it continues to physically impact other physical systems long after its demise, long after it was supposed to stop doing so.
Memory makes death a transcendental affair. As long as we (or what we create) are remembered - we continue to have a physical effect on physical systems (i.e., on other people's brains). And as long as this is happening - we are not technically (or, at least, fully) dead. Our death, our destruction are fully accomplished only after our memory is wiped out completely, not even having the potential of being resurrected in future. Only then do we cease to exist (i.e., to have an effect on other physical systems).
Philosophically, there is no difference between being influenced by a real-life conversation with Kant - and being effected by his words preserved in a time-space capsule, such as a book. As far as the reader is concerned, Kant is very much alive, more so than contemporaneous people whom the reader never met.
It is conceivable that, in the future, we will be able to preserve a three-dimensional facsimile (a hologram) of a person, replete with his smells, temperature, and tactile effects. Why would the flesh and blood version be judged superior to such a likeness?
There is no self-evident hierarchy of representations based on their media. Organic 3-d representations ("bodies") are not inherently superior to inorganic 3-d representations. In other words, our futuristic hologram should not be deemed inferior to the classic, organic version as long as they both possess the same information content and are able to assimilate information, regenerate and create.
The only defensible hierarchy is of potentials and, thus, pertains to the future. Non-organic representations ("representations") of intelligent and conscious entities - of "organic originals" - are finite. The organic originals are infinite in their potential to create and to procreate, to change themselves and their environment, to act and be acted upon within ever more complex feedback loops.
The non-organic versions, the representations, are self contained and final. The organic originals and their representations may contain identical information. But the amount of information will increase in the organic version and decrease in the non-organic one (due to the second Law of Thermodynamics). This inevitable divergence is what renders the organic original privileged.
This property - of an increasing amount of information (=order) - characterizes not only organic originals but also anything that emanates from them. It characterizes works of art and science, or human off-spring, for instance. All these tend to increase information (indeed, they are, in themselves, information packets).
So, could we say that the propagation and the continuation of physical effects (through memory) is life after death? Life and memory share an important trait. They both have a negentropic (=order and information increasing) impact on their surroundings. Does that make them synonymous? Is death only a transitory phase from one form of Life (organic) to another (informational, spiritual)?
However tempting this equation is - in most likelihood, it is false.
The reason is that there are two sources of increase in information and what sets them apart is not trivial. As long as the organic original lives, all creation depends upon it. After it dies, the works that it has created and the memories that are associated with it, continue to affect physical systems.
However, their ability to foster new creative work, to generate new memories, in short: their capacity to increase order by spawning information is totally dependent upon other, living, organic originals. In the absence of other organic originals, they stagnate and go through an entropic decrease of information (i.e., increase of disorder).
This is the crux of the distinction between Life and Death:
LIFE is the potential, possessed by organic originals, to create (=to fight entropy by increasing information and order), using their own software. Such software can be coded in hardware - e.g., one's DNA - but then the creative act is limited to the replication of the organic original or parts thereof.
Upon the original's DEATH, the potential to create is passed through one's memory. Creative acts, works of art and science, or other forms of creativity are propagated only within the software (=the brains) of other, living, organic originals.
Both forms of creation (i.e., using one's software and using others' software) can co-exist during the original's life. Death, however, incapacitates the first type of creation (i.e., creation by an organic original, independent of others, and using its software). Upon death, the surrogate form of creation (i.e., creation, by other organic originals who use their software to process the works and memories of the dead) becomes the only one.
Memories created by one organic original resonate through the brains of others. This generates information and provokes the creative potential in recipient brains. Some of them do react by creating and, thus, play host to the parasitic, invading memory, infecting other members of the memory-space (=the meme space).
Death is, therefore, the assimilation of the products of an organic original in a Collective. It is, indeed, the continuation of Life but in a collective, rather than individually.
Alternatively, Death could be defined as a terminal change in the state of the hardware.
Segments of the software colonize brains in the Collective. The software now acquires a different hardware - others' brains. This, of course, is reminiscent of certain viral mechanisms. The comparison may be superficial and misleading - or may lead to the imagery of the individual as a cell in the large organism of humanity. Memory has a role in this new form of social-political evolution which superseded Biological Evolution, as an instrument of adaptation.
Should we adopt this view, certain human reactions - e.g., opposition to change and religious and ideological wars - can perhaps be regarded as immunological reactions of the Collective to viral infection by the software (memories, works of art or science, ideas, in short: memes) of an individual.
A comment would be really helpful for the Author to keep going and Post Better. So, Post a Comment to this topic and Share your Views to It. I really appreciate your Comments
Add a Reply / Comment
No comments:
Post a Comment