Human and nature

When disabled people aren't integrated into society, it's a reflection on the poor character of that society. Allowing society to eliminate people does nothing to improve social morals.

St Teresa of Avila wrote about the blessings that elderly and infirm nuns bring to the rest of their religious sisters. Besides the humility and patience which being cared for cultivates in the more needy nuns, the rest of the monastery learns real charity and love, through their care, respect, and service to those who cannot reciprocate.

Moral character isn't measured by how well we treat our benefactors and friends, but how we treat the weak and vulnerable.

 

You are mixing up perspectives here. He isn't taking up a personal one in the question, rather explaining the current course.

 

I think this quote from Tolkien gives a clue



It can be applied to omission as well as to the active taking of life. Which of us can put a value on someone else's life? One of the most prominent physicists of our era was severely handicapped yet lived on for decades beyond all expectation and became a household name - not for his disability but for his genius. We each only get one shot at life, and it comes and goes in a flash compared with the age of the universe. It's luck and privilege beyond all counting to be alive - for each one of us, there are an uncountable numbers of others that could have lived instead of us but were passed over by the fates. These are the children that our parents could have conceived instead of us, and those our grandparents didn't have and so on back to the dawn of time. We are so familiar with our everyday lives that we take each other for granted, but when you look at our world from remote outer space, and consider each of our lives, it is one of the most precious things in the Universe, and so are each of us, no matter what our state or condition. Every one of us is precious beyond measuring, each of us a separate world that we bring to life that wouldn't exist without us. I think that we have a collective obligation to give each person as much a chance of life as we can.

Now of course resources are limited, and it isn't possible to solve every problem - but that's not the same as withholding support that could be given. The former is simply the way the world is - we do the best we can with what is available; the latter is to play god without the wisdom to do it.

The issue isn't simply black and white and there are times when I do think it can be right to withhold what may keep someone alive.



My father was in late stage dementia and 99 years old. He had been fading for weeks and was not expected to live more than a few hours or days. His GP agreed with us that there would be no point in resuscitating him when the time came and he died peacefully in his bed in his care home. He would not have been conscious if they had brought him back - it would only have kept him going a few hours longer, and I think this was right. Two years earlier though I'd have insisted they tried to bring him back. He had three good years in the care home even though he was unable to care for himself and was confused a lot of the time - even so, he was laughing and joking with the care staff who loved him, and could still beat us hands down at rummy.

I don't regret any of the demands my father's condition placed on me. I didn't have to physically care for him to a great extent, but I had the responsibility of seeing him safely through his 6 years of illness and sorting out his life, his house, his care, his safety. It was very demanding emotionally, and in commitment of my time, but I don't regret any of it - it's in things like this we learn what it really means to love someone, as @Matty is saying. I think it's never right to withhold the possibility of life until life is irrevocably gone anyway.

 

I agree - this is a dilemma isn't it? The problem arises when there is no escaping the need for a judgement, but when the individual affected is incapable of making the judgement for themselves. One of the hardest judgements I had to make was not one of life and death, but when I had to stop my dad from driving at the age of 95, and he lost his independence. He would never have stopped himself, and he would have gone on until he had a serious accident - I probably left it longer than I should have, and it left me pretty shaken because it was so life changing for him. The judgement in these situations cannot be avoided though, because doing nothing is as much a judgement as doing something. All we can do is act in as much good faith as we can if we have to do this sort of thing for another.

The dilemma with very premature babies will eventually go away I suspect, because technological and medical advances will mean we will be able to gestate safely to full term from conception outside the womb. That may well bring other problems to the table of course.

A problem that has occurred to me in the past, really extrapolating from yours, is whether we are making our gene pool very unstable by preserving to adulthood those people who would otherwise have died before having children. Is it possible that in the future, the average human being will be far less healthy than at present because of this? I have no answer to this one - I just hope that it's an unwarranted fear. It may well be unwarranted because natural selection works on regardless - at present it is selecting for those of us best fitted to our modern societies.