Right to death
I didn't really pay attention to the Supreme Court news from yesterday, but it hit me just now that it is very important. It marks an interesting transition from a liberal point of view. Locke's doctrine of equality states that we are all equal because we are all individually subordinate to God, and his property. This understanding, as Jeremy Waldron points out in God, Locke, and Equality, is fundamental to liberalism and our own constitution. It is very easy to assume equality, but besides Hobbes and Locke, no one has really justified it well. Hobbes argument is, of course, that we all have the ability to kill one another, and thus are sacrificing an equal right when we submit to the sovereign. This doesn't really get you too far.
Locke's notion does, however. Because we are all God's property, no one has the right to rule over any one else. Moreover, no one can alienate certain rights, because they are possessed by God, not them. One of these rights is the right to property, in yourself and your physical possessions. This is sort of bendable, in the sense that we can agree to let go of our property, but we cannot possess a right of death over ourselves.
Thus the Supreme Court decision means we can no longer depend on a Lockean doctrine of equality. If it is legal to kill yourself, we no longer respect God's claim to our lives. Where does this leave us? I think we are forced to admit, as Stanley Fish believes, that a commitment to liberalism is no more than aesthetic choice. This is my own belief, and has been for a while. I imagine it will take the rest of the country a long while to come to this conclusion, however. Ahhh... the inconsistent hoi polloi.
Locke's notion does, however. Because we are all God's property, no one has the right to rule over any one else. Moreover, no one can alienate certain rights, because they are possessed by God, not them. One of these rights is the right to property, in yourself and your physical possessions. This is sort of bendable, in the sense that we can agree to let go of our property, but we cannot possess a right of death over ourselves.
Thus the Supreme Court decision means we can no longer depend on a Lockean doctrine of equality. If it is legal to kill yourself, we no longer respect God's claim to our lives. Where does this leave us? I think we are forced to admit, as Stanley Fish believes, that a commitment to liberalism is no more than aesthetic choice. This is my own belief, and has been for a while. I imagine it will take the rest of the country a long while to come to this conclusion, however. Ahhh... the inconsistent hoi polloi.
posted by Austin 5-000 at 10:40 AM
4 Comments:
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
In some way, perhaps the one argument would say that as death is inevitable in such cases, the 'claim' has already been taken out. The body is dead, God can have it, and the goal then is to minimize the possiblity of suffering. I don't know, in all honesty though, how much I buy that logic.
You are very right I think in associating even secular liberalism with the figure of God; beyond just Locke, if you look in many/all philosophies that try to work out an ethics of "otherness" so often associated with liberalism, (I'm thinking Levinas) there is the necessity of the "Alltogether" or absolute Other, whose presence keeps our individual relationships (self+other) from collapsing into the Same (when self+other is viewed from a third). It seems that humanism, ethics as such, to agree with Badiou, is always of a theistic nature.
The questions then are:
1-Can we explain this new ruling (and any reasoning butressing it) in a way that does not renounce God's direct claim on man as his creations?
2-Does another theory, like the one I briefly mentioned above, allow the existence of God, liberalism, and still give us the right in question?
If neither of these are possible, then we might indeed end up in a situation where our liberalism is an aesthetic choice, as you say. What are the consequences of this? If liberalism is just some aesthetic effulvium, where is the true governing ideology of our system, where does power lie? The two are not neccessarily linked in evil-genius fashion; though you've reviled talk of ideology before, I feel that this case is a perfectly apt demonstration of its nature and function; liberalism is a symptom, a fetish, the "lie that enables us to endure an unbearable truth" (in Zizek's words. He gives an example of a man who only tolerated his wife's death insofar as her cat was still alive. When the cat died, the man went insane). We've said it, fine, liberalism is an aesthetic choice, do we accept this? If liberalism is merely aesthetic, then some profoundly non-liberal powers must lie beneath it.
What is to be done? I'm not myself sure, but do we just lament the hoi polloi's ignorance, quietly whispering thanks that we're amongst the few enlightened with access to this "secret" power?
The "right to die" question is interesting insofar as it not only posits a "right to die," which is available to everyone in the form of manual rather than assisted suicide, but also a "right to submit oneself to the act of examination and killing on the part of another," i.e. the doctor/specialist. That is, it displaces the one act we could truly call our own onto an act carried out by another. This action in itself seems to bypass liberal/Lockean notions of being in possession of oneself and the limits of that possession. But perhaps the whole logic behind the idea is that the terminally ill has no practical way, in his or her bedridden, weakened state, to carry out the suicide. Therefore they plead their case to the professional and ask that person to "become" them, i.e. take their place as the right-holder, in the moment of death. But the other issue at stake is the right to a painless death, rather than risking the chance of maiming or otherwise hurting oneself with a gunshot or overdose. In this case the patient again asks the doctor to "become" them in order to effect the death they wish for themselves and would carry out if they had the means. In any case the question seems to hinge not so much on the "right to die" but on the temporary agency of one individual in place of the other. With the proper documentation, witnesses, "expert" advice etc, I don't see a problem with this in a strictly libertarian sense.
I am not exactly sure why we do not have the "right" to kill ourselves. Since an overstepping of rights or an encroachment upon others' rights always entails a curtailing of one's own rights as punishment (that is, in a practical sense rights only make sense when they can be taken away as well), and since the subject can neither enjoy rights nor protest against their withdrawal when he is dead, where is the commandment against suicide? Even if we say that there are certain postmortem rights, such as right to burial, return of the body to one's family, or right against character defamation, these can only be carried out in the context of its affecting others, in the dead body becoming the property of the relatives. In other words, as much as Antigone appealed to Cleon to bury her brother based on the gods and propriety, the right exists only because she does.
Finally, I think the phrasing "liberalism is an aesthetic choice" is misleading, because we are tempted to start saying "*merely* aesthetic." My question is, what other sort of choice is there? An "aesthetic" choice is one that is presumably made on emotivist, "primitive" grounds, but as I have said to Austin, those feelings have just as much history and ideology behind them as anything else. So you do not just choose liberalism because "it seems good to you," or "it appears nice," but because you have reasons for thinking that it's good. Perhaps it is because you enjoy choosing commodities, enjoy your rights, enjoy the limits that have circumscribed what can and cannot be said (here I am heavily drawing on Fish), enjoy the availability and multiplicity of forms of knowledge (books, music, film, art) and congregation (book clubs, coffee shops, universities, art galleries, religious groups, etc). What better reasons do you have for preferring liberalism than these?
Of course, Sherief would say that such talk (1) smacks of ideology and status quo complacency, and refuses to seek after new forms beyond what is accepted, and (2) ignores the great mass of people on whose backs we enjoy such luxuries. To which I say, socialist democracies, such as those existing in Europe and South America, can hopefully offer us ideas on how to reduce our dependency upon exploited labor, while at the same time avoiding a "fidelity to a simulacrum," in Badiou's terms, the prime examples being Soviet and Chinese Communism and to a greater degree Fascism (Badiou would presumably take great offense to the first part of that statement.) Bring the change, I say, but stave off the terror. (In this I am undoubtedly a simpering apologist of capitalism. Sigh.)
For more on the pragmatism of human rights, see Rorty, "Human rights, rationality, and sentimentality" in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. Savic. It also contains articles by Rawls, Levinas, Eagleton, Habermas, Charles Taylor, Lyotard, Beudrillard, the whole gang!
Having just re-read some of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, I would like to offer a psychoanalytic approach to the "right to die" in light of Freud's theory of death drive. According to Freud, death drive is an organism's instinct to revert to its most primitive state - in the case of humans, the infantile condition which precedes ego-formation and the pleasure principle, in which the infant perceives no difference between self and other, pleasure or displeasure (love and hate). It is important to grasp that for Freud and Lacan after him sex and death are not so far apart; indeed, Freud argues that Eros often serves the aims of Thanatos (death drive) by transferring aggression from self to Other, most noticeably in sadism. However broadly strange Civ and Discontents may be, in somewhat Lacanian terms it seems to imply that the division between self and Other, the formation of ego and its objects, constitutes a foundational repression. Certainly not the sort of repression anyone has any hope of superceding (or regressing from) without becoming psychotic. But it is noteworthy that, just as our right to choose the means of our death is not affirmed universally in our legal system, neither is the right to sex. I cannot help but think that the argument against a right to die is rooted in an unconscious response: that to have an Other fulfill one's wish either to die or have sex is fundamentally and unacceptably narcissistic. An institution of death or sex would seem to support what law (and thought) represses.
Post a Comment
<< Home