OPINION: Bioethicists versus medical ethicists

I have received correspondence contending there is little difference between medical and bioethicists; that my characterization of most bioethicists as utilitarian secular humanists (and useful agents of the state) may stem from ignorance; and that personal autonomy is given “high priority” by bioethicists. I beg to differ on all counts.

In the past 25 years, I have served as a chief medical editor in four medical publications, and in all of these journals differences were noted in the tenets of traditional medical ethicists, who follow the teachings of Hippocrates and bioethicists who follow utilitarian precepts and collectivists ethics. Not all bioethicists are secular humanists, but the bioethics movements is centered on that philosophy and utilitarianism, as encapsulated by the leading lights of the bioethics movement:

1. Daniel Callahan, professor of bioethics and former director of the Hastings Center: “Denial of nutrition, may, in the long run, become the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious patients actually die.”

2. Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University: “Fetuses like newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood — ‘rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness’ and therefore ‘killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”

3. John Hardwig, professor of ethics at the University of Tennessee has repeatedly affirmed that elderly patients and chronically ill patients, whose lives, in his estimation, have become not worth living, have a “duty to die” for the good of society and the proper utilization of societal health resources. Denying individual autonomy, he asserts there is “responsibility to end one’s life in the absence of any terminal illness ... a duty to die when one would prefer to live ... even those who want to live face a duty to die.

4. Ezekiel Emanuel, director of the Clinical Bioethics at the National Institute of Health and one of the architects of Obamacare has proposed that we should all die by age 75 because “we are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.” Dr. Emanuel claims he is not advocating euthanasia at age 75 “in order to save resources, ration health care, or address public-policy issues,” but that is exactly what he is inferring, and in fact later makes utilitarian proposals to redistribute health resources from the old and infirm to the younger generation.

In reference to my previous article in which I referred to the bioethicists’ call for newborn infanticide, I received inquiries as to why not adopt these unwanted babies. In their own convoluted thinking, the bioethicists claimed that adoption was too traumatic “for the birth mother in coping with grief” than killing the child. We must ponder whether we have here a pathologic inversion of priorities due to convoluted compassion or deliberate deceitful casuistry.

It is no wonder, then, that with all this obsession to push society toward “a duty to die” mindset and euthanasia for the most vulnerable in out society — not necessarily respecting individual autonomy, as it is claimed by some as “the right to die,” but really for utilitarian reasons, the conservation and redistribution of resources — the bioethics movement has been deemed a “culture of death.”

References are available at www.haciendapub.com.

— Miguel A. Faria Jr., M.D.

This story was originally published August 30, 2015 at 12:00 AM with the headline "OPINION: Bioethicists versus medical ethicists ."