(rainy day post… pulled this from the drafts I save for times when there’s not much going on.)
This one is closer to home – two different worlds within the same culture.
How valuable are you?
According to the world-story into which we are trying to live more fully, your true, absolute value as a person is not determined by your feelings, abilities, appearance, age, behaviour, or ‘capacity to contribute to society.’
The ‘experts’ – in this case Ivy League medical ethicists – disagree. One of them is the National Institutes of Health‘s department of clinical bioethics chairman, a Harvard University-educated doctor, and a former Harvard Medical School associate professor… I guess that ranks as one of the academic elites who wield considerable relative influence over our culture and society.
Emanuel and Wertheimer agree that the people who make, distribute and deliver vaccines should have priority, but say people between the ages of 13 and 40 should be next in line.They based their recommendation on what they call the “life-cycle” principle. Under this approach, a person’s value is balanced between how many years he expects to have left and how many years he has already lived.
The death of a young person seems more tragic than the death of an elderly person, they wrote, “because the younger person has not had the opportunity to live and develop through all stages of life.”
On the other hand, they wrote, “20-year-olds are valued more than one-year-olds because the older individuals have more developed interests, hopes and plans, but have not had the opportunity to realize them.”
The ethicists said their approach is more focused on saving the greatest number of productive years of life rather than on saving the greatest number of lives.
Emanuel and Wertheimer, of the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Md., published their recommendations in this week’s issue of the journal Science.
In short: when saving lives in a pandemic, aim for quality, not quantity. The value of a person is determined by their potential for productivity.
To be fair, Dr. Emanuel falls into his own “less valuable” category. And my beef isn’t necessarily with the order of priority they suggest. It’s the way they determine people’s relative value that makes me wonder. What criteria are these guys using to determine people’s value? They aren’t stupid. Actually, they’re brilliant, and their conclusions are most likely the reasonable outcome of a long, detailed, and well-fleshed out picture of the universe that meets industry standards for coherency. In one sense I’m glad they’re expressing these conclusions because it helps reveal the honest results of removing certain key factors from deliberations about the Big Questions of life/existence (meaning, purpose, value, identity). People should be honest regarding their worldviews’ implications for meaning and value.
Given the way they handle our relative value, I wonder how much absolute/inherent value they’d attribute to humanity.
What is a person, after all? What criteria do we use to determine a person’s absolute and relative value, and how do we form that criteria? I have my working answers of course, but my worldview isn’t guiding national bioethics, shaping government policy, and getting reported in the popular media.
Fundamental world-story assumptions matter. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the values expressed by these Ivy League ethicists – youth is best; midlife and onward is lesser life – are mirrored in our entertainment media and consumer culture.
world story? where’d you get a crazy idea like that?
If your bottom line is survival, then these suggestions are pretty good. I understand these seem like unreal conversations, but after watching the made for tv movie about bird flu, people will likely make these decisions tomorrow (or today for you guys).
In some ways this is like an inverse conversation like the ones held in my missions classes. Those you seek to convert are older b/c they have more influence on the rest of the community.
In science, save those in the middle ground b/c they provide the best chance for a good tomorrow.
Enjoy my ramblings.
I got the world story idea from inbetween suggestive comments in someone’s class notes regarding their spouse.
But this is the second world story post. Didn’t you see the other one (better photos!)?
Houston - Haha, you got auto-edited.
Right, I mean, I’m not mystified as to the probable “why’s” behind their conclusions; that’s not an entirely unfamiliar worldview. But they aren’t just going for survival of the species – survival of the species is a given.
They are choosing to save less people who together would tally more ‘productive years of life’ than a greater number of people from an ‘unproductive’ category. The value of a life is directly correlated to its potential for productivity. I wonder how ultimately conditional the value of life is in their big picture. Why should productivity be the determining factor if we’re producing something of ultimately conditional value?
Why is everyone over 40 considered less valuable? It’s not like they’re high maintenance! Is it just because at 40 you’re half-way done? You’ve got less potentially productive years left? Every day after 40 you’re ultimately worth less and less? I imagine that they’d attribute value to life from more than one source, potential for productivity being one of them. It doesn’t make sense to say productivity is inherently valuable; it must be dependent on the thing being produced.
It appears that more people believe Hitler than would like to admit.
Thank goodness we follow Someone who sees way past the externals and goes right for the heart. I think when we get to our true home, it might completely freak us out many of the “useless” people that are there, and how many “productive” ones were just to busy being productive to pay attention to our purpose.
The idea doesn’t surprise me, but it does bother me.
Our culture has no place for the elderly. They have ceased being good consumers and they suck the system dry. There is no room wisdom. It messes up the market.
suggestive comments??!! where were those?
as someone over forty, i only have one thing to say to the “intellectual elites”.
i bet i’m a better shot than you!
peace
Miller - speaking of people getting tagged as dispensible (and their possible reactions), I read an article from an Ivy-League-educated secular humanist the other day who argues that it would be right to kill people for privately holding certain beliefs (if rational secularists were in power). Since certain beliefs (read: religious=irrational) are so toxic to this guy’s version of ideal society, it is moral to kill the people who hold them, even if they hold them privately. And again… negotiable/relative value of humanity?
I guess this comes from living in an environment for 8+ years where the people we look up to are mostly all over 50, but I was sort of subconsciously assuming that 50′s – 70′s was like the prime of life… where you could potentially have enough maturity, experience, and wisdom to have a bit of clue (as opposed to 20-somethings who’s opinions carry little relative weight) but aren’t so old yet that you can’t whoop up on young punks like in Second Hand Lions if you need to. In other stuff I’ve read/am reading, that stage of life also has the highest potential for relational (and sexual) intimacy.
Don’t get me wrong – I like being young! But I’m not exactly dreading getting older. There’s a lot to look forward to (or pursue).
Kelly - should I post them on your blog? Houston had the best ones, if I remember right. I guess that’s the one good thing about us not having a laptop in class all those years… all of our suggestive comments only exist as hard copies and can’t be e-mailed all over the internet.
By the way… what is the primary text for your flashy new world story stuff? Or is that all just something Chris cooked up on his own? We’re getting Geography of Thought… is it in there?