Barbarians in Tweed Coats

Assisted suicide crusader Jack Kevorkian is headed to the University of Florida for an October 11 speaking engagement — which will have the college pay him $50,000. Subsidized by taxpayer dollars mind you. So the same government which threw him in jail is now paying Dr. Death to wax eloquent on creative ways to murder.

This is just another example of 21st Century Barbarian chic which has become the intellectual zeitgeist of our universities. My ire is not so much focused on Kevorkian. The crazies will always be amongst us and he numbers among them. It’s the tenured troglodytes in tweed in our universities passing on the culture of death to our children.

Bluntly stated, many bioethicists in our universities today don’t believe that humans are of intrinsic moral worth. Rather, what matters is whether “a being” has sufficient cognitive capacities. Those who don’t measure up are denigrated as “non-persons.”

Folks, when we separate “beings” from “people” we delve into Hell.

Peter Singer of Princeton argues that unless an organism is self-aware over time, the entity in question is a non-person. Now mind you Peter Singer is a founding member of the Great Ape Project, which seeks to persuade the United Nations to adopt a Declaration on Great Apes awarding personhood to non-human great apes. His contradictions become laughable but his intentions are dead serious. His theories and many of his colleagues would reduce some of us into killable and harvestable people.

The British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance professor of bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, has defined a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence.” Harris wrote that killing human non-persons would be fine because “Non-persons or potential persons cannot be wronged” by being killed “because death does not deprive them of something they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.”

Georgetown University bioethicist Tom Beauchamp has suggested that “because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they…might be aggressively used as human research subjects or sources of organs.” Hey guys, remember that Georgetown is a Catholic school. It seems that the gates of hell have at least prevailed against some Catholic schools.

Beauchamp is talking here about harvesting organs without consent. The worst monsters of the 20th Century were cloaked in military uniforms, spoke from stages to thousands and dispatched troops to kill millions. The 21st century’s greatest monsters are wearing tweed jackets and unironed Dockers in classrooms and may yet do more damage.