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Aswad -> RE: court forces brain radiation on child (12/25/2012 8:22:17 PM)
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ORIGINAL: tazzygirl
If we amend that to the best medical information, then I can agree. Without the qualifier, the quality of "information" os just far too subjective.
I'm fine with that amendment. I should've made it in the first place.
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But, medically, baseline would be previous to a disease process.
I never said "medical baseline", and to clarify, I did not mean medical baseline (i.e. health), either. The disease occurs without any decision on the part of the parents, and that brings us to the baseline from which action is taken. That action can leave things unchanged, better or worse. Acting to worsen things relative to this baseline is actively causing harm. Not acting to improve things relative to this baseline is an omission, not the same as causing harm. I think it's a shitty choice, if one has the option to unambiguously improve, but I wouldn't put it on par with actually actively causing harm, and I wouldn't want the State to intervene on that grounds alone. Certainly not when it's clearly not an unambiguous improvement, or when the metric of improvement is unclear (such as when dealing with the value assessment of length of life vs quality of life and the definition of the meaning of the latter term).
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Lets say diabetic. With insulin and diet, children can lead a normal life. Without, they dont have long at all. Its that absence that I could argue would have both an active and a passive intention of harm.
And yet, it's just shitty parenting, not murder, to my mind. Now, feeding the kids sugar if they can't produce enough insulin, that we could argue is active harm, and without taking the appropriate measures such as diet or insulin or both it's virtually impossible to feed a diabetic child without causing active harm, so you could certainly make a reasonably neat generalization there. Similarly, I suppose you could make a case that not feeding your child is essentially the same as not claiming the child at all and treat it as an orphan, if that case is successfully made.
Plenty of room for deriving coverage for many of the usual cases without going the default route of granting the State the blank check authority to intervene in any and all parenting decisions based on whatever passes for good parenting at the time. Heck, most people wouldn't know good parenting if it bit them on the ass, anyway, let alone most beurocrats. The State does not have the capacity for responsibility, accountability or conscience, among other things, all of which are essential qualities to be able to fill this role in the first place, assuming one wanted to accord it such authority.
It's administratively convenient to go with "we can do as we like", rather than actually deriving some solid ethical principles about what a State can and cannot do with respect to its citizens, but that doesn't make it the right course to pursue. And given the choice, I prefer for mistakes to be made hands-off, rather than hands-on, because hands-on puts the blood on our hands, while hands-off merely means we weren't as good as we can be, which is inherently always going to be the case.
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And yet, with the potential, society simply isnt prepared to allow someone so young to "die".
Which shows the underlying assumption I don't approve of: the notion that it's automatically everyone else's business what a parent does, and that a parent's choices are somehow inherently subject to societal approval. If we're going to structure everything based on all that is wrong in the world, and pander to the lowest common denominator, we've already lost. Most parents do a decent job. Some do a poorer job, some do a better job.
IMO, we can't regulate ten fellow citizens that do the right thing, just to be able to regulate one fellow citizen that did the wrong thing. In the courts, it's considered better to let ten guilty parties go than to wrongly punish one innocent party. This principle should carry into all aspects of the State exercise of authority, in my opinion, or be abolished from the justice system altogether, one or the other. Either we have this principle and treasure it, or we don't have it at all, or we're inconsistent hypocrites.
It's not the bad seeds that concern me. I frown at them, same as anyone else, but I don't define myself in terms of the negatives. It's the good seeds I am concerned with. The downside with giving people the freedom to fuck up is that some will indeed fuck up. The downside with not giving them the freedom to fuck up is worse, because that affects all those that weren't going to fuck up in the first place.
For the good, the law must be just, else the law is unjust, and it becomes every (wo)man's obligation to disobey it.
If we posit my standards of what I think the minimum required of a parent should be, nine out of ten parents would fail. But I'm not out to impose my standard. I'm out to permit people to live their lives as they will, so long as they don't actively prevent others from this same pursuit of life, liberty and happiness. Children don't have that option, because they lack the freedom and independence required to do so. Parents have to set them up. Parents, not the kibbutz, not the State. Others can help, sure, and society would be wise to invest in its children. But they are contributors, not the actual parents. Nor should they be.
Would you approve of my standards of parenting being imposed on you?
Thought not.
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Its one thing to go in knowing there is only a 5% chance this will work. But the courts were told an 80%. Until we are really ready to allow parents to actively make the decision to let their children die, this is the system we have for such disputes.
I'm ready to allow parents to make the decision to let their children die. Emphasis on let, as opposed to cause.
From what I was told, the courts were told outdated information, but that just underlines the bikeshed principle at work in such cases.
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Even if the parents had been in complete agreement, the hospital or physicians could have initiated the same suit, resulting in the same decision.
Which is doubly screwed up and illustrates that this is a clear cut case of what I'm opposed to as a means.
The ends are still a decent intention, but we can pave a very unfortunate road with those.
IWYW,
— Aswad.
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