as small as a world and as large as alone

12:43am July 1, 2014

dendriforming:

I can’t reduce life or death situations to a philosophical principle or two. I don’t think setting aside context is admirable.

“This person said they would rather die than burden their family if they developed dementia. Now they have dementia and want to live. Should they continue getting food?”

“This other person said they wanted to be kept alive, even if they were in pain and indicated otherwise. Now they’re saying they don’t want to be alive. Is assisted suicide okay?”

“If you say no to the second, but yes to the first, you’re inconsistent. They’re exactly the same situation.”

And… there’s a level of abstraction where you can make that make sense. But the automatic assumption that that’s an appropriate level on which to make life-or-death decisions is the thing that bothers me most about medical ethics.

I don’t like the way that people are given these things as thought experiments in medical ethics, with no training about their own biases or the biases of the medical profession.  Even though those biases are upheld by a lot of peer-reviewed, replicated research.  (No, I don’t have cites on hand, my mind doesn’t work that way.  But I know it exists.)

These are situations where you have to be in the situation.  You can’t abstract a few facts out of the situation and expect people’s judgement to make any sense.  These are situations where the entire world, at one moment in time, is part of the decision you are making.  These academic philosophical types love to ignore context, to make things ‘purified’ by removing the heart out of the world and leaving the superficial remains.  And they think this is deep thinking.  It’s the shallowest possible way to think.

And cognitive ableism boy is it everywhere.

31 notes