TRIBUNE/OPINION – The promotion of euthanasia has been part of the project of progressive ideology for years, which presents it, like abortion, as an eminently therapeutic, even “ethical” act.
It is supposed to correspond to a social “progress” in the perception of human suffering and compassion, which the too famous Lambert affair did not precisely demonstrate. As for abortion too, it is maintained that this act would only concern marginal cases, very legally framed.
Mr. Didier Sicard, president of the National Ethics Committee, however showed, in 2012, that “the practice of euthanasia develops its own dynamic resisting any effective control and necessarily tends to widen, with a constantly shifting qualitative cursor that never goes back” (1)
Never go back: such is the intrinsic logic of progressivism, like that of cancer, moreover, as observed by Michel Onfray. He is ready today to develop all possible quibbles to distinguish “assisted suicide” from “euthanasia”, in order to mask this reality, which is nevertheless essential in both cases: it is a question of obtaining the legal recognition of a right to the infliction of death on innocent people by private persons, in violation of a dignity that no one can renounce, neither for themselves nor for others. (2)
Progressivism has, however, here again, its parade: why should the very notion of “dignity” of the human person escape its transformist alchemy? One of the founders of the Austrian School (3), the highly respected libertarian economist Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973), did not fail to reflect on this, writing this: “Beings of human descent who, by birth or because of an acquired defect, lack the capacity to act (in the broad sense of the term, and not only legally), in order to achieve practical effects, are not beings humans. Even if the laws and biology consider them as men, they lack, in fact, what specifically characterizes the human being. The newborn is not an active being; he has not yet gone through the whole trajectory which goes from conception to the full development of his human qualities. It is only after this development that it will become a subject of action” (4). Anyone who has not yet reached this term is therefore not yet a “human”; he who has accidentally or naturally exceeded it, is no longer one. “Dignity” therefore does not concern them.
The influential Australian philosopher Peter Singer (1946), champion of animalism, intends to erase any moral distinction between humans and other animals. He further argues, in his book Questions d’éthique pratique (5), the need to distinguish, among humans themselves, those who are ” people “, that is to say who are “conscious of themselves”, of those who are not, life, according to him, having no value in itself.
Who is not aware of himself – a child in his mother’s womb, a mentally handicapped person, a victim of an accident in a comatose state, an old man suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s disease – is not or is no longer a “person”. Peter Singer came to believe that the life of a healthy dog was intrinsically more valuable than that of a sick human, because that dog is capable of positive experiences that “the human animal” no longer experiences. because of his condition. There is therefore hardly any reason not to apply to the sick man the fate reserved for the sick dog.
These anthropological conceptions, patiently diluted in societies by these authors and so many others, with the active complicity of political educational institutions, lobbies and the media, are directly linked, as we can easily see, to the problems of the infliction of death in our societies: abortion, euthanasia, even infanticide. Peter Singer calls the latter of his wishes “post-natal abortion”, especially with regard to the disabled. The circle is then complete and any objection of a moral nature rendered futile. What cannot be qualified as a “person”, according to these criteria, can no longer be recognized as having human dignity. Will the law one day come to enshrine these conceptions?
It is not without importance to stress that the doctrinaires quoted here are not Nazi or neo-Nazi theoreticians. These are recognized authorities of the liberal or neo-liberal world. They did not teach their theses in secret, in Buchewald or Ravensbrück, sheltered by watchtowers and barbed wire, but in prestigious universities widely open to the audience of the “free world”.
Singer holds the chair of ethics (sic) at the American University of Princeton; Mises taught at New York University. Singer has just received in March 2023 the Frontiers of Knowledge prize, awarded by the BBVA Foundation, financed by the international banking group BBVA, which describes itself as a “responsible banking model aimed at creating a more inclusive and sustainable society”. Laudatoryly presenting Singer on its Foundation’s website, BBVA designates him as “one of today’s most influential moral philosophers” whose work “marked a turning point by extending the field of ethics to the animal domain”.
If we compare these theses to the slogans “My belly is mine! »abortive hysteria, promotions of surrogacy, or “rights” claimed to inflict death on who does not have to live, or who no longer has to live, according to opinions or utilitarian calculations, one thing is clear. These street or press slogans, like all subjectivizations of the meaning of life, are only the simplified and crude translations of what thinkers otherwise conceive coldly and teach with method and authority. What these cogitate to exasperate the desires of a society freed from all transcendence, where man is called upon to become the object of his own animal appetites, these are driven to claim it, more or less unconsciously drinking their thirst for new freedoms at the sources of their own death (to be continued).
Notes :
(1) “Report to François Hollande (…) on the end of life in France”, December 18, 2012, p. 85, §5.
(2) It should be recalled that under Article 16 of the Civil Code, “the law ensures the primacy of the person, prohibits any attack on the dignity of the latter and guarantees respect for the human being from the beginning of his life”. In a famous case, called “dwarf throwing”the Council of State ruled that even the victim of a violation of his dignity, which is a component of public order, cannot legally consent to it (CE, October 27, 1995, Municipality of Morsang-sur-Orge , No. 136727, published in the Recueil Lebon).
(3) It is important to observe that if the progressive currents work to undermine the foundations of society and of human nature itself, they do not disdain to sometimes look in the past for supposed sources of legitimacy. The Austrian School of Economics, liberal, thus claims to be heir to the School of Salamanca which shone in the Spanish Golden Age, when in reality their fundamental principles are contradictory, as Daniel Marín Arribas has clearly shown. in his book Destapando al liberalismo, Ed. SND Editores, 2018.
(4) Louis of Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on EconomicsLiberty Fund Inc, 2007.
(5) P. Singer, Practical Ethical IssuesEd. Bayard, 1997. About this author, one will profitably consult: JF Braunstein, Philosophy gone mad, Ed. Grasset, 2018, pp. 153-256.