This Blog considers assisted suicide/euthanasia, bioethics, human cloning, biotechnology, radical environmentalism, and the dangers of animal rights/liberation. My views expressed here, as in my books and other writings, reflect my understanding that the philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters. (The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of any organization with which I am affiliated.)
In this edition of my podcast What It Means to be Human, I return to Switzerland's Constitution declaring plant "dignity," and what that all means according to a government-appointed ethics committee. It takes really big brained people to worry about the "decapitation" of wild flowers.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:31 AM
6 Comments
I am a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the author of 12 books, including A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy, which is relevant to the issues considered by this blog.
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6 Comments:
GOVERNMENT-APPOINTED ethics committee? Now that's scary, just as hospital ethics committees are. First of all, people with ethics don't have to form committees and have meetings to discuss ethics; they just DO ethics. (I know, SHS has said that apes "do" ethics whereas humans are able to choose whether to do right or wrong; as far as I'm concerned the apes are ahead of us on that one.) What good are ethics if they are not acted upon? A government, like a hospital, that would even HAVE such a committee is dangerous.
I suppose the Swiss no longer have cut flowers in their homes, embassies, etc.? A government-run department of plant husbandry, preservation, etc. I can understand. It's even charming that the question of whether plants have rights would be considered. But the existence of an ethics committee in a government is scary. A government that has to "determine" what is right and wrong and doesn't already "know" is scary.
Again, Switzerland is the kind of place that has to regulate everything; it is in the national character, apparently. There are laws in Switzerland under which people can be fined for not having their curtains hung evenly, and regulating the way in which seeds can be planted, re straight rows, etc., I understand. Similarly the heroin addiction program mentioned not long ago on SHS (wasn't that Switzerland?) was explained by someone involved with running it as a way to end the unsightliness of people shooting up drugs in the street and public parks. Order is good, and it's understandable that a national culture would include social pressure to have everything looking nice, clean, neat, and orderly. This is after all the nation that makes precision timepieces, and they have done some pretty amazing things with medical technology (which didn't require animal testing to invent, and was based on the premise that life is worth living; again, the best results come from using the mind with attention to the value of soul, not from vivisection) that U.S. medicine doesn't seem to know about and that the FDA here hasn't approved, no surprise.
I heard a radio interview recently with a physician who was trained at Yale Medical School and has researched psychic phenomena and written a book on the subject; she is working on discovering the physical bases for psychic ability, intuition, etc. Thus far she has confirmed what many of us have observed, that animals have these abilities naturally, and discovered that it has to do with the right side of the brain. That explains why intuition gets to the truth via the kind of thinking we do with the right side of our brains, and why "science," which is more "left-brain-oriented," often misses the point and proceeds without perspective and reason. The brain has both halves for a reason, and true logic invariably turns out to coincide with what an "emotional" approach gets to straightaway. Which is why there is no reason for SHS to regret having spoken out passionately at Princeton and given those eggheads hell.
One could say that true logic is on all fours with emotion. Which would explain why non-human animals have more sense than we do. "Horse sense" says it all.
Ianthe -
The minute bureaucracy rears its ugly head, you know things are going to become a mess.
First, getting a group together to decide what's "ethical" or not will have some people railroaded into choosing something we'd otherwise know was unethical as the "ethical" choice, because they won't just go with the whole, "What's good for my fellow humans?" but will be presented all these facts and figures and charts and so on and so on that muddy the waters, so they're thinking now, "Say! This will save us thousands of dollars every year! That's got to be the way to go."
Pffth.
Oh! Completely off topic, but I recommend you look up Dr. Melvin Morse. He's not spiritual in any way, shape or form, but he's one of the foremost experts on Near Death Experinces and has shown how the right side of the brain has to do with them. I love his down-to-earth facts and the way he can calmly say, "NDEs are 100% real," without anybody looking at him sideways for his (cue the eye roll) "religious views." Since he doesn't believe in an afterlife per say, or God, he presents a clear, factual case, and I dig his writing.
Cue the blush, sorry, I just had to bring it up, because I'm totally with you on psi-abilities. I look at my cats and I *know* they know when I'm coming home from a shopping spree, even though I don't have a set time I come home from those. And they know when I want my chair, and refuse to share.
Yeah, sorry. Heh.
Animals! The big difference is that animals have brains and are subject to instincts and other brain-activated things that guide them in doing what's best to survive. Plants, no, they're designed differently, and why should they have "rights?" They should be cared for to make sure they're available for us to enjoy and for animals to have good, nutritious food, but plants aren't animals or people. You get to the point where you're legislating the "rights" of plants and suddenly you're infringing on the rights of animals. If Fluffy has a tummy ache and she needs to eat grass to make it feel better, I don't want some politician with too much time on his hands coming down on her for being a "bad dog" and not respecting the rights of the plants, and you *know* that's what would end up happening.
Hmmmmm.. Will have to keep this one in Mind for the next time a neighbor trespasses by lawnmower..... :D
Good grief! You mean no more taking dasies and pulling of the petals, "he loves me,he loves me not"??
What killjoys!
Stupidity reigns it seems!
T.E.: I think the minute an ethics committee is formed in those contexts, ethics has already gone out the window.
The highest value, for me, is aesthetics. I think we should respect and care for plants not because they are useful to us, but because they are beautiful. Everything was not put on earth for our sake; some things surpass us in ways we cannot match, and if we do not understand that, we are incomplete. We say so and so has the beauty of a rose, for example; I've never heard that a rose has as much beauty of any human. We're nowhere without them, and we have to remember that, with both plants and animals. Plants don't have brains in the form animals (and we are animals, too) do, but that doesn't mean that they don't have brains in their own form. They, too, act in such a way as to survive.
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