The parents of the disabled girls Ashley in Seattle are catching hell from the self-righteous over their decision. Ashley should be glad, if she's capable of being anything, that she lives at a time and in a country where keeping her alive is given a moment's consideration, let alone whether it's unethical to provide her with anything less than the maximum lifetime experience of which she's capable.
I suspect that the "advocates for the disabled" have spent very little time in the type of situation which Ashley's parents have experienced. I have only done a small bit myself when my aged mother was dying and the task was less, was shared, and was clearly time-limited. I wouldn't consider doing what Ashley's parents have done, let alone face a lifetime of continuing to do it. But that's their choice.
However, let's put that choice in context. It's the same context as keeping Terri Schiavo alive. This is not a world with unlimited resources. When you decide to maintain someone in a vegetative (Schiavo) state in some vague hope of a better outcome, or near vegatative (Ashley) because you somehow enjoy the relationship, you spend millions of society's dollars. The spenders seldom pay it all or even much of it; it's passed on to everyone else in medical bills and insurance. But it's a ton of money for every such decision.
Meanwhile, in India, about 750,000 children under the age of 6 die annually as a result of bad water. Hardly anyone considers it a moral obligation of America to fix this problem, but we could do it easily for the amount of cash lost annually in Nevada casinos. On a smaller scale, we could have devoted the cash required to keep Terri Schiavo staring at the walls for years to saving thousands of young lives.
But we don't. We are ethnocentric, which is why we don't save children in India. But even in the United States, we have an infant mortality rate that is among the worst in the advanced industrialized world. For the cash we spend on silly grand gestures, we could save many American babies who would have the prospect of actual, full and productive lives.
We should not expect Ashley's parents to work any harder than they have, and we should not as a society consider extending more services for the severely disabled until we've taken care of our reasonable priorities.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I'd like to see us start to define these "where to spend limited resources" issues primarily in terms of return on our charity or tax or any investment.
Why is it so easy for people to think they are acting ethically when they advocate that we leave hundreds/thousands in poverty in favor of spending on a handful of very needy people?
Misguided spending is not only bad social and economic policy - it is fundamentally immoral to misallocate resources as we routinely do.
A very modest annual cut in the global (or just the US) military budget of about 100 billion would solve virtually all the key health and water infrastructure problems of the third world.
Politics is often the culprit as is emotion without reason.
I'd suggest there is a lot of moral wiggle room in terms of the ethics of spending more on your family or neighbors or country than on, for example, people who hate the USA.
However this does not absolve the greatest sin of our American prosperity - helping unwisely.
Post a Comment