Pig Herder

There is a lengthy and interesting piece at Frontpag Magazine today on the Terry Schiavo case. The author clearly comes down on the side of "choosing life." But he goes beyond choosing life when the patient's wishes can't be known, as in the case of Terry, to argue that even where a person has left a living will or healthcare directive, it is really just an act of imperfect human will; that even in competence we cannot say how we would want to be treated if we were to become incapacitated. At least I think that's what he's saying.

Before he makes this argument he identifies two types of liberalism. The first (and by implication the soundest) is "procedural liberalism (discerning and respecting the prior wishes of the incompetent person; preserving life when such wishes are not clear)." This, he says, has [given] way to "ideological liberalism (treating incompetence itself as reasonable grounds for assuming that life is not worth living)."

This ideological liberalism has us asking the wrong questions:

For all the attention we have paid to the Schiavo case, we have asked many of the wrong questions, living as we do on the playing field of modern liberalism. We have asked whether she is really in a persistent vegetative state, instead of reflecting on what we owe people in a persistent vegetative state. We have asked what she would have wanted as a competent person imagining herself in such a condition, instead of asking what we owe the person who is now with us, a person who can no longer speak for herself, a person entrusted to the care of her family and the protection of her society.

That is reasonable enough. But not far on we get this:

For some, it is an article of faith that individuals should decide for themselves how to be cared for in such cases. And no doubt one response to the Schiavo case will be a renewed call for living wills and advance directives--as if the tragedy here were that Michael Schiavo did not have written proof of Terri's desires. But the real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are.

Is he arguing that the wishes of a person as expressed in a healthcare directive should be ignored when they are a potential indignity? This would throw our entire legal system, not to mention the notion of small 'l' liberalism, into chaos.