GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: A person? A thing? No, it’s a chimpanzee!

domingo, 3 de junio de 2018

A person? A thing? No, it’s a chimpanzee!

A person? A thing? No, it’s a chimpanzee!

Bioedge

A person? A thing? No, it’s a chimpanzee!

by Xavier Symons | 2 Jun 2018 |

A concurrent opinion by a New York Court of Appeals judge has raised hopes that chimpanzees will soon be given legal rights in the US.

On May 8, Judge Eugene M. Fahey handed down an opinion in which he agreed with the New York Court of Appeal’s majority ruling that chimpanzees Kiko and Tommy -- privately owned by resident New Yorkers -- should not be recognised as persons by the law; he stressed, however, that the ethical issues involved in the case were “profound and far reaching”, and that failure to grapple with these issues “amounts to a refusal to confront a manifest injustice”.

Fahey went as far as to say that “while it may be arguable that a chimpanzee is not a “person,” there is no doubt that it is not merely a thing”.

In a commentary on Fahey’s opinion, bioethicist Syd Johnson of Michigan Technological University said that the judge’s comments were unprecedented: “No high court in any US jurisdiction has ever recognized the non-thing-hood of nonhumans, nor the possibility that animals might be entitled to legal rights”. Johnson concurred with Fahey’s opinion, and while warning of the risks of introducing a concept of second-class legal status into law, said that chimpanzees deserve more legal recognition: “If there is no doubt that a chimpanzee is not merely a thing, as Judge Fahey himself stated, then there should be no doubt that justice requires more than to be treated like one”

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Some years ago, I received an unexpected phone call from a Melbourne magazine which described itself as the voice of the Australian Left. One of the editors wanted me to write an article about euthanasia activist Philip Nitschke. “He’s ****ing the proletariat over, comrade,” was his interpretation of Dr Nitschke’s mission. I obliged and was later rewarded with an invitation to the magazine’s Christmas party. I had an interesting chat there with an enthusiastic fan of Stalin’s philosophical works (“much misunderstood”), thus dispelling any misgivings I might have had about the magazine’s left-wing credentials.

Nowadays, “left-wing” almost certainly indicates support for euthanasia. That’s why I was gratified to read that the defeat of a euthanasia bill in Portugal last week was due to the opposition of the Communist Party. Its leader, João Oliveira, told the Portuguese parliament that:

“Faced with the problems of human suffering, illness, disability or incapacity, the solution is not to remove responsibility from society by promoting the early death of people in these circumstances, but to promote social progress in order to ensure conditions for a decent life.”

That’s what I thought left-wing politics was all about: protecting the disadvantaged. Have left-wingers in the Anglosphere lost their way?