Thank you for this video. I love it, for many reasons including family history.
I would have liked to have seen the entire interview. It could well be that it was an enlightened and thoughtful discussion of serious moral and perhaps even theological issues. What we see here provides fodder only for speculation and conjecture.
I’ll bite. No one else seems to find discussions of the morality of these sorts of issues to be interesting and worthy of dialogue.
I love the reactions of the woman on the left and the way her reactions develop.
She is probably correct in her observation that Virginia Ironside’s view that many mothers would suffocate their child who was deeply suffering, is false. Most mothers would be repelled by the idea of suffocating her own child or any child even if that child is dying and in deep pain.
There are two issues here and it is not at all clear which one is the center of attention.
Ironsides claims:
1. Any mother would suffocate her suffering child.
2. It is morally permissible for a mother to suffocate her suffering child.
The woman on the left says almost nothing. She explicitly addresses only claim 1 – denying that claim 1 is true. The interviewer seems to deny that claim 2 is true. I will infer (from her facial expressions at particular moments) that the woman on the left also holds that claim 2 is false.
There is a monument in Salem, Ohio to one of my cousins who participated in the John Brown raid and was hanged for it. At one point he aimed his rifle at Col. Robert E. Lee and was about to shoot him. He didn’t fire. He might have prevented the suffering and deaths and hundreds of thousands of people had he killed him in 1859 at Harpers Ferry.
Why are mothers and all of us, in fact, repelled by such killings?
Research into brain functions tells us something about it, although none of it is clear and conclusive.
If these women were connected to brain-function monitors we would see “things happening” in their brains.
The unknown woman on the left (based on my inference that she opposes Ironsides’ claim 2) would display the synapse receptor proteins firing in the three emotion-related areas of her brain: the posterior cingulated cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex, and the amygdale.
Virginia Ironsides would display firings in the two classically cognitive brain areas lighting up: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal lobe.
Research into brain function is still relatively primitive, but quite a bit of research has been done on the brain responses to problems analogous to this.
Brain function research using the well-known trolley car and footbridge problems seems to show that the emotional centers of the brain are at the center of our reactions to the idea of “up-close” and personal killings.
Good source: Joshua D. Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul”
http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~jgreene/GreeneWJH/Greene-KantSoul.pdfThe German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who participated in various plots to kill Hitler and was hanged for it, makes an interesting point about confronting evil (deep suffering is an evil) and our tendency to cling to our comforting mindless and empty “images” (think of Plato’s allegory of the cave) of morality.
Bonhoeffer refers to a teacher who asks one of the girls in front of the class if her father is a drunkard. The child says no. Those with a strict legalistic mind-set (the Pharasees) would call the answer an outright and obvious lie.
Bonhoeffer says the lie contains more truth than if than child had acknowledged her father’s tendency to drink. One simply cannot demand “the truth” at all cost. If she had affirmed that her father was a drunkard she would have dishonored her father and that was a greater sin than “lying”.
These have become famous lines:
It is only the cynic who claims “to speak the truth” at all times and in all places to all men in the same way but who, in fact, displays nothing but a lifeless image of the truth…. He dons the halo of the fanatical devotee of truth who can make no allowance for human weaknesses; but, in fact, he is destroying the living truth between men. He wounds shame, desecrates mystery, breaks confidence, betrays the community in which he lives, and laughs arrogantly at the devastation he has wrought and at the human weakness which “cannot bear the truth.” He says truth is destructive and demands its victims, and he feels like a god above these feeble creatures and does not know that he is serving Satan.(Ethics, p. 361)
http://books.google.com/books?id=djM15pn4yOsC&pg=PA360&lpg=PA360&dq#v=onepage&q&f=falseThis is strong language and must be taken in context. I do not apply these criticisms to any of the women in the video clip.
Columbus Townhall > Forum > Politics > National > Culture / Society (Moderators: Peter, CTH Public Relations)
Topic: Sanctity of Life
