A Challenge to Medical Ethics

Well. I am going to make a case against organ transplantation, as well as a case against the medical industry as a whole. It won’t be a popular stand, but I think it is cogent enough for those who bear with their disagreement with my ethical position to take from it something of value.

There are supposed to be medical ethics. We all have read stories about the many failures of living up to such a standard, and about just how impossible it is to enforce any of those standards. We all also have loved ones for whom we would likely do just about anything to preserve their lives. But what is it really all about?

The medical industry is a huge profit-driven enterprise. I have nothing against profit, but with the intensification of profit generally comes ever more corruption, and, a willingness to overlook ethics. This is clearly the case in the medical industry. But that isn’t my point here. My point is about the ethics of medicine.

We all hold dear the sanctity of life. We’re appalled to read when suicide bombers kill scores. Our humanitarian instincts are intact.

Others, for religious reasons oppose abortion, stem cell research and a host of other medically approved procedures basing their objections again upon the sanctity of life.

These are not my arguments, and I merely pull them up from recollection to establish that the concept of sanctity of life has some human-truth validity to it, however strained and contradicory the popular analysis might be.

I approach the problem differently. I write philosophy. In my work I have coined and cite here the moral imperative:

To live a life that detracts not at all from the lives others who will come into this world will have available to them to live after we leave it.

It is my assertion that if you cannot abide by the moral imperative, you are immoral.

Any reader here can take exception to the moral imperative, it is however, a cogent view, and one that has the strongest of philosophic arguments behind it. No one has the right for whatever reason to gamble the end of all humanity against some perceived possible gain no matter how altruistic, or even to imperil the future by cumulatively adding to future woes.

Most all medicine is immoral by this perspective.

The ethical considerations of medicine are set forth as, Do no harm.

This statement of medical ethics is millennia old, and it meant, do no harm to the patient.

Medical ethics however, can be easily expanded to mean, do no harm to either the patient or anyone else, which would seem to be implied by the original statement of medical ethics. I would argue, it is more implicitly implied than medical ethics in practice, is applied to any given patient.

It is easy to see and illuminate how the practice of medicine harms everyone else.

The use of antibiotics has undeniably created superbugs that have killed many millions of people. Blood transfusions have made of the collective of human being’s circulatory systems a polluted pond of infectious and potentially infectious disease, providing organisms an opportunity to mutate and transform themselves into real threats to every human, again, no doubt already having killed many millions of people.

The medical invention of organ transplantation too has provided infectious disease and potentially infectious diseases an avenue and a niche where existing and new pathogens can develop into widespread killers of millions of other humans.

Hospitals in fact, have become incubators of horrific diseases that have killed millions.

Medical professionals from the brain surgeon to the guy that washes the floor and the linen all know this is true.

The same and similar problems will arise due to stem cell research and its anticipated application.

In fact the same is true about just about the entirety of all of modern medicine’s treatments.

It is unfortunate for cognitive purposes that the religious community is so vocal in their opposition to medical propositions. Their arguments based upon gods ad infinitum carry little weight within the medical community itself, as they are easily defused by however faulty empirical logic as fallacy based upon religious belief.

I however, do not approach it from a religious perspective. I approach it from a philosophic perspective. And in order for the medical community to defeat my arguments, they need to defeat the moral imperative I have asserted, again:

To live a life that detracts not at all from the lives others who will come into this world will have available to them to live after we leave it.

For medicine to ignore this philosophic moral imperative is not only arrogant and reckless, it is immoral, just like a suicide bomber is immoral.

If you are a doctor who eases past this challenge, the very sanctity of every human life condemns you as immoral.

So, Bob’s Irish philosophic bloggers, blast away. If you’re not into medical ethics, let loose on the moral imperative of life. And, thanks, Bob!

Don Robertson, The American Philosopher