Choice as absolute
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey CHOICE AS ABSOLUTE THE HIGHEST MORALITY? THIS COLUMN is not about abortion. I have to make that clear because it begins with some language which showed up in an ad...
...And therefore your God-given right...
...At the turn of the century morals were regulated much more strictly than they are today, but manufacturers were quite free to dump poisons into the air and water...
...The way you want it...
...And, given the right we have to make choices, isn't it possible for us to make truly stupid, wrong-headed, even terrible decisions...
...We do not make that assumption with regard to pollution, or military spending...
...This is what I mean when I say that a pervasive assumption shows through the rhetoric here and reveals a larger, important pattern...
...But I was also bothered by the fact that a young woman who was every bit as much in the pink as I am was so enthusiastic about the idea of suicide...
...others are only ugly and seem to mean nothing but pain...
...And therefore your God-given right...
...What about those who are simply tired of living...
...What caught my eye was a couple of sentences - or rather, a sentence and sentence fragment, since the ad is written in a style I first noticed in old Volkswagen ads, where a sentence is followed by brief non-sentences, something like this: "You'll like it...
...Is it wise...
...In this debate and in many others one form of rhetoric meets another...
...In The Myth of Sisyphus Camus calls suicide the most important philosophical question...
...It is one thing to say that a person has a legal right to hold whatever stupid ideas he or she wants to hold, because the alternative to allowing this freedom is politically dangerous...
...This could be seen as an indication that love, which cannot be measured, is nevertheless as real a force as gravity...
...Choice is the thing that makes us human...
...Rex Stout, author of the Nero Wolfe books, told an interviewer that his life had been long and good, but he was tired of it...
...The glorious age of capitalism, when poor children could be forced into labor and pollution was the free choice of the plant manager, was finally limited by the community, which realized that some choices are destructive...
...Our freedom is terrifying, and essential...
...What law ought to do is not irrelevant, but spending all of our energy on law is something like worrying about the plumbing, while assuming that a building's architecture will take care of itself...
...He said that he would like to kill himself, but his relatives wouldn't understand it...
...The abortion ad and this belief in the right to suicide both assume that choice is not only morally important...
...Some long and difficult deaths may be exemplary...
...choice in itself is made the highest morality...
...But I do find something repellent in the idea of voluntary death chambers for people who decide that they should die, and I tried to tell her what bothered me: maybe suffering has meaning, and our human work is not to impose our own wills on our lives, but to accept what happens to us and try to listen to it, learn from it - this is lame, I know, especially when it comes from someone who is not suffering...
...If there are forces and patterns of meaning which we must discover in order to be human, our culture not only does nothing to encourage our exploring that posssibil-ity - it positively discourages it as a serious consideration...
...But I knew that this was making light of an important problem: what about the hard cases, the people whose lives are a continual suffering...
...Does it make sense in the light of the fact that we will someday die...
...At one level, which may or may not be legal (depending on the state's mood) you do, of course...
...Because the results of moral decisions are not easily measured and may forever escape measurement, we act as if they were therefore less real, less important...
...Pro-abortion people would say that because child-abuse involves another individual it is not really an individual decision, but that is exactly the point anti-abortion people want to make...
...It doesn't matter that we didn't know the damage pollution would do...
...This is what the ad said: "We believe abortion is an individual decision...
...As a negative insight democracy makes great sense...
...It is the implications of human freedom which humans most fear, as Dostoevsky shows in The Grand Inquisitor...
...the item at the other end of the decision to abort is not a thing...
...What I am interested in is the way the assumptions we make about what it means to be human can show up where we don't expect to meet them, like plants which thrust through the pavement or grow in gutters at the tops of buildings...
...There has been a shift in our perception of freedom of choice and its exercise...
...But some important questions go along with this: do you have a right to make absolutely any choice at all...
...Infanticide...
...Not all choices are equal, obviously...
...Choice itself is elevated...
...But there are haunting signs of the limits to this attitude...
...Their opponents call themselves pro-choice - and who wants to be anti-choice...
...Unless God or language doesn't matter, this is nonsense...
...As a relatively young man who feels pretty good I can understand what he meant only in an abstract sort of way...
...But the questions which are constantly avoided are these: how should we live...
...If it can be chosen, it should be permitted...
...Where choice alone is enough, where choice is the ultimate moral category, all of the ways which might be chosen are seen as equal - and equally unimportant...
...But we assume that the area of morality is the only one in the world in which all choices are equally valid...
...Of course you have the right to make choices...
...There are studies, for example, which show that children raised in institutions, without much individual attention or love, are both physically and mentally less developed than other children...
...As a positive ideology it can be poisonous...
...Because it's built right...
...Therefore...
...But the structure of an argument can't help revealing the assumptions of its maker, and the language in this ad reveals assumptions which are fascinating...
...Suicide...
...And there is something to this...
...My first reaction to this idea was that I could imagine nothing more desolate than the prospect of looking into the basset-hound eyes of a professional sympathizer during my final moments, and I began to think of the times when I had longed for death - hangovers and long sermons leapt to mind...
...No one wants to be anti-life...
...This is the special insight of the modern West, and it is connected with such issues as suicide...
...When I said that even suffering might have some meaning, something to teach us, she said, "Well, dying is a choice...
...It is wise to legislate as little as possible...
...The em-physemic style doesn't make the thought behind the sentence and its trailing fragments necessarily wrong, but in this case the device underscored precisely the arguable assumption...
...If there is a meaning to the fact of our being alive and sentient, will we have blown it if our choices are stupid ones...
...people are eager to avoid those implications...
...The moral area is one which is wisely left rather open-ended where legislation is concerned, because in a pluralistic society there is the danger that a dominant ideology or religion will use the power of law to impose its views on people who do not accept them willingly...
...Stupor...
...There ought to be places, she felt, where people could go to commit an "ethical suicide," places where people could end their lives with professional help and without the feeling of guilt...
...it grabs you by the lapels...
...the very fact that a choice can be made is seen as a thing to be celebrated...
...You have a right to make a choice...
...What the law should or should not permit has been made the central feature of a debate which ought to have another focus...
...Never mind, for now...
...Rhetoric is meant to convince, to seem inarguably right...
...But many of us have come to believe that what is legal is moral, and what is not forbidden is therefore ethically acceptable...
...The anti-abortion people call themselves pro-life, and who can oppose them...
...It is quite another thing to say that all ideas and choices are in fact equal...
...There is something wrong with this, but also something right...
...There is a crude way of assuming that "objective" (i.e., easily quantifiable) data are more real than other data...
...Another, related to it, is the belief that all ideas and choices are equal, an idea as shallow as the belief that the will of the majority is always correct and must not be opposed...
...What matters is not what is chosen, but the act of choosing itself...
...Abortion...
...Think of some of the changes that might be rung on that sentence: "We believe that child-abuse is an individual decision...
...JOHN GARVEY...
...What is fascinating here is what the language really says: because something is an individual decision - as any decision made by any individual is - it is therefore a right, even one which has divine sanction...
...If life is not worth living, if it is meaningless, suicide is consistent with that discovery...
...it keeps some of the most heavy-handed forms of tyranny from taking over completely...
...I have to make that clear because it begins with some language which showed up in an ad sponsored by the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, an ad with which I disagree, but my disagreement with the ad and its sponsors isn't the main point here...
...Is it good to choose such and such a course...
...I was talking to a woman who was taking a course on thanatology (the word, stripped to its roots, means talk about death) and she was excited by an idea she had encountered in her reading...
...This is crazy, but it is one of democracy's weird side effects...
...we live with the consequences of our choice to pollute...
...Will we be free - as a community, as well as individually - of the consequences of having made our choices...
Vol. 109 • January 1982 • No. 1
