Slippery Slope

Well, it was bound to happen.

And if fetuses are OK, then why not infants?  Peter Singer has already gone there, basically, so what's stopping us?

The problem with calling the slippery slope a logical fallacy is that it's something more than just a logical fallacy.  It also happens--a lot.  This is why people, at least those of us who are still old-fashioned enough to be concerned with things like morality, worry about whether allowing X will lead to Y.  With embryonic stem cell research, the first concern is that we are making a decision--however we euphemistically describe it--that either the blastocysts aren't "alive" and therefore warrant no moral consideration at all (also the stance many of the extreme pro-choicers take, as I've argued before, although I don't think that's how *most* pro-choicers feel), or, alternatively, that this life just isn't worth as much as the life of someone with Alzheimer's who may someday be cured by those stem cells.  Either way, we've made a moral decision, and because we are too cowardly to admit it, we have no language available to determine why this case is allowable but another, similar case might not be.  So, fetuses were bound to be the next step, and we will again hear argument that this must be done to help those who need kidney transplants and, anyway, these products of abortion would be *wasted*  It's really no different from organ donation, right?  Except that these fetuses had no say in the matter, but since we've already pushed fetuses outside the realm of moral consideration (via the abortion "debate," among other things), then that doesn't matter.

What's interesting to me in all this--or, one of the interesting things--is that the notion that we can or should find a cure for every disease and save everyone's life is taken as given.  One reason I find this interesting is that some of the same people who apparently have no moral concerns with the idea (if not, certainly, the reality) of extending human life as long as possible speak rather viciously about those of us who have decided to have children.  The decision of whether or not to have children, and if so, how many, is supposed by some to be a kind of cost-benefit analysis in which the overall cost of the child to the planet and to society's systems is to be considered a major factor.  The decision, on the other hand, of whether to prolong the lives of the sick and the elderly is apparently not.  I guess the sick and the elderly aren't responsible for any fossil-fuel use.  Or death is only bad if it occurs in someone who already knows how to talk.  Or something.  I really don't see any logical or ethical consistency there.

And, yeah, it's totally because I have something against people with kidney damage, and I just want to see them suffer.  Totally.  At least, that's how simple minds will read this, I'm sure (just like if you have any moral qualms about abortion, or at least about the way it gets framed, you must be anti-abortion, right?  Right!).  It's just that there actually is a complex moral question being hidden by a debate that purports to be value-neutral and only concerned with "science."  This is misleading at best.

Worse, though, is that by covering up what we're really talking about, we don't have the moral language (or the cojones) left to put the brakes on the real-life slippery slope when we want to.  That's one reason why social conservatives are right to be concerned about it, and, yes, it does matter, unless you're comfortable with a gradual speed up in the slide to nihilism. 

I think Eric Holder was mostly wrong in his assessment of our ability to talk about race.  For my money, we talk about race more than is really helpful.  But we sure the fuck are a nation of cowards when it comes to talking about morality.  The Christian right is comfortable with it, but they do it far too rigidly and often hypocritically (not that the left is less hypocritical in most cases).  Actually, we're worse than cowards because what we're usually trying to cover up is that we prefer one moral choice over another because it's either more convenient for us or for some other baldly self-interested consideration (e.g., once we're old enough to do so, we all fear disease and death, especially horrible ones like Alzheimer's.  Rather than cope with those fears on an adult level, we have any number of devices to cover over our fears and push them away, and if it means we can't find a way to stop the slide to infanticide (not that we have to slide very far for that one--we have more than enough infanticide, and instead of just letting those babies get thrown away, we should totally harvest their kidneys, and then throw them away), then so be it.  We just won't talk about it, and then it will go away.  Much easier that way.