Thursday, May 24, 2007
All Too Close to Home
With the very imminent (ahem) arrival of our third child I found Molly's article on Get Religion to be rather close to home. The article focuses on a practice known as Selective Reduction, a means of aborting unwanted fetuses when a mother is carrying more children than she would like to give birth to. For anyone who has seen/had and ultrasound, the descriptions of the "reduction" will be moving. My writing is crap, just read the article:
We call it ‘selective reduction’
As an afterthought: I was laying in bed last night waiting for my brain to finish its final laps and slow enough for sleep and I realized something. The doctor's "ethics" and those of the bioethicist he worked with can be directly traced back almost 260 years ago to Jeremy Bentham and the early voices of Utilitarianism. Now I am certain we can find roots and traces of this sad philosophy earlier on, but here we find it clearly spelled out. A rough paraphrase of Bentham's philosophy, the greatest good is that which causes the greatest amount of pleasure for the most people. It's pleasure economics, basically. In fact Bentham is known for having come up with Hedonic Calculus. Good job old chap!
With the very imminent (ahem) arrival of our third child I found Molly's article on Get Religion to be rather close to home. The article focuses on a practice known as Selective Reduction, a means of aborting unwanted fetuses when a mother is carrying more children than she would like to give birth to. For anyone who has seen/had and ultrasound, the descriptions of the "reduction" will be moving. My writing is crap, just read the article:
We call it ‘selective reduction’
As an afterthought: I was laying in bed last night waiting for my brain to finish its final laps and slow enough for sleep and I realized something. The doctor's "ethics" and those of the bioethicist he worked with can be directly traced back almost 260 years ago to Jeremy Bentham and the early voices of Utilitarianism. Now I am certain we can find roots and traces of this sad philosophy earlier on, but here we find it clearly spelled out. A rough paraphrase of Bentham's philosophy, the greatest good is that which causes the greatest amount of pleasure for the most people. It's pleasure economics, basically. In fact Bentham is known for having come up with Hedonic Calculus. Good job old chap!
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