Human Exceptionalism

A court in Ontario, Canada, has ruled that a patient’s desire to be euthanized trumps a doctor’s conscientious objection. Doctors there now face the cruel choice between complicity in what they consider a grievous wrong—killing a sick or disabled patient—and the very real prospect of legal or professional sanction. A little background: In 2015, the Supreme Court of Canada conjured Read More ›

Each year, Gerber, the baby food manufacturer, holds a “cute baby” photo contest, the winner of which receives a $50,000 cash prize and may appear as a “spokesbaby” to advertise the company’s products. Media coverage of the contest is usually limited to sweet human-interest pieces. Not this year. The contest made huge news when Lucas Warren, a child with Down syndrome, was Read More ›

I will use treatment to help the sick according to my ability and judgment, but never with a view to injury and wrong-doing. Neither will I administer a poison to anybody when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Similarly, I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion. —The Hippocratic Oath The Read More ›

We’ve seen it happen: A new assault on the sanctity of human life appears—say, infanticide being promoted in a major bioethics journal, or officials in Iceland bragging that no children with Down syndrome are born there, thanks to prenatal genetic screening—and some horrified opponents respond in horror, “That’s what the Nazis did!” It’s an easy accusation to wield, but rarely Read More ›

Joseph Fletcher (1905–1991) was one the most influential philosophers and bioethicists of the twentieth century. His advocacy blazed the path for many of the radical social transitions we are experiencing today. He gained fame as the prime proponent of “situational ethics,” popularly known as social relativism. But his work in bioethics eroding the sanctity of human life and promoting a Read More ›

President Donald J. Trump could care less about biotechnology. How else to explain his total failure to engage the most important and portentous biotechnological issues of our day? In fact, the Trump administration’s policy void on these issues is so complete the president hasn’t even taken the rudimentary step of appointing a bioethics advisory council to advise him, Congress, and Read More ›

Kiss today goodbye And point me toward tomorrow. We did what we had to do. Won’t forget, can’t regret What I did for love. —A Chorus Line Imagine the pain. Imagine the sleepless nights. One minute you are leading an ordinary life. Then something awful happens to someone you love—a heart attack, an accident, or a disease. Suddenly, not only Read More ›

As the Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare withered on the vine, the self-described socialist senator from Vermont rushed to fill the political vacuum. Bernie Sanders’s Medicare for All Act of 2017 is a single-payer proposal that shamelessly attempts to harness the popularity of Medicare, the government insurance program for the elderly. But the system Sanders proposes would be Read More ›

We live in metaphysically desolate times. An increasing number of us—particularly among the millennial generation—now reject Christianity and other non-materialistic faiths as superstitious relics, vestiges of a time before science uncovered the truth about existence. The less polite even mock traditional religious believers by pretending to worship a faux-god, the great flying spaghetti monster. Scorn faith as they will, moderns can’t escape Read More ›

As I wrote in The War on Humans, environmentalism has become increasingly anti-human, both in proposed policies–such as those that would reduce economic vitality and thwart human thriving–and the goal of reducing human population. The latter goal would require particularly tyrannical impositions to actually effectuate. Voluntary family planning offers great benefits. But actually reducing our numbers would require iron-fisted tyrannical measures. After all, China’s Read More ›