British ethicist: Senile should be “put down”

From Ed Morrissey at HotAir [boldface mine]:

In yet another revealing moment for nationalized health care, a highly respected British ethicist said that dementia sufferers should get euthanized in order to preserve resources for healthier people. Baroness Warnock, described as “Britain’s leading moral philosopher”, said that the government should license people to be “put down” and stop being a drain on society:

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are “wasting people’s lives” because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was “nothing wrong” with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be “licensed to put others down” if they are unable to look after themselves. …

Lady Warnock said: “If you’re demented, you’re wasting people’s lives – your family’s lives – and you’re wasting the resources of the National Health Service.

“I’m absolutely, fully in agreement with the argument that if pain is insufferable, then someone should be given help to die, but I feel there’s a wider argument that if somebody absolutely, desperately wants to die because they’re a burden to their family, or the state, then I think they too should be allowed to die.

“Actually I’ve just written an article called ‘A Duty to Die?’ for a Norwegian periodical. I wrote it really suggesting that there’s nothing wrong with feeling you ought to do so for the sake of others as well as yourself.”

Shocking? It shouldn’t be. When the State has the burden of providing “free” medical care, that care will get rationed in ways that are, unfortunately, all too predictable. Human life stops being sacred and instead becomes a commodity with a balance sheet. If bureaucrats decide that a particular life, or a class of life, has become a net negative, then eventually they will find ways to eliminate the liability.

Totalitarian governments have always worked this way; the shock comes from the same impulse occuring in supposedly enlightened democracies. We’re seeing a new kind of government these nanny states, though — a democratic totalitarianism that makes all of the choices for its subjects after they willingly give the bureaucracy the power of life and death over them. It’s a voluntary totalitarianism, and it starts by assigning government the role of caretaker from cradle to grave, the latter point coming at their choosing.

Western civilization built itself on the sanctity of human life and the rights of the individual. It doesn’t take much for Westerners to give up that birthright. The only incentive for voluntary slavery appears to be low-cost prescriptions and catastrophic hospital coverage. Once we buy into that system, all manner of personal choices get removed: the foods you can eat, the beverages you can drink, your pastimes, and apparently your right not to be murdered just to clear a hospital bed. . .

Read it all.

Lose faith in God we will lose faith in humanity

From the Times Online by Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth:

. . . The odd thing is that dignity seems to go hand in hand with humility. Only when people discovered that they were not gods were they able to reach their full stature as human beings. Finding God, humanity found itself. Losing God, it is at risk of losing itself. For the biblical view of the human person - free, responsible, lonely yet capable of redeeming his or her loneliness through the moralisation of love - is what gave Western humanism its singular glory. For once, the human person confronted God in a realm of freedom and was lifted to the heights.

When human beings lose faith in God they lose faith in human beings. They abandon their moral qualms about abortion. Some, like the biologist Francis Crick, have no problem with infanticide. They favour voluntary euthanasia, death on demand. They give their support to eugenics and “designer children”. For what, after all, are we but a random concatenation of genes, a handful of dust?

Faith does not disagree; “From the dust you came and to the dust you will return.” It merely adds one detail. There is within us the breath of God. We have immortal longings. Lose this and we will lose all else. We will have knowledge without wisdom, technology without reticence, choice without conscience, power without restraint.

Read it all.
H/t to TitusOneNine.