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LA TIMES: Copyright Sunday, April 26, 1998 PERSPECTIVE ON ETHICS
Whom Should We Save First?
Whether outside a bank robbery or on board a sinking ship, every day we must make judgments that affect lives.
By DENNIS PRAGER
Whom to save? This seems to be the question of the moment as a result of two well-known events, one recent and one 86 years ago. The recent event was the Feb. 28, 1997, Los Angeles Police Department killing of two bank robbers--one of whom, some charge, could have been saved had the police desired to do so. The controversy revolves around the official rescue policy that stipulates saving people in order of severity of wound. Was this policy violated by first saving less severely wounded innocent people before attempting to save the mortally wounded bank robber?
The older event raised similar questions and has preoccupied millions of people since the release of the film "Titanic." With a ship sinking with far fewer life boats than passengers, whom do you save? Women and children? The young? First-class passengers? Those chosen by lots?
The questions raised by the North Hollywood shootout and the sinking of the Titanic are disturbing because they force us to confront a disturbing idea: Some people's lives are more valuable than others'. But we cannot turn away from these questions because increasingly we will have to confront them. For example, should we spend the same amount of money on health care for the very elderly as we should on the young? The money supply is not endless. Thus we also have to determine which diseases should receive more research money than others. Should we spend more researching AIDS or cancer and heart disease? Those who argue for AIDS say that unlike many cancers and heart disease, AIDS is almost always a death sentence, and it is killing many millions of people in the prime of their lives around the world. Those arguing for more cancer and heart disease research say that AIDS is entirely preventable, while cancer and heart disease are not.
Increasingly, we cannot avoid having to choose whom to save. As much as we are repelled at having to do so--inasmuch as it seems to imply the unspeakable, that we deem some people more worthy of life than others--there will be times when we have to make this choice. While good people can differ as to what criteria to use in making such choices, most people might be able to sign on to at least four guiding principles:
1. Rarely are there morally perfect answers. The Titanic provides the clearest example. No criteria would have been fair in choosing whom to save from the sinking ship. In our egalitarian age, many may scoff at saving women and children, but what would have been fairer? Casting lots? What if a mother won but not her 5-year-old child? Would saving the youngest have been a better choice? Why is a 30-year-old single person more worthy of saving than a 45-year-old mother who is raising three young children?
2. Politics or any other extraneous concern must never be allowed to intrude into this sacrosanct moral debate. There may well be powerful emotional arguments for America's having chosen to give considerably more funds per capita into research on AIDS than into cancer and heart disease, but the fact is that it has been the political clout of gay people, not apolitical moral concern, that has determined how much this country spends on AIDS research.
3. No law can replace common sense, human decency and a working moral compass. A rule that in all cases effort must first be made to save those most seriously hurt is morally untenable. There are too many examples when morality and common sense would demand its violation. If a murderer is mortally wounded and a civilian whom he shot was "only" paralyzed, should rescuers really first tend to the murderer?
In the North Hollywood incident, two men who had just robbed a bank left the bank firing AK-47 and M-16-type automatic weapons in every direction. They injured 16 police officers and civilians, and it was little short of miraculous that some innocent people were not slaughtered by these would-be murderers. Would it really have been immoral to save every civilian first?
Don't common sense and fundamental morality suggest that sometimes we ought to distinguish first between guilty and innocent rather than between severely and less severely wounded? And as much as it offends the pacifistic and egalitarian temptations of our age, is our society really a morally inferior place because a man died of the wounds he suffered in his attempt to murder as many innocents as possible?
4. Not all ethical and moral questions can be codified. Our society attempts to solve every problem with a law or policy. Yet from sexual harassment to whom to save first, laws and policies often cause more harm than good. Sometimes decent people with common sense simply must be left to make decisions. It is messy, but life is often messy, and a mature society recognizes that. - - -
Dennis Prager, the Host of a Talk Show on Kabc Radio, Is the Author of "Happiness Is a Serious Problem" (Harpercollins, 1998). on the World Wide Web: http://www.dennisprager.com
Copyright Los Angeles Times
4-24-98 On KABC radio AM 790, Dennis Prager was disturbed by the custom in some churches, at times, to allow parishioners to bring dogs. The custom obliterates the distinction between human and animals and retards the human rising to God. Prager discussed an Episcopal church on the Upper East Side, a rich church, a high church, the most ritualized of the Protestant churches, allowed the presence of dogs in its services. A caller said that this was not surprising as Christianity humanized God through its divinizing of Jesus. P pointed out all the anthropomorphic references to God in the Hebrew Bible. God gets sad, gets angry…etc… P claimed that Christians do not conceive of God as human anymore than Jews or Muslims do. In his second hour, DP talked about the death of James Ray, who killed Martin Luther King. DP was disturbed that MLK's widow thought the passing of Ray was a tragedy. Ray did not deserve to live says DP. He does not buy that Ray may not have carried out the crime. Ray maintained to his death that he was innocent. Assassination is a particularly heinous form of murder. P says that many Americans here, like with the Kennedy assassination, have a hard time admitting that one man can wreak such havoc. P recommended a book on the King assassination by Gerald Posner, who wrote a similar work about the Kennedy assassination. Prager referred to today's Wall Street Journal article on sentimentality.
By DIGBY ANDERSON
LONDON--When Pol Pot's death was reported at the end of last week, it understandably made the front pages of newspapers around the world. But in the Times of London and the Daily Mail, the leading British tabloid, the dictator's death was pushed down the front page to make room for something apparently more important. It was a report from a modest think tank, written by 12 rather dry academics and titled: "Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society." What on earth could they say to rate such attention? They said, or rather, since I edited the book, we said that Britain and modern societies in general were increasingly being driven by sentimentalism. The "mob grief" at Princess Diana's funeral showed just how sentimental the once famously reticent English had become. At that funeral, wrote one of our contributors, philosopher Anthony O'Hear, sentimentality was "personified and canonized, the elevation of feelings above reason, reality and restraint."
If true, this is something new. We are, after all, meant to be societies of the Enlightenment, of reason, reality and science. Yet the evidence is all around us that we are rejecting this tradition. ...What people want is to feel good about the environment, about animals, to feel concerned. They happily subscribe to myths about the blissfulness of nature and the hazards of the man-made environment, oblivious of the reality that raw nature has always been man's enemy. But they are simultaneously unwilling to give up any of the comforts of prosperity and development that taming nature has produced. Woe betide any politician who actually inflicted a state of nature on a high-income, long-living, microwaving, two-car, computerized population. What the people expect is a display of concern, the unveiling of initiatives that come to naught, or for someone else to pay for environmental controls.
Sentimentality is also there in the schools, and wherever else children are. The sentimentalist regards children as innocents, offers them opportunities to "fulfill" themselves, indulges them in play, and is never judgmental. Again sentimentality runs away from reality, the reality of children's nature, which has a capacity for evil and needs judgment and discipline.
It is there too in the modern obsession with health. No society ever has less reason to be obsessed with health. We live longer and healthier lives than anybody else. Yet we talk self-indulgently and endlessly about our health. We are on the lookout for every trivial hazard. We scour the newspapers for the latest story showing that there might be some link, however trivial, between a certain "lifestyle factor" and disease. And, at a time when medicine is better based in science--that is, in reality--than ever before, we spurn doctors' verdicts we do not like. Instead of taking with fortitude bad news about some disease we have caught, we rush after the witch doctors of alternative medicine, hoping one of them will give us a diagnosis more in keeping with our fantasies of how things should be.
In modern society even religion is frantic to adjust reality to appearance and indulgence. In this case it must adjust the ultimate reality, God, to a human image we feel comfortable with. He is not to be judgmental or set moral standards that are inconvenient for us. He is not to be described by immutable doctrines of truth but to be infinitely and variably malleable into our own image. His job, we must remind Him, is to be supportive to us. And when religion is emptied of doctrine, tradition and discipline, all that remains is cozy feeling.
If sentimentality creates a fake world with fake churches containing no religion and fake schools containing no education, then no wonder our politicians produce fake policies. Welfare policies such as the huge handouts in Europe or "affirmative action" in the U.S. show the same childish, sentimental impatience with the human reality. They are an attempt to make people better off without the crucial and painstaking ingredient of anyone's true welfare: his own effort and responsibility.
We might further exonerate the politicians by noting that they have to talk to their electorates through the popular mass media. And the mass media are the greatest sentimentalists of all. What they want are not trends and statistics but the human-interest story that will enthrall the reader and viewer. Does this tide of sentimentality matter? Yes, because it is essentially escapist. It involves the substitution of appearance for reality, of wishes for facts, of self-indulgence for restraint, and of victimhood for personal responsibility. It is not just cultural conservatives who should fear the rise of sentimentality. Anyone who values reason and civilization should be alarmed.
Mr. Anderson is director of the London-based Social Affairs Unit, a think tank, and co-editor of "Faking It: The Sentimentalisation of Modern Society" (Social Affairs Unit).
A female caller agreed with Prager about not bringing dogs to a house of worship. But what about rabbis who kick kids out for being noisy. P agreed with such rabbis' behavior. Religious services are to elevate the human. This is difficult. Crying children disturb that process. You take a crying kid out of a movie theater. Religious services are more important than movies. Prager says his childhood talk radio hero was Gene Shepherd on WOR. He took no calls and had no guests, and just talked for three hours. P asked if he would be allowed to do that? P laughed. P also laughed over the latest SUV which sold for $60K and is equipped with an anti-aircraft gun. P was annoyed with a 55-year old unmarried woman who used a sperm donor (invitro fertilization) to get pregnant. P was particularly annoyed that she was unmarried. The woman gave birth to four children at once. P thought that the following news, on page three of today's LA TIMES was not news.
SACRAMENTO--Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jane Harman may have broken the law by hiring an immigrant nanny in 1989 who had no legal authority to work in the United States. Harman says she thought at the time that her actions were legal because the immigrant from England was pursuing work authorization, with Harman as her U.S. sponsor. "By continuing the sponsorship process, she felt that she was proceeding appropriately," said Kam Kuwata, Harman's campaign manager. "In all candor, I don't think she has given it a lot of thought since then." But federal authorities say Harman violated U.S. immigration laws if she employed the nanny before the application process was complete. Since 1986, federal law has provided for fines of up to $2,000 for employers of undocumented workers. Harman, currently a third-term congresswoman from Torrance, volunteered the information about her nanny during a discussion with reporters in 1993. At the time, Harman was a first-term congresswoman defending Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird--two of President Clinton's choices for U.S. attorney general whose nomination prospects were scuttled over similar accusations about their domestic help. Harman complained to her hometown newspaper, the Torrance Daily Breeze, that the Wood and Baird episodes posed an unfair "litmus test" for women who are trying to balance careers and family. Harman said she sympathized with Baird and Wood because she raised four children while pursuing her own career ambitions through jobs in the White House, in a prestigious Washington law firm and in Congress. Prager thinks it is irrelevant if a candidate had an illegal nanny or did not pay the Social Security tax for her nanny. P cares more about her views on bilingual education, vouchers, taxes… How many times would the LA TIMES feature an article on Harman's ideas? Prager has an article in Sunday's LA TIMES. The paper asked him to write an opinion piece on choosing who will live and who will die. P sat up all Thursday night thinking about it and writing his essay. P says the police say they saved wounded citizens before a wounded bank robber at a shootout in North Hollywood last year. Dennis lectured on happiness at LA TIMES books fair at UCLA on Sunday at 11AM at the Barnes and Noble booth.
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