{"id":125493,"date":"2023-12-22T07:30:22","date_gmt":"2023-12-22T12:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=125493"},"modified":"2023-12-22T05:38:15","modified_gmt":"2023-12-22T10:38:15","slug":"the-critic-euthanasia-is-liberalisms-endpoint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=125493","title":{"rendered":"(The Critic) Henry George–Euthanasia is liberalism\u2019s endpoint"},"content":{"rendered":"

It is unsurprising that euthanasia consistently breaks its boundaries, always presented as\u00a0an expansion of choice as the route to kindness<\/a>. This is rooted in liberalism\u2019s fundamental presuppositions, for as George Grant\u00a0wrote<\/a>, \u201cit is the very signature of modern man to deny reality to any conception of good that imposes limits on human freedom \u2026 man\u2019s essence is his freedom. Nothing must stand in the way of our absolute freedom to create the world as we want it. There must be no conceptions of good that put limitations on human\u00a0action.\u201d\u00a0If there is no ultimate value towards which our lives point, then \u201cthe vaunted freedom of the individual to choose becomes either the necessity of finding one\u2019s role in the public engineering or the necessity of retreating into the privacy of pleasure\u201d.\u00a0We are\u00a0reduced to utilitarian measures of the good, achieved through harm reduction and happiness maximisation, materialistically defined.<\/p>\n

The result of the liberal conception of the human person is expressive individualism,\u00a0where<\/a>\u00a0\u201cpersons are\u00a0conceived merely as atomized individual wills whose highest flourishing consists in interrogating the interior depths of the self in order to express and freely follow the original truths discovered therein toward one\u2019s self-invented destiny\u201d.\u00a0This conception of the human person\u00a0privileges cognition, will, rationality and autonomy<\/a>\u00a0in defining full personhood. Our nature as embodied souls is largely ignored: if one cannot employ one\u2019s body to achieve the desires of one\u2019s autonomous, rational, willed cognition, then one cannot achieve full personhood.<\/p>\n

As a result, the constraints of our existential finitude made so explicit by disability\u00a0are\u00a0seen as immoral barriers to maximal autonomy attained through rational will. The unchosen bonds of interdependence, obligation, reciprocity and mutual loyalty that comprise the texture and meaning of\u00a0life are\u00a0denigrated. Liberalism discards the weak just as the Greco-Roman world once did, now done for reasons of supposed benevolence. From Locke onwards, liberalism has always seen some more capable\u00a0of, and\u00a0suited to, forming political society than others. Mill took this furthest in his proposal of colonisation and slavery for those less capable of freedom.<\/p>\n

It is not such a stretch from liberalism\u2019s definition of the individual\u2019s capacity for personhood to advocating the killing of disabled infants deemed incapable of fulfilling this. As Leon Kass\u00a0has written<\/a>, it is no surprise that those Germans who coined the phrase \u201clife unworthy\u00a0of life\u201d were\u00a0two liberals: a jurist and an academic. Better to curb the depersonalised source of the suffering with all haste. James Burnham viewed liberalism as the ideological legitimator and enabler of Western suicide. I\u2019m not sure he meant for\u00a0the title of his book<\/a>\u00a0to be taken so literally, across so many countries.<\/p>\n

Read it all<\/a> from 2022.<\/p>\n

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As assisted suicide is in the news again, re-upping my piece for @TheCriticMag<\/a> from last year, in which I argue that assisted suicide is not only wrong in itself, but that it\u2019s the logical endpoint of the liberal view of the human person https:\/\/t.co\/ZMK8sy5Pyh<\/a><\/p>\n

— Henry George (@intothefuture45) December 22, 2023<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n