Shades Of Reality

Chapter Twelve

[I have intentionally saved this chapter for near-last because it contains some of the most difficult and controversial concepts that result from applying the fuzzy paradigm to issues in American society.]

Let us now consider that famous line that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

Of course, we know that everybody is not equal in terms of their physical attributes or intelligence or skills. We all have our individual strengths and weaknesses. (If everyone were exactly alike, then there would be no need, for example, to elect our government officials; we could simply choose them at random.) Instead, what Jefferson meant by "Equality" was that everyone is seen as being equal in the eyes of the law.

However, what may have seemed "self-evident" to Mr. Jefferson and his contemporaries is somewhat dubious in the light of the fuzzy paradigm. Since law is fuzzy (at least any kind of realistically meaningful law), then might not Rights and Equality also be fuzzy? Is every human being exactly equal, or is everybody just almost equal (i.e., equal "for all practical purposes")? The answer to the question depends on the interpretation of the word "human."

I strongly suspect that there are many readers (especially the anti-abortionists) who are still having trouble understanding the concept of "degree of being a human." They probably still think that something either is a human, or else it isn't. And even if it's only the slightest bit human, then it must be 100 percent human. (They are still "drawing the line at zero," and then equifying.)

Unless you are a creationist, you probably accept the concept that all animals (including Man) are biologically related, and that all present-day animals evolved from older and more primative forms of life. And even if the particular species homo sapiens didn't evolve, there is still evidence that pre-historic humanoid creatures (such as Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, etc.) did once live on earth, regardless of how they got here.

In any event I would like to raise the question: If these creatures were still alive today, would they be considered to be "human beings," or would they just be another name on the endangered species list? Would killing one of them be considered "murder," or would it be considered as being nothing more than illegal "hunting"? Would they be granted equality with the rest of mankind? Would an eighteen-year-old member of their species have the right to vote if it lived in the United States? Would any of them even have any rights? Would we regard them as being our peers, or our pets?

Of` course such creatures don't exist today, and so we can pragmatically avoid having to answer these questions. But consider the possibilities offered by the new field of genetic engineering. By slightly altering the structure of DNA it is possible, even today, to change the genetic characteristics of plants and animals. Someday it might even be possible to start with a monkey and end up with a human being by genetically creating the entire continuum of "missing links"! If this were ever accomplished, which of these new "species" would be human and which ones wouldn't? (An anti-abortionist, with his sorites-type of reasoning, would have to conclude that they would all be human, including the monkey!)

If "rights" and "equality" are to be considered as all-or-nothing ideas, then where on the continuum of missing links would be the cutoff point separating those creatures that have rights from those that don't? Which creatures would have been created "equal" to men, and which ones would have been created "unequal"?

We don't need to wait for the prospects of genetic engineering to come to fruition before we can start thinking about these kinds of questions regarding "human" rights. Even today we can ask: Is every person on earth totally "human"? How about a cold-blooded murderer, or a molester of children who feels no remorse for his actions? Are they to be regarded as being 100 percent human and given all the "Rights of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," just because their bodies have an anatomical structure that we associate with the term "human being?" Or is there something more to being a human being than merely having a prescribed set of body parts?

On the other side of the coin, consider an anencephalic "person," one who is born without a complete brain and who therefore achieves little or no degree of consciousness. They too look human, at least on the outside. But then so does a Barbie doll. Can a living entity be considered to be human if it doesn't even have a human brain? Should such an entity be granted rights and be considered equal to someone with a brain? Should we even "feel sorry" for such an entity for its having to exist in such an unfortunate state? Should we feel sorry for a Barbie doll that looses one of its plastic arms?

Of course the first response that comes to mind is that a Barbie doll isn't something that's alive, and so the comparison is trite. So let's ask the same kinds of philosophical questions about something which is living: Should we feel sorry for every human egg that goes unfertilized? After all, it too was deprived of the "Right" to develop into a complete human being.

And how about the other half of the component, the millions of potentially could-have-been human beings represented by unused sperm? Shouldn't we also feel sorry for them? Shouldn't we feel obliged to bury each of these half-potentially human entities three feet underground in cemeteries (semi-teries?) and bring them half-bouquets of flowers while we kneel (on one knee) and cry tears from one of our eyes? Or should we, in our so characteristically Aristotelian fashion, simply "draw the line at zero" and have compassion for only those living entities that were lucky enough to become completely conceived?

Consider the following somewhat far-fetched and admittedly contrived scenario: You have just built a time-travel machine, and you have gone back in time to the year 1932. As you wander around you suddenly come upon a building which is on fire. On the roof of the burning building are two men trapped by the flames. One of the men is Albert Einstein. The other man is Adolph Hitler. There is just enough time to rescue one, and only one, of the two men. Which man would you choose to save?

If you are a true believer in the notion of Aristotelian equality and the right to life, then you would have to flip a coin to decide. (Remember that in 1932 Hitler was not yet at war with the United States, and was therefore not an enemy.) But if you are honest and realistic in your assessment of the problem, you will easily realize that all human life is not equally valuable.

If the above scenario seems too unrealistic or too extreme, then consider the same scenario, only let it take place today instead of in 1932. Instead of Hitler and Einstein, let it be a school teacher and a drug pusher who are trapped.

Our society presently divides (and equifies) everyone into two distinct groups: Those who have the right to live (such as you and I), and those who don't (such as prisoners on death row). There is no middle ground. There are no shades of gray to that right. It is black and white. Everyone who has a right to life has exactly as much of that right as everyone else, be they saint or sinner, scholar or idiot, dope addict or drug pusher. And society seems to feel that all of these lives must be preserved at all possible cost.

Let's return for a moment to our discussion of the genetic engineering experiment and ask the question: which of the "missing links" would have the right to life, and which ones wouldn't? Perhaps, in an attempt to avoid being forced into selecting an arbitrary cutoff point, you might now decide to "draw the line at zero" and adopt the strategy of claiming that all living things (not just all "men") are endowed by their Creator with the right to life. But that strategy (as we saw in the discussion of "pro-life" in the previous chapter) leaves us with very little to eat.

When a person commits a crime and is sent to prison for a brief term, he is partially deprived of his Right to Liberty. (I say "partially" because the deprivation is not permanent -- he will be released after his term in prison is over.) And even a convict out on parole is still not totally free. He must maintain contact with his parole officer, and he must refrain from participating in certain activities that would otherwise have been allowed had he not been on parole. So even under our present system of democracy the Right to Liberty is already clearly a matter of degree.

Even an honest "law-abiding" person who has never been arrested is not totally free. Most of us have to work for a living, perhaps doing jobs that we don't always enjoy having to do. Plus, we have obligations that we must honor to family, friends, and aquaintences.

Nor does the Right to Liberty mean that we can just come and go absolutely whenever or wherever we please. There are many "restricted areas" where only "authorized personnel" are allowed to enter.

Of the three Rights mentioned in the quote from the Declaration of Independence, the Right to the pursuit of Happiness is probably the one that is most obviously fuzzy. As long as your Happiness occurs in complete isolation (or maybe in the presence of a consenting group), then the Right is fairly crisp. For example if you are at home and you want to watch a particular TV show, or read a certain book, or have sex with your partner, then you should have a high degree of Right to do so.

But quite often, your Right to the pursuit of your Happiness can conflict with somebody else's Right to the pursuit of their Happiness. For example it may give you Happiness to smoke cigarettes. Do you therefore have the Right to smoke? It just so happens that it gives me Happiness not having to breathe somebody's secondhand smoke (especially inside transportation vehicles and other areas of forced confinement). Do I not therefore have the right to enjoy clean smokeless air? You want to smoke. I want you to not smoke. Once again we have the Aristotelian conflict between A and not-A. Therefore the Right to smoke is clearly a fuzzy Right.

But sometimes the fuzziness in the Right to pursue Happiness is not quite so immediately obvious. Should you have the right to use heavy drugs? The superficial answer might be that it should be entirely OK, since you would be only harming yourself and nobody else. (And it should never be illegal for anyone to harm him/herself.) But more often than not, the use of such drugs leads the user into a life of crime in order to get money to continue financing their addiction. Once again we arrive at a conflict between your Right to pursue drugs, and society's Right to not have to be bothered by you.

Since it should not be against the law for anyone to do potential harm to themself, there should not be laws requiring the use of seat belts or motorcycle helmets. If someone prefers to "pursue his happiness" in a foolish or risky manner, then that should be his business, as long as his actions don't endanger anyone else. It should not be the preogative of the government to enact particular laws just because those laws might be "good for us." Otherwise, they might just as well start passing laws making it illegal to do such things as to eat candy or watch TV for prolonged periods of time, since neither of those activities are very good for us either.

We have already pointed out that, even in the eyes of our present legal system, everybody most definitely does not have the same Rights and Equality. You remember that eighteen-year olds have the Right to vote, but seventeen-year olds don't have that Right. Therefore "we can hold this truth to be self-evident" that seventeen-year olds are not created equal to eighteen-year olds! (Or, as George Orwell might have said, we may all be equal, but clearly some of us are more equal than others.)

Furthermore, it would seem that society already subconsciously acknowledges the idea of partial Rights. Hardly a day goes by without someone uttering an expression like, "You don't have any Right to do (such and such)." Notice the choice of the wording, "any," as opposed to simply saying "You don't have the Right." The word "any" automatically implies an acknowledgement of potential quantification.

As un-American as I know it sounds, we are eventually going to have to acknowledge the reality that every warm body on our planet is not exactly equal to every other warm body, despite Mr. Jefferson's claims to the contrary. The only way we're going to be able to provide meaningful and realistic answer to questions about rights and equality is to acknowledge those concepts in terms of shades of gray:

Furthermore, Rights and Equality are not concepts endowed on us by our Creator. They are concepts endowed on us by ourselves. And as such, we can adopt whatever rules we want for playing those kinds of games. But if we insist on trying to continue the games in an Aristotelian fashion, we are someday going to find ourselves facing the very same kinds of tough questions that the abortion issue used to face. If we proceed with genetic engineering and apply all of its potential, where will we "draw the line" between those life-forms that we will consider as being "human" (and which are therefore "equal" and "endowed with unalienable Rights"), and those that just miss falling into that prestigeous category? And even if we never actually perform such experiments, we have still already opened up a Pandora's box merely by recognizing the possibility.

Let's ask ourselves, how does nature (or physical reality) deal with the concepts of Rights and Equality? The answer is -- it doesn't. Nature does not simply endow Rights to animals. All "Rights" have to be earned. If an animal wants the Right to life, then it must be clever and resourceful enough to keep itself from being eaten. Therefore, a sick or injured animal doesn't have exactly the same "Right" to life as a healthy one. Nature does not demand that a lion give fair and equal treatment to all animals, injured or not. An injured animal becomes the lion's dinner. In nature, the law is, "survival of the fittest."

That is also the principle behind the concept of natural selection in evolution. Those genetic traits that are beneficial to the survival of a species endure, and those that are not get eliminated. But by declaring everyone to be equal (and simply handing over "Rights" to everybody), mankind has stopped the natural selection process for the species homo sapiens. Everyone is now equally "fit." Everyone survives to contribute to the gene pool. Evolution has been halted.

Or perhaps it would be more correct to say that evolution is now proceding in a haphazard fashion now that natural selection no longer guides its direction. Instead of the undesireable traits being eliminated from the system, they are allowed to continue evolving along with the good.

In every biological system, be it a single cell, a complete animal, or an entire society, there is a need to eliminate waste material. Without a mechanism for removing such poisons, the system will eventually die. (In our bodies, our kidneys are a part of this waste-removal mechanism.) Natural selection may therefore be viewed as the "kidneys of evolution." But now that its "kidneys" have been removed, how can we keep human evolution from becoming poisoned?

The first step is to recognize and accept the fact that some parts of the system are indeed simply waste materials that need to be eliminated. And since we are the ones responsible for the kidney-removal operation, it is now incumbent upon us to prescribe an appropriate method of dialysis. In other words, the future course of human evolution is now in our own hands.

In the past, the course of evolution was controlled entirely by nature (i.e., "natural" selection). While it was left to fate (or God) to decide who specifically would survive and who specifically would die, natural selection would help skew the stastistics slightly in favor of those creatures having advantageous attributes. But now we, have assumed a large portion of the role formerly played by God. Now when nature says to a person, "It's time to die," we step in with a wonder drug or a surgical operation and say "No." We keep the person living. But if we choose to step in and "play God" like that, then we must be prepared to play God at both ends. We must also accept the responsibility for willfully terminating lives as well as saving them.

How much does a parakeet cost? Probably around ten or twenty dollars. How much does a puppy dog cost? Depending on what kind you buy, it might cost anywhere from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars.

But what's the value of a human life (in dollars)?

The species homo sapiens likes to see itself as being infinitely valuable. In our minds, nothing in the whole universe is more important than we are. In fact, no other life form can even come close in comparison. There's simply no way to put a price tag on something as wonderful and perfect as we! (Do we have an ego problem or what!)

Let's see how much money our present legal system thinks a person's life is worth. Looking at the table of crimes that we saw back in Chapter Ten, we see that the penalty for killing someone (shown in the first three lines of the table) ranges anywhere from 3 years to life imprisonment, depending on the degree of murder. Recalling that each year in prison is approximately equivalent to the theft of about $1,000, your "infinitely valuable" life doesn't appear to be worth much more than a few thousand bucks!

Now that we can begin to see things in their proper perspective, let's return to our discussion about the elimination of waste material from our evolutionary development.

Of course we can't go around just killing each other "willie-nillie" (although the proliferation of hand guns and the increased number of drive-by shootings might suggest otherwise!) But we can decide what level of effort we wish to make at keeping alive the undesireable elements of our society. We can acknowledge that the Right to life in society (just as in nature) must be earned and not simply granted. And we can acknowledge the sobering reality that human life is not infinitely valuable, nor is it all equally valuable.

Let's start with our criminal justice system. Our society spends far too much time and money taking care of criminals. We give them food and shelter and see to it that they are reasonably comfortable. And after we've housed and fed them for a while we slap their hands and then send them back out to reinfect the community.

And to what purpose? Is it because we feel that society needs to have troublemakers running around loose? Is their continuing existence on this planet accomplishing something so beneficial to society (and to the long-term evolution of man-kind) that it must be endured in spite of the problems they create? In fact, wouldn't we all be much better off if we didn't have to waste time and money keeping these kinds of nuisances alive? (Try answers of "no, no, and yes," respectively.)

Everybody makes mistakes once in a while. But if the nature of a particular person is such that he chronically gets into serious trouble, or if he's foolish enough to allow himself to start taking drugs, then society should have very little interest in allowing him to contribute to the gene pool.

If we're going to take human evolution into our own hands, and if we're going to control the destiny of society, then let's start by eliminating the useless and smelly waste at the very bottom.

It just so happens that there is a very straightforeward way of accomplishing all of this without even violating the Prime Directive of Equality. It involves the concept of "fading out" (see Chapter Ten) coupled together with an increasing level of hardship. As the number of crime units for a criminal continues to increase, not only would the duration of each sucessive prison term increase, but its severity as well. For example we might simply start feeding them less and less with each new conviction until they actually do "fade away!" Or we might devise even more severe ways to make their prison stays increasingly miserable.

What's that? -- "Cruelty," you say?

"Inhumane treatment," you mumble?

You're damn right!

It's about time we stop treating the scum of society as if they were honored house guests. They're supposed to be in prison, not on vacation with free room and board. But to appease the "bleading hearts" of society, we could offer each prisoner the ongoing option to request a more humane execution at any time. That way it would always be his choice whether he wants to continue suffering or not.

Since the Right to life should be earned and not simply bestowed, the welfare system should be little more than the equivalent of a federally operated insurance company. The purpose of welfare should be to provide temporary financial aid to the productive members of society who have earned the right to such assistance. It should not be a source of free funds for the derelicts of the world. The idea of "living on welfare" (except as a reward for past accomplishments) should be an absurdity. If a person cannot make it on their own, or if they cannot justify a valid reason for their continued existence, then they should be entitled to very little of the Right to life. (The world does not owe anybody a living.)

Of course it's not a requirement that a person must die, just because he fails to meet the prescribed qualifications for the Right to life. If the person's life is significant enough to someone else (such as a relative or a friend) who is willing to take the responsibility of supporting him/her, then that is an entirely different matter. Their existence then does have a purpose -- it provides happiness to their sponsor who, as a productive member of society, does have the Right to the pursuit of such happiness. But the burden of support is then private rather than public.

This option of allowing a person to have a sponsor clearly illustrates that all human life is not equal in value. It shows that -

Just as with welfare, medical care should also be generally regarded as being a commodity of only short-term application whose primary purpose is to lead to an eventual healing of the patient. If a person is incapacitated and suffering from a terminal illness, then simply keeping that "warm body" alive is a waste of medical resources. There is a limit to how far we can be expected to go in our adopted role of "playing God." And even if we could keep a person alive forever, what would be the purpose? (If we had not stepped into our God-playing role, nature [or God Himself] would have probably killed off the person by applying the "survival of the fittest" rule. Then we would not have had to be responsible for the death.)

By preserving only those attributes of humanity and those aspects of society that we perceive as being beneficial and desireable, we would once again be providing direction for the evolution of mankind and society. But instead of natural selection being the driving force behind evolution, as it was in the past, it would now be human selection.

In addition to the long-term benefits that would occur, the quality of life in society would immediately improve. Major crime would disappear virtually overnight. Crime cannot easily survive in a society that has no criminals. And (one way or the other!) criminals would surely cease to exist.

Without crime, the size of our police force could be cut dramatically. And police work would not be nearly as hazardous as it currently is. In fact, the role of a typical policeman would become little more than that of being a meter maid.

And finally, with poverty and the need for welfare eliminated, our country would enjoy a higher standard of living. By no longer having to invest time, effort, and resources managing and maintaining the dregs of society, taxes could be greatly reduced. Instead of wasting revenues on taking care of criminals and perpetuating poverty by giving away welfare checks, tax money could be directed toward more productive efforts.