Case
No slippery Slope
Benetar 11 (Curr Oncol. 2011 Oct; 18(5): 206–207. PMCID: PMC3185895 A legal right to die:
responding to slippery slope and abuse arguments D. Benatar, PhD Correspondence to: David
Benatar, Philosophy Department, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch 7701
South Africa. E-mail: c/o az.ca.tcu@yhposolihp- BRW)
Slippery slope arguments, which are regularly invoked in a variety of practical ethics contexts, make the claim that if some specific
kind of action (such as euthanasia) is permitted, then society will be inexorably led (“down the slippery slope”) to permitting other
actions that are morally wrong.
It is, of course, easier to assert the existence of a slippery slope
than to prove that it exists. Opponents of a legal right to die thus point to the
Netherlands, for example, and note how the law permitting euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide in that country has
become steadily more permissive. At first, euthanasia was permitted only for the terminally ill who requested it, but then it was
permitted for the chronically ill, for those whose suffering was psychological, and for incompetent patients, including children. It
is indisputable that the Dutch laws regarding euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide have become
more permissive, but those who invoke the slippery slope argument fail to realize
that those changes are insufficient to demonstrate the existence of a (noxious) slippery
slope. To understand why this is the case, imagine, for example, that you are an opponent of apartheid in South Africa in the
1950s. If you are seeking to bring about legal change, through legal channels, you might realize that you have little hope of
convincing the white electorate of abandoning apartheid. Thus, you might decide to begin by chipping away at the edges of the
apartheid structure. You might recommend, for example, abolishing separate entrances to the post office for blacks and whites. A
defender of apartheid might resist that move by pointing to the possibility of a slippery slope: “If we abolish separate entrances,” that
defender might say, “we shall soon find that people of different races are permitted to marry one another, and before we know it,
there will be no more apartheid.” It should be readily apparent that, even if the defender of apartheid is correct that the stated
trajectory is a likely consequence of abolishing the separate entrances, that consequence would not be a noxious slippery slope. With
that scenario in mind, we can see the
hidden assumption in the slippery slope argument against
legalizing euthanasia: It is the assumption that the instances of euthanasia that the
Netherlands now permits are morally wrong. But the problem is that very many defenders of a legal right
to die would deny that those instances of euthanasia are wrong. Some of us think that the suffering that a person endures need not
be the product of a terminal disease in order for it to be intolerable. We also recognize that some mental suffering is intractable and
as unbearable as physical suffering. And we recognize that it is not only competent patients, but also incompetent ones who can
suffer from conditions that make their lives not worth living. Accordingly, we would like to see euthanasia and assisted suicide
permitted in such a wider range of cases. If, however, we cannot effect that legal change in one step, we recommend, in the first
instance, a more limited liberalization of the law. Once that change has been made, people might realize that the
next step and then the next are also acceptable, even if they cannot see it now. The second argument invoked by opponents of a legal
right to die is the argument that such a right will be abused and that no legal safeguards can prevent that abuse. Thus, for example, it
has been said that where written voluntary consent to euthanasia is a legal requirement, that consent has not always been obtained.
Similarly, it has been said that euthanasia or assisted suicide are often not reported, even in jurisdictions in which reporting is
obligatory. The problem with that argument is that citing many examples
of abuse of a legal right is not
sufficient to justify withholding that right. If the likelihood of abuse were thought to be grounds for
withholding a right, then much more than euthanasia would have to be banned. Driving, for example, would have to be prohibited
on the grounds that this right is abused and that none of the safeguards we have against such abuse are completely effective. People
drive faster than they should. They drive through red traffic lights and weave through traffic, and they drive cars that are not
roadworthy. Some even drive without a license or while under the influence of alcohol. Moreover, the
abuse of a legal
right to drive often has fatal consequences, and thus, it is not unlike euthanasia in the
severity of the outcome of the abuse. (And unlike the case of euthanasia, fatalities from car accidents often involve people who were
in excellent health, which makes abuse of driving worse than abuse of euthanasia.) Few
opponents of a legal right
to die are prepared to accept the implication that driving should be banned. Nor is it a
conclusion that should be accepted. There is no reason to withhold from some people a legal right to reasonable activity merely
because other people will abuse that right. The appropriate response is regulation, imperfect though that
may be. The opponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide who cite the dangers of abuse in support of their view also fail to notice
that abuse is possible even when euthanasia and assisted suicide are legally prohibited. It is naïve to think that covert forms of
euthanasia and assisted suicide are not occurring in places where those practices are illegal. At least some of those instances would
constitute abuse if a legal right to die existed. It is hard to say how much abuse occurs in such jurisdictions, but that is partly because
where euthanasia and assisted suicide are prohibited, doctors will be even less likely to admit to participating in such practicesa.
Banning alcohol consumption, prostitution, gambling, and so forth, does not result in the elimination of those practices, in either
abusive or non-abusive forms. Similarly, the choice is not between euthanasia and no euthanasia, with abuse occurring only in the
former. Instead the choice is between euthanasia with or without regulation. Abuse will occur in any event, and thus, on the
assumption that there is nothing wrong with euthanasia in itself, we may as well legalize and regulate it. The slippery slope and the
abuse argument are both compatible with the view that there is nothing intrinsically wrong with the practices at issue. Any person
could hold the view that euthanasia and assisted suicide are morally permissible, but then deny that they should be made legal on
account of the slippery slope and the danger of abuse. As it happens, however, many if not most of those who advance the slippery
slope and dangers of abuse arguments do think that euthanasia is immoral. Those who think that euthanasia and assisted suicide are
immoral often suggest that there are always alternatives to death for those whose lives have become intolerable. Thus, it is suggested
that palliation is always a possibility, even if palliation requires sedating the patient to the point of minimal or no consciousness.
What that suggestion fails to recognize, however, is that it is not always pain that renders a life not worth living. For some people,
the prospect of continuing in a minimally conscious or unconscious state for the rest of their biological life is a fate worse than death.
Opponents of a right to die sometimes reply that people with such views can be helped to realize that such a condition is not worse
than death. However, this line of argument is dangerous precisely because it could as easily be argued that those who think that
death is worse than sedation until natural death could be helped to realize that they are wrong and that they should therefore agree
to euthanasia. It is not at all unreasonable to view as undesirable continued biological life with only minimal (if any) consciousness.
Nor is depression in response to such a prospect in any way irrational. To suggest that people who manifest such depression should
rather be provided with psychiatric help is to pathologize an entirely reasonable response to an appalling situation. The quality of life
can fall to dismal levels. Not everyone agrees about just how bad life must be before it ceases to be worth living. However, the fact of
that disagreement provides no more reason for prohibiting euthanasia than it does for requiring it. To force people to die when they
think that their lives are still worth living would be an undue interference with people’s freedom. It is no less a violation of human
freedom to force a continuation of life when people believe that their continued life is worse than death. Opponents of a legal right to
die are fond of saying that freedom has its limits. However, just because freedom has its limits does not mean that a right to die falls
beyond those limits. When a person deems that life is no longer worth living, then taking action to prevent that person from gaining
assistance to die imposes a very serious harm. Although society may restrict a person’s freedom to prevent the infliction of harm on
others, it is very difficult to justify restricting a person’s freedom when that restriction will result in an immense personal harm.
Displacement of decisionmaking power means doctors don’t become coercive –
status quo health regulations would have triggered the impact
Brandt 14 (THE LOGICAL SLIPPERY SLOPE IS NEITHER SLIPPERY NOR LOGICAL
February 19, 2014 · by impact ethics · in Death & Assisted Dying, Law & Policy
http://impactethics.ca/2014/02/19/the-logical-slippery-slope-is-neither-slippery-nor-logical/
Reuven Brandt - phd candidate –BRW)
In Canada, legitimate substitute decision-makers (and not
physicians) are the ones who make medical
decisions on behalf of non-competent patients; and, when they do so, they are bound to act in accordance
with the patient’s prior competent wishes and values. Only when the patient’s prior wishes and values are
unknown and unknowable is the substitute-decision-maker to act in the best interest of the patient. The legalization of
physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia would not de facto change this legal and
ethical requirement. To be precise on this point, legalizing physician-assisted suicide and
voluntary euthanasia would not empower the physician to unilaterally euthanize noncompetent patients on the grounds of beneficence. If, for the sake of argument, however, we grant
Keown’s emphasis on beneficence , there is still reason to reject his claim that physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia
are a slippery slope to non-voluntary euthanasia. First, it can be argued that determining what is in the best interest of a patient
requires careful consideration of the patient’s values insofar as a patient has an interest in having her values respected. It follows
that for a physician to determine that euthanasia is in the best interest of a non-competent patient, the physician would have to take
into consideration the patient’s prior values. Consider, for instance, the non-competent patient who while competent so valued life
that she endured immense suffering in her efforts to postpone death. Non-voluntary euthanasia might not be in her best interest
insofar as it fails to respect her values. Secondly, if we accept Keown’s
position that the content of the duty of beneficence
is independent of legal prohibitions, then it is unclear why permitting physicianassisted suicide would create new or stronger conceptual reasons for euthanizing noncompetent patients. For Keown, the law plays no role in determining whether non-voluntary euthanasia is beneficent for
a particular patient. It therefore seems that legalizing physician-assisted suicide could have no conceptual impact on what
beneficence requires for a particular patient. Keown’s worry might be something like, if physicians get used to providing assisted
suicide, then they will be more likely to see non-voluntary euthanasia as a moral obligation for non-competent patients. This may be
true, but this is at best an example of the psychological, not the logical, slippery slope. In closing, it is not evident that permitting
physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia will provide new and pressing conceptual reasons for permitting non-voluntary
euthanasia.
No extinction from disease
Gladwell 95 (Malcolm, writer for The New Yorker and best-selling author The New Republic, July,
excerpted in Epidemics: Opposing Viewpoints, 1999, p. 31-32)
Every infectious agent that has ever plagued humanity has had to adapt a specific strategy but every
strategy carries a corresponding cost and this makes human counterattack possible. Malaria is vicious
and deadly but it relies on mosquitoes to spread from one human to the next, which means that
draining swamps and putting up mosquito netting can all hut halt endemic malaria. Smallpox is
extraordinarily durable remaining infectious in the environment for years, but its very durability its
essential rigidity is what makes it one of the easiest microbes to create a vaccine against. AIDS is almost
invariably lethal because it attacks the body at its point of great vulnerability, that is, the immune
system, but the fact that it targets blood cells is what makes it so relatively uninfectious. Viruses are not
superhuman. I could go on, but the point is obvious. Any microbe capable of wiping us all out would
have to be everything at once: as contagious as flue, as durable as the cold, as lethal as Ebola, as
stealthy as HIV and so doggedly resistant to mutation that it would stay deadly over the course of a long
epidemic. But viruses are not, well, superhuman. They cannot do everything at once. It is one of the
ironies of the analysis of alarmists such as Preston that they are all too willing to point out the
limitations of human beings, but they neglect to point out the limitations of microscopic life forms.
Racism is a power relation deciding who must live and who must die based on
biology. Racism is the indispensible precondition of killing.
Foucault, French historian and philosopher, 1976 (Michel, Society Must Be Defended, March 17,
p. 254-256)
What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of
life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must
die. The appearance within the biological continuum of the human race of
races, the distinction among races, the hierarchy of races, the fact that
certain races are described as good and that others, in contrast, are described
as inferior: all this is a way of fragmenting the field of the biological that
power controls. It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. It
is, in short, a way of establishing a biological-type caesura within a populatio n that
appears to be a biological domain. This will allow power to treat that population as a
mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it
controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of
racism: to fragment, to create caesureas within the biological continuum
addressed by biopower. Racism also has a second function. Its role is, if you
like, to allow the establishment of a positive relation of this type: “The more
you kill, the more deaths you will cause” or “The very fact that you let more
die will allow you to live more.” I would say that this relation (“If you want to
live, you must take lives, you must be able to kill”) was not invented by either
racism or the modern State. It is the relationship of war: “In order to live, you
must destroy your enemies.” But racism does make the relationship of war –
“If you want to live, the other must die”- function in way that is completely
new and that is quite compatible with the exercise of biopower. On the one
hand, racism makes it possible to establish a relationship between my life and
death of the other that is not a military or warlike relationship of
confrontation, but a biological-type relationship: “The more inferior species die
out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the fewer degenerates there will be in
the species as a whole, and the more I – as species rather than individual- can live, the
stronger I will be, the more vigorous I will be. I will be able to proliferate.” The fact that
the other dies does not mean simply that I live in the sense that his death
guarantees my safety; the death of the other, the death of the bad race, of the
inferior race (or the degenerate, or the abnormal) is something that will make life
in general healthier: healthier and pure. This is not, then, a military, warlike, or
political relationship, but biological relationship. And the reason this mechanism can
come into play is that the enemies who have to be done away with are not adversaries in
the political sense of the term; they are threats, either external or internal, to the
population and for the population. In the biopower system, in other words, killing or
the imperative to kill is acceptable only if it results not in a victory over political
adversaries, but in the elimination of the biological threat to and the
improvement of the species or race. There is a direct connection between the two. In
a normalizing society, race and racism is the precondition that makes killing
acceptable. When you have a normalizing society, you have a power which is, at least
superficially, in the first instance, or in the first line a biopower, and racism is the
indispensible precondition that allows someone to be killed, that allows
others to be killed. Once the State functions in the biopower mode, racism alone can
justify the murderous function of the State. So you can understand the importance
- I almost said the vital importance – of racism to the exercise of such a power: it is the
pre-condition for exercising the right to kill. If the power of normalization wishes to
exercise the old sovereign right to kill, it must become racist. And if, conversely, a power of
sovereignty, or in other words, a power that has the right of life and death, wishes to work
with the instruments, mechanisms, and technology of normalization, it too must become
racist. When I say “killing”, I obviously do not mean simply murder as such,
but also every form of indirect murder: the fact of exposing someone to
death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political
death, expulsion, rejection, and so on.
And, they’ll burn out anyway
Lederberg 99(Joshua, professor of genetics at Stanford University School of Medicine, 1999, Epidemic: The
World of Infectious Disease, p. 13)
The toll of the fourteenth-century plague, the "Black Death," was closer to one third. If the bugs'
potential to develop adaptations that could kill us off were the whole story, we would not be here.
However, with very rare exceptions, our microbial adversaries have a shared interest in our survival.
Almost any pathogen comes to a dead end when we die; it first has to communicate itself to another
host in order to survive. So historically, the really severe host- pathogen interactions have resulted in a
wipeout of both host and pathogen. We humans are still here because, so far, the pathogens that have
attacked us have willy-nilly had an interest in our survival. This is a very delicate balance, and it is easily
disturbed, often in the wake of large-scale ecological upsets.
This juridified self exports the most dangerous form of biopower, global policing
and intervention carries along the constant nuclear threat, which promises total
destruction – this also leads to torture and violence to destroy individuals.
Hardt and Negri in 2004 (Michael and Antonio, prof. @ duke, prof. @ universities of Padua and Paris, Multitude:
War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. The Penguin Press. Pg. 18 - 19)
17 War
really became absolute only with the technological development of weapons that made possible
for the first time mass and even global destruction. Weapons of global destruction break the modern dialectic of war.
War has always involved the destruction of life, but in the twentieth century this destructive power
reached the limits of the pure production of death, represented symbolically by Auschwitz and
Hiroshima. The capacity of genocide and nuclear destruction touches directly on the very structure of life,
corrupting it, perverting it. The sovereign power that controls such means of destruction is a form of
biopower in this most negative and horrible sense of the term, a power that rules directly over death—
the death not simply of an individual or group but of humanity itself and perhaps indeed of all being.
When genocide and atomic weapons put life itself on center stage, then war becomes properly
ontological.28 War thus seems to be heading at once in two opposite directions: it is, on one hand, reduced
to police action and, on the other, raised up to an absolute, ontological level by technologies of global
destruction. These two movements, however, are not contradictory: the reduction of war to police action
does not take away but actually confirms its ontological dimension. The thinning of the war function and
the thickening of the police function maintain the ontological stigmata of absolute annihilation: the war
police maintain the threat of genocide and nuclear destruction as their ultimate foundation . 29 Biopower
wields not just the power of the mass destruction of life (such as that threatened by nuclear weapons) but also
individualized violence. When individualized in its extreme form, biopower becomes torture. Such an
individualized exercise of power is a central element in the society of control of George Orwell's 1984 .
"'How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?' Winston thought. `By making him suffer,' he said. `Exactly. By
making him suffer. Obedience is not enough.' "30 Torture is today becoming an ever more generalized technique of
control, and at the same time it is becoming increasingly banalized. Methods for obtaining confessions and
information through physical and psychological torments, techniques to disorient prisoners (such as sleep deprivation), and simple
means of humiliation (such as strip searches) are all common weapons in the contemporary arsenal of torture. Torture is one
central point of contact between police action and war; the torture techniques used in the name of police
prevention take on all the characteristics of military action. This is another face of the state of exception
and the tendency for political power to free itself from the rule of law. In fact, there are increasing
numbers of cases in which the international conventions against torture and the domestic laws against
cruel and unusual punishment have little effect .3' Both dictatorships and liberal democracies use torture,
the one by vocation and the other by so-called necessity. According to the logic of the state of exception,
torture is an essential, unavoidable, and justifiable technique of power.
And, when the chips are down these civilized people will eat each other. Util
sounds nice in theory but ignores the absurd nature of existence. We may seem
like monsters but at least our moral code isn’t reliant on a lie that we choose to
believe.
Itzkowitz 99 (Kenneth. Associate professor of philosophy at Marietta College. College Literature. “To Witness Spectacles of
Pain: The Hypermorality of Georges Bataille. Accessed: 7/18/12. Jstor)//CL
It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At
the same time, however, given the violence of the life of our culture, we need to
understand immoral violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it
will allow. Beyond our condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit
are paradoxically also the very ones we most celebrate. A foremost proponent of this
need is the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille. Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of its
expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is what he calls an accursed yet
ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of
violence, yet the problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires
behaviors that violate the very same rules we cherish and intend to uphold. The
commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed “to view the world as if it were animated by a turmoil in accord with the
one that never ceased to dominate his personal life” (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an individual-in-turmoil
reflects the surplus of energy distributing life in general, rather than a moral
deficiency for which an individual can be held accountable. For Bataille an individual’s
wasteful behaviors are ultimately reflections of the problem of the surplus of solar
energy. Piel but it this way: “The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy, the surplus is used” (1995,
103). How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataille contends that this
surplus is never extinguished and that its expenditure always leads towards the
commission of violence. The surplus of energy is accursed and finally cannot serve
us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the problem of how to
expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made be useful. Thus the
production of violence has a value for us as those condemned to the realm of nonproductive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when “Under present
conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to
restore wealth to its function, to gift giving, to squandering without reciprocations”
(1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, “the impossibility of useful expenditure is ignored, then
we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level as who we most fundamentally are.
Against this failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian self-recognition, Bataille calls for the
transgression of our prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of
squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an
overabundance over and beyond all others i.e. an overabundance that can only, at
best, be squandered. He writes, Life suffocates within limits that are too close; it aspires
in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of excess
resources, possibly involving large squanderings of energy. The limit of growth
being reached, ... enters into ebullition. Without exploding, its extreme
exuberance pours out into a movement always bordering on explosion. (Bataille 1988, 30)
As living lives that must enter into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally
committed no more to moral righteousness than to immoral outpourings of energy
to sudden and violent outbursts exceeding all rational considerations. The protests of
moralism are secondary and never responsive to Bataille’s questioning of morality: “Supposing there is no longer
any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?”
(1988, 31). We are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit
behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our morality identifies the right
with the useful and productive with whatever makes us better. Bataille however,
argues against this morality and for the requirement of useless, non-productive,
violent outpourings of energy – a requirement for what he calls “a draining-away,
a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case” (1988, 31). These violent
nonproductive outpourings according to Bataille, are required of us all as living
beings regardless of whether or not we take the responsibility to manage and
arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue, for Bataille, is energy in excess,
energy as an excess. As an excess, such energy must be discharged explosively in
outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable.
2AC: Trust
McDorman 05 (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2005,
pp. 257/279 Controlling Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy Todd F.
McDorman Todd F. McDorman Professor and Senior Associate Dean of the College Department
of Rhetoric Wabash College – BRW)
Bio-Power and its Exercise In continuing the critical rhetoric of bio-power, this section examines its extension through two
important tools*/medicine and the vegetative subject. The
goal is to lay bare techniques of bio-power that have
advanced domination and to suggest the need for and possibility of resistance (a basis for a
critique of freedom). The effort to shape medical practice and create legal obstacles reflects HerrleFanning’s explanation that bio-power ‘‘produces ‘truths’ about the body, which , when internalized,
have a ‘normalizing’ and ‘regulatory’ function.’’40 First, medicine often has served to
restrict the body, both through the treatment available and the stigma it places on death. Second, the
judicial construction of the vegetative subject and distinctions between passive and
active death have been used to limit the decision-making power of competent
individuals. Confining the Subject: Hospitalization as ‘‘Cure’’ There is no question that in most circumstances,
for most individuals, life is preferred to death. We are fortunate to live in an age where
medical knowledge and technology have provided the means for longer, healthier living and
for the effective treatment of illness and disease. However, regardless of such advancements and no matter how
unsavory a result, death is still the ultimate undeniable conclusion of physical existence.
This part of the analysis is concerned with the extent to which ‘‘life’’ and ‘‘death’’ are decontextualized without regard to meaning or
implication. An
analysis of fragments from the medical community reveals the normalization of
extensive supervision and regulation of the body often in the service of uncritically extending ‘‘life’’
and combating ‘‘death.’’ Power is located in the physician and hospital with, as Foucault
explains bio-power, ‘‘the taking charge of life.’’ The result is an authoritative discourse
that at once can force the extension of life to its absolute limit while also stigmatizing
death as that which must be avoided at any price. While medicine has been effective in realizing these
goals, unpacking the underlying philosophy reveals both unfortunate and ironic results. First,
stigmatizing and vilifying death only succeeds in making it more invisible and
feared. Second, the very mechanisms intended to extend life may cause some to take
more drastic measures to end it. Doctors, not unlike any other professional, remain committed to overcoming
their ‘‘adversary,’’ which is not only disease, but death itself. As Foucault explains, ‘‘behind the doctor’s back,
death remained the great dark threat in which his knowledge and skill were abolished.’’41 In
continuing to attempt to defeat this threat*/to extend physician knowledge*/the viewpoint might be simplified to the mantra
‘‘death is the enemy.’’ In using this as the ultimate truth, doctors can, perhaps unintentionally, use the hospital as
a structure to maintain the body. The potential result, as Herrle- Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy 265
Fanning explains in a different context, is that ‘‘if both patient and practitioner have accepted an anatomical
understanding of the body, simply ‘submitting to fate’’’*/in the present case allowing for death to
occur*/’’is an almost unthinkable option.’’42 Consequently, life-prolonging medical technologies,
such as life support systems, feeding tubes, and respirators*/hallmarks of contemporary ‘‘bio-power’’*/are
normalized and can be read as ‘‘techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies.’’43 When
preserving life is identified as the ultimate goal by the state*/buttressed by their self-proclaimed (and
judicially legitimated) claim of an unqualified interest in life*/the physician can be utilized as an
instrument for transmitting the ideology. The result may be that in confrontations
with death, the patient risks becoming a captive object, a site of struggle between
physician and nature, rather than an active subject who is treated as a person.
Unable to cope with death, with ‘‘failure,’’ doctors may impose their own form of
subjugation upon the body. As physician Sherwin Nuland explains, ‘‘in the personalities of many doctors’’ there
may be a ‘‘fear of failure’’ that creates an abnormally high ‘‘need to control. . . . In an attempt to maintain control, a
doctor, usually without being aware of it, convinces himself that he knows better than the patient what course is proper.’’ It
is also possible that the physician, even when death is inevitable, ‘‘may maintain a bit of authority by
exerting . . . influence over the dying process . . . by controlling its duration and determining the moment at which’’
life will be allowed to ‘‘end.’’44 Notably, Nuland’s description of the ‘‘control’’ and ‘‘authority’’ exerted over life is nearly a mirror
image of the sort of supervision that accompanied the advent of bio-power as explained by Foucault.45 Beyond the actions of
doctors, the
hospital can appear to be a prison-like structure for the near-dead, a
place to be contained, controlled, and, not least importantly, hidden. While the historic foundations and
purposes of the hospital expounded upon by Foucault seem questionable today*/and there can be no denying that the hospital and
modern medicine have greatly improved life and its quality*/there are similarities. In
Madness and Civilization ,
Foucault argues Paris’s Hoˆ pital Ge´ne´ral served more of an administrative function than as a medical center. That is, the
hospital primarily provided ‘‘an instance of order,’’ confining the unemployed and impoverished in
times of economic recession.46 Hoeffler and Kamoie extend this conclusion in arguing similarly that during the 1800s,
American hospitals ‘‘typically provided only food, shelter, and nursing care to dislocated indigents. Very little in the way of clinically
sound treatments were available there.’’47
Today, the hospital continues to serve an administrative
function through confinement of a slightly different nature. This is, as Phillipe Arie´s argues in his history of Western
attitudes toward death, that in addition to its ‘‘curative function,’’ the hospital also has become ‘‘the
designated spot for dying.’’48 This development furthers the regulation of death, the stigma it
acquires and, at least superficially, aids in the normalization of life. When the RTD is implicated, the
hospital serves to maintain vital signs rather than to heal, confining the body according to a
mangled web of medical protocols. Life support, like Foucault’s picture of the asylum, might be
seen as aiding the ‘‘conversion of medicine into justice, of therapeutics into repression.’’49 The
266 T. F. McDorman procedures contribute to the creation of what Nuland terms a ‘‘method of modern
dying.’’50 The sterility, isolation, and intrusiveness of this method have stigmatized death, have made
dying more unbearable, and likely have contributed to the appeal of euthanasia. Nuland argues that for many of the
dying, intensive care, with its isolation among strangers, extinguishes their hope of not being abandoned
in the last hours. In fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel
who barely know them.51 While Arie´s explains that death was once a ceremony involving close
personal friends and family rather than overseeing doctors and nurses, our reliance on the hospital has
eliminated such ritual ceremony and transformed death into ‘‘a technical
phenomenon.’’ 52 It is a point David Thomasma reinforces, commenting that hospitals provide ‘‘little possibility of
maintaining the personal and social ritual of dying.’’53 By segregating death, by excluding it from ordinary
view, the idea that death is an ‘‘abnormality’’ is reinforced. This is consistent with and advances the state’s
promotion of bio-power, but it also ultimately makes death more difficult to face and accept. Hoeffler and
Kamoie explain that the transformation of death into a ‘‘process’’ has made it ‘‘very much an extraordinary and
disconcerting experience, and, understandably, Americans find themselves struggling to adjust.’’54 It also has contributed to
a tendency in American culture to ‘‘feel out of place in the foreign, intimidating, antiseptic
surroundings of a hospital or nursing home,’’ as visitors ‘‘struggle to find the right words during brief irregular visits.
Seeing death in this light, it is no wonder that they have come to fear and deny it.’’55 James F. Bresnahan adds that ‘‘we must
ask ourselves whether, as a society, we have become simply incapacitated from
being sensible about when to stop treatments originally designed to help the
survivable survive. We continue to use them to afflict the dying. . . . This is just
another way of not facing our problem.’’56 Banished to the hospital, dying is almost too painful to
watch*/and often we do not. Ultimately, this inability to face and accept death damages the doctor/patient
relationship, decreases trust, forces patients to look for answers elsewhere, and, counter to its design, has increased the appeal
of euthanasia.57 In his personal observations of the dying, Dr. Lonny Shavelson says that he encountered people who allowed their
fear of ‘‘how they would die’’ to persuade them to act too quickly because no physician said they would help if the pain became
unbearable.58 These actions demand that physicians and the conditions of medical care be at the forefront of examinations of the
RTD. Medical ethicist Ronald E. Cranford argues that ‘‘any
discussion of active euthanasia’’ must start
with inspection of the care offered by the medical profession. He suggests that it is ‘‘by
doing such a miserable job of caring for the dying’’ that physicians ‘‘are driving
people toward the more extreme measures of suicide and euthanasia.’’59 While the
social, moral, and legal debate over the RTD continues, the medical profession finds itself playing a pivotal role. And it is, as Michael
Hyde notes, ‘‘in a rather difficult situation. For what
is at stake here is medicine’s ‘very moral center,’
placing a premium on ‘‘life’’
through the vilification of death and the containing structure of the hospital, the
medical establishment is an important, if perhaps somewhat unaware, technique of bio-power.
The mechanisms of medicine bring regulation and order to the body while furthering the
normalization of life*/but appear to do so at a cost. The stigma of death reinforces life, but it may
do so by reducing its quality and our ability to cope with death. Similarly, the emphasis placed on life*/on repelling
death*/has the ironic consequence of encouraging some of the dying*/who are unwilling to wait
its Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy 267 Hippocratic tradition.’’60 In
for medicine to resolve its dilemma*/to resort to more drastic and reactionary actions in exercising choice in dying.61
Their discursive construction of health and disease is mediated by colonialist
understandings of the “foreign” and “dangerous” other—epidemiological
discourses reproduce power relations that make disease a threat in the first place.
Lewis 7 (Bradley Professor at New York University—Department of Psychiatry and the
Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, 2007, “The New Global Health Movement: Rx for
the World,” New Literary History, Vol. 38 No. 3, pp. 459-477)
Of course, Rx was made for popular audiences in the U.S. and so in its populist format, some
may argue, it is more likely to reproduce these kinds of stereotypes than other more professional
or expert discourses. This does not mean, however, that other medical discourses are devoid of
these problematic "othering" stereotypes. All discourses deployed by the global health
movement—whether they are political statements or funding agendas or the finite descriptions
of disease behaviors in scientific papers—are mediated by the culture, society, and politics in
which they are produced. Intentionally or not, they reproduce and relocate cultural, societal, and
political ideas and constructions, including problematic constructions of the contagious foreign
"other." The association of "foreignness" with contagion has long been established in scientific
discourses. As Cindy Patton observes, the conflation of foreigners and "immigrants" with germs
has been apparent since the emergence of "germ theory" in the late 1800s: a theory which was
compounded by the emergence of immunology and virology in the twentieth century.36 This
theory, and its more modern incarnations, represents germs—or, more belatedly, viruses—as
"foreign," "dangerous," "contagious," and a threat to the "pristine, clean, uninvaded, untouched"
body; a body which itself is commonly figured as "the 'virgin' land of the new world."37
Scientific discourses associated with HIV/AIDS—such as immunology and epidemiology—offer
recent examples of the way these constructions continue to be reproduced. Immunologic
discourses frequently deploy a language of "foreignness and invasion" in their accounts of HIV
infection.38 Emily Martin cites one popular textbook that describes the process of "foreign
antigen recognition" as the "human body's police force" being "programmed to distinguish
between bona fide residents and illegal aliens."39 Epidemiological discourses on HIV/AIDS
have similarly reinvigorated these stereotypes when they have designated entire populations—
such as Haitians or sub-Saharan Africans—as "risk groups." The near consensus among AIDS
immunologists and epidemiologists that Africa is the primary site of HIV also powerfully
reinstalls the link between foreignness and contagion. Whether latent or manifest, such
exclusionary "othering" and racist stereotypes keep being reinstated, even by the world health
advocates (such as the makers of Rx) and scientists who are concerned with saving the globe
against disease and ill health. If the global health movement does not take this into account it
may well, in McFadden's words, reproduce the very relations of exploitation, supremacy, and
servitude underlying the social and survival crises that currently face our world.
Lack of international physician trust triggers the internal link
NYT 14 (AFRICA Fear of Ebola Breeds a Terror of Physicians By ADAM NOSSITERJULY 27, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/28/world/africa/ebola-epidemic-west-africa-guinea.html-BRW)
Why Ebola Patients Are Rejecting Care Amid
the deadliest Ebola virus outbreak in history, doctors are
fighting the disease and also local populations’ fear of medical treatment. Video by Carrie Halperin on Publish
Date July 27, 2014. Photo by Samuel Aranda for The New York Times. Workers and officials, blamed by
panicked populations for spreading the virus, have been threatened with knives,
stones and machetes, their vehicles sometimes surrounded by hostile mobs. Log barriers across narrow dirt roads block
medical teams from reaching villages where the virus is suspected. Sick and dead villagers, cut off from
help, are infecting others. “This is very unusual, that we are not trusted,” said Marc Poncin, the emergency
coordinator in Guinea for Doctors Without Borders, the main group fighting the disease here. “We’re not stopping the epidemic.”
Efforts to monitor it are grinding to a halt because of “intimidation,” he said. People
appear to have more
confidence in witch doctors. Health officials say the epidemic is out of control, moving back and forth across the
porous borders of Guinea and neighboring Sierra Leone and Liberia — often on the backs of the cheap motorcycles that ply the roads
of this region of green hills and dense forest — infiltrating the lively open-air markets, overwhelming weak health facilities and
decimating villages. It was in this rural area, 400 miles over bad roads from Guinea’s capital, Conakry, where the outbreak was first
spotted, and where it has hit hardest. More than 80 percent of those infected have died in this region, and Guinea has recorded more
than twice as many deaths as the other countries. In Koundony, more than one-eighth of the population, including the headman, are
dead; many others have fled. There is no known cure for the virus, which causes raging fever, vomiting, diarrhea and uncontrolled
bleeding in about half the cases and up to 90 percent of the time, rapid death. Merely touching an infected person, or the body of a
victim, is dangerous; coming into contact with blood, vomit or feces can be deadly. Now the
principally from
fear of aid workers,
Doctors Without Borders and the Red Cross, is helping to spread the
disease, health officials say, creating a secondary crisis. Villagers flee at the sight of a Red Cross truck. When a Westerner
passes, villagers cry out, “Ebola, Ebola!” and run away. This month, Doctors Without Borders classified 12 villages in Guinea as
“red,” meaning they might harbor Ebola but were inaccessible for safety reasons. As recently as April, the epidemic seemed to be
under control. But in the past two weeks, its center appeared to have shifted across the border to Sierra Leone, where most of the
new dead were being recorded. The sick are being hidden and the dead buried, without any protection. Last week, the Sierra Leone
Health Ministry reported that its lead doctor fighting Ebola had contracted the disease, and the virus had spread to a fourth country,
with a confirmed fatality in Nigeria. Over the weekend, an aid organization working in Liberia, Samaritan’s Purse, said that two
Americans, a doctor who was treating Ebola patients and an aid worker on a case management team, had tested positive for the
virus. And the Liberian government said Sunday that one of its most high-profile doctors had died of Ebola, according to The
Associated Press. Back in Guinea, in the village of Wabengou, residents placed a tree in the road to block outsiders. They also
attacked an official delegation from Conakry, rushing its cars, banging on the vehicles and brandishing machetes, according to
Doctors Without Borders. “We don’t want them in there at all,” said Wabengou’s chief, Marcel Dambadounou. “We don’t accept their
presence at all. They are the transporters of the virus in these communities.” Continue reading the main story GRAPHIC How Many
Ebola Patients Have Been Treated Outside of Africa? Questions and answers on the scale of the outbreak and the science of the
Ebola virus. OPEN GRAPHIC He was surrounded by grim-looking men from Wabengou, standing at a crossroads on the way to his
village; none of them demurred. “We are absolutely afraid, and that’s why we are avoiding contact with everybody,” he said, “the
whole world.” Doctors Without Borders has set up an emergency treatment center in the regional capital, Guéckédou, but a nurse
there said the center had diminishing appeal. “Here, if the people come in, they don’t leave alive,” said the nurse, Fadima Diawara. It
may not help win confidence that the medical teams wear top-to-toe suits and masks, burning much of the outfit after helping a
patient. The wariness against outside intervention has deep roots. This part of Guinea, known as the Forest Region, where more than
200 people have already died of the disease, is known for its strong belief in traditional religion. The dictator who ruled Guinea with
an iron fist for decades, Ahmed Sékou Touré, was only partly successful in a 1960s campaign to stamp out these beliefs, despite mass
burnings of fetishes. Addressing villagers this month in Bawa, where a woman had just died, the regional prefect from Guéckédou,
Mohammed Cinq Keita, warned: “There is no root, no leaf, no animal that can cure you. Don’t be fooled.” Near the border with
Sierra Leone this month, Doctors Without Borders discovered an Ebola patient who had been privately “treated” in the village of
Teldou and then returned to his relatives in another village, possibly infecting untold others. “Extremely, extremely concerning,”
said Sylvie Jonckheere, the charity’s doctor on the scene. A colleague in full gear lectured the villagers of Teldou as the rain started,
but was met with indifference or hostile stares; some turned their backs on him. As the aid workers drove off, the private nurse who
administered a shot to the Ebola patient defended his treatment. “I couldn’t say that he had the illness,” said the nurse, Eduard
Leno. “His body was hot, that’s all.” Asked why the patient had not been sent to the clinic in Guéckédou, he said angrily: “We are in
the bush here. You can’t just send someone away. How will society view you?” Local officials have begun a campaign to open the
closed villages — there have even been some recent arrests in Kolo Bengou — but in tiny Koundony, fear is palpable. On a recent day,
a Red Cross truck drove up to the cemetery to deliver the body of Marie Condé, 14, wrapped in plastic sheeting. As the body was
carried off the truck, a high-pitched wail pierced the country stillness. “There is no cure!” a woman cried. “There is no cure!” The
gravedigger, Marie’s half brother Famhan Condé, 26, was sweating as he heaved shovels of dirt. The grave, he said, would be the
26th he had dug since the epidemic began. “We’re all scared here,” he said. “There’s no solution. We can do nothing. Only God can
save us.”
Doctors can opt out of PAS – proves the people that trigger the internal link just
choose different docters
Marcia Angell 97 , MD, Senior Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, wrote in her Jan. 2, 1997 Editorial "The Supreme Court and
Physician-Assisted Suicide--The Ultimate Right," that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine:-BRW)
"Doctors
who are opposed in principle [to physician-assisted suicide] need not
assist, but they should make their patients aware of their position early in the
relationship so that a patient who chooses to select another doctor can do so. The
greatest harm we can do is to consign a desperate patient to unbearable suffering -- or force the patient to seek out a stranger like Dr.
Kevorkian. Contrary
to the frequent assertion that permitting physician-assisted
suicide would lead patients to distrust their doctors, I believe distrust is more likely
to arise from uncertainty about whether a doctor will honor a patient's wishes."
Loss of trust not sufficient to trigger refusal to go to doctors – your evidence
doesn’t assume US data
Mark Hall 05 , JD, Fred D. & Elizabeth L. Turnage Professor of Law at Wake Forest University,
stated in a Dec. 24, 2005 article titled "Euthanasia; Research Suggests Doctor-Assisted Suicide
Wouldn't Undermine Patient Trust," published in Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week:-BRW)
"Overall, three times as many people disagree as agree that legalizing physician-assisted death would cause them to trust their
personal doctors less... Despite
the widespread concern that legalizing physician-assisted
death would seriously threaten or undermine trust in physicians, the weight of the
evidence in the United States is to the contrary... Our study shows that only about 20% of
people believe they would trust their physician less if euthanasia were legalized...
The empirical support is weak for those who confidently assert that legalizing
physician-assisted death would undermine trust in physicians for most people in
the United States."
Only a risk of a link turn – patients fear doctors not granting autonomy in decision
more than the potential for the choice to exist
Peter Rogatz 01 , MD, MPH, founding board member of Compassion in Dying of New York,
wrote in his Nov.-Dec. 2001 article, "The Positive Virtues of Physician-Assisted Suicide:
Physician-Assisted Suicide is Among the Most Hotly Debated Bioethical Issues of Our Time,"
that appeared in The Humanist -BRW)
"... It is argued that permitting physician-assisted suicide would undermine the sense of trust that
patients have in their doctors. This is curious reasoning; patients are not lying in bed wondering if their
physicians are going to kill them--and permitting assisted suicide shouldn't create
such fears, since the act of administering a fatal dose would be solely within the control of the
patient. Rather than undermining a patient's trust, I would expect the legalization of physicianassisted suicide to enhance that trust. I have spoken with a great many people who feel that they
would like to be able to trust their physicians to provide such help in the event of
unrelieved suffering--and making that possible would give such patients a greater sense of
security."
Studies prove Legalization doesn’t kill trust
Scand J Public Health. 2009 May;37(3):260-4. doi: 10.1177/1403494808098918. Epub 2009
Jan 30. Lindblad A1, Löfmark R, Lynöe N. Author information – BRW) Would physicianassisted suicide jeopardize trust in the medical services? An empirical study of attitudes among
the general public in Sweden.-BRW)
AIM: To investigate the attitudes among the Swedish population towards physician-assisted suicide, with special regard to the
possible effects on trust in the medical services of physician-assisted suicide being allowed. DESIGN: A
postal
questionnaire about physician-assisted suicide under certain conditions and its
possible influence on trust in the medical services was distributed to 1206
randomly selected individuals living in the county of Stockholm. Two reminders were distributed,
followed by a short version of the questionnaire containing only the question about the attitude towards physician-assisted suicide.
RESULTS: The
total response rate was 51%, a short-version reminder adding another 7%. Of all participants,
73% were in favour of physician-assisted suicide, 12% were against, and 15% were undecided. They
believed that their trust in the medical services would increase (38%) or not be
influenced at all (45%) if physician-assisted suicide were to be allowed. However, 75% of those who
were against physician-assisted suicide believed that their trust would decrease. As compared to those reporting high trust in
medical services (n = 492), those with low trust (n = 97) stated that their trust would increase, 36% (confidence interval (CI) = 3537%) vs. 49% (95% CI = 39-59%). Thirty-three per cent (95% CI = 28-38%) of the younger respondents (<50 years), and 43% (95%
CI = 37-49%) of the older respondents believed that their trust would increase. CONCLUSIONS: We
found no evidence
for the assumption that trust in the medical services would be unambiguously
jeopardized if physician-assisted suicide were to be legalized.
2AC: Framework
Our interpretation is the judge is an ethical actor deciding between the ethics of
the status quo and an ethics of the right to die
ethics cannot be universalized by standard of legal expression, it is not enough to
pretend to “legalize” physician assisted suicide and be done with it however, in the
interest of ground within the debate we will defend links to desirability of
physician assisted suicide for purposes of clash within the debate round
a. solves offense – aff still engages in core of the topic debate over key stasis points
in the physician assisted suicide debate
b. aff creativity – legalization as mechanism forcloses on the possibility of
affirming the ethical implications of the provision of freedoms resulting from the
crimes legalized – understanding the liberalist order that undergirds the right to
life facilitates a better engagement with core of the topic literature
c. switch side debate doesn’t solve
The Swiss model of legalization proves that you are able to get sufficient ground
Ziegler 09 (Copyright (c) 2009 American Society of Law, Medicine & Ethics Journal of Law,
Medicine & Ethics Summer, 2009 Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 37 J.L. Med. & Ethics
318 LENGTH: 7684 words INDEPENDENT ARTICLE: Collaborated Death: An Exploration of
the Swiss Model of Assisted Suicide for Its Potential to Enhance Oversight and Demedicalize the
Dying Process NAME: Stephen J. Ziegler BIO: Stephen J. Ziegler, Ph.D., J.D., is an Associate
professor in the Division Public & Environmental Affairs at Indiana University-Purdue
University Fort Wayne and aformer Mayday Pain Scholar. His research and publications focus
on the regulation of physician-hastened death, opioid risk management, and pain policy.-BRW)
While the Oregon model shares several similarities with the way assisted suicide is performed in Switzerland, the
Swiss
model of assisted death differs in three significant ways. First, unlike Oregon, the Swiss do not
have a PAS statute; the authority for assisting another in suicide stems from an
omission in penal law as well as Swiss tradition. Secondly, assistance in suicide is not limited to
physicians; right to die organizations and their volunteer staff play a significant role in
facilitating assisted death (since the penal law does not make any distinctions between
physicians and non-physicians in terms of assistance, team-assisted suicide may more accurately
describe the Swiss model of assisted suicide). Finally, although most members who seek assistance are terminally ill, the law does
not limit assistance to those who are dying. n60
a. Actors become disengaged from the foundational merits of their argument –
switch side creates a simulation of beliefs that reduces political actors to passive
participants
Antonio ’95, Nietzsche’s antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History”; American Journal of Sociology; Volume
101, No. 1; July 1995
According to Nietzsche, the "subject" is Socratic culture's most central, durable
foundation. This prototypic expression of ressentiment, master reification, and ultimate justification for slave morality and
mass disci- pline "separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum . . . free to express strength
or not to do so. But
there is no such substratum; there is no 'being' behind the doing,
effecting, becoming; 'the doer' is merely a fiction added to the deed" (Nietzsche 1969b, pp.
45-46). Leveling of Socratic culture's "objective" foundations makes its "subjective" features all
the more important. For example, the subject is a central focus of the new human sciences, ap- pearing prominently in
its emphases on neutral standpoints, motives as causes, and selves as entities,
objects of inquiry, problems, and targets of care(Nietzsche 1966, pp. 19-21; 1968a, pp. 4754). Arguing that subjectified culture weakens the personality, Nietzsche spoke of a
"re- markable antithesis between an interior which fails to correspond to any
exterior and an exterior which fails to correspond to any interior" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 7879, 83). The "problem of the actor," Nietzsche said, "troubled me for the longest time."'12 He considered
"roles" as "external," "surface," or "foreground" phenomena and viewed close
personal identification with them as symptomatic of estrangement. While modern theorists
saw dif- ferentiated roles and professions as a matrix of autonomy and reflexivity, Nietzsche held that persons (especially male
professionals) in specialized occupations overidentify with their positions and engage in
gross fabrica- tions to obtain advancement. They look hesitantly to the opinion of oth- ers, asking
themselves, "How ought I feel about this?" They are so thoroughly absorbed in simulating effective role
players that they have trouble being anything but actors-"The role has actually become
the character." This highly subjectified social self or simulator suffers devas- tating inauthenticity. The powerful
authority given the social greatly amplifies Socratic culture's already selfindulgent "inwardness." Integ- rity, decisiveness, spontaneity, and pleasure are undone by paralyzing overconcern
about possible causes, meanings, and consequences of acts and unending internal dialogue about what others might think, expect,
say, or do (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 83-86; 1986, pp. 39-40; 1974, pp. 302-4, 316-17). Nervous
rotation of socially
appropriate "masks" reduces persons to hypostatized "shadows," "abstracts," or
simulacra. One adopts "many roles," playing them "badly and superficially" in the fashion of a stiff "puppet play." Nietzsche
asked, "Are you genuine? Or only an actor? A representative or that which is represented? . . . [Or] no more than an imitation of an
actor?"Simulation
is so pervasive that it is hard to tell the copy from the genuine
article; social selves "prefer the copies to the originals" (Nietzsche 1983, pp. 84-86; 1986, p. 136;
1974, pp. 232- 33, 259; 1969b, pp. 268, 300, 302; 1968a, pp. 26-27). Their inwardness and aleatory scripts foreclose genuine
attachment to others. This
type of actor cannot plan for the long term or participate in
enduring net- works of interdependence; such a person is neither willing nor able
to be a "stone" in the societal "edifice" (Nietzsche 1974, pp. 302-4; 1986a, pp. 93-94). Superficiality
rules in the arid subjectivized landscape.Neitzsche (1974, p. 259) stated, "One thinks with a watch in one's
hand, even as one eats one's midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always 'might miss
out on something. ''Rather do anything than nothing': this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture. . . . Living in a
constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and
anticipating others." Pervasive
leveling, improvising, and faking foster an inflated sense of
ability and an oblivious attitude about the fortuitous circumstances that contribute
to role attainment (e.g., class or ethnicity). The most medio- cre people believe they can fill any position, even cultural
leadership. Nietzsche respected the self-mastery of genuine ascetic priests, like Socra- tes, and praised their ability to redirect
ressentiment creatively and to render the "sick" harmless. But he deeply feared the new simulated versions. Lacking the "born
physician's" capacities, these impostors am- plify the worst inclinations of the herd; they are "violent, envious, ex- ploitative,
scheming, fawning, cringing, arrogant, all according to cir- cumstances. " Social selves are fodder for the "great man of the masses."
Nietzsche held that "the less one knows how to command, the more ur- gently one covets someone who commands, who commands
severely- a god, prince, class, physician, father confessor, dogma, or party conscience. The
deadly combination of
desperate conforming and overreaching and untrammeled ressentiment paves the
way for a new type of tyrant
Resolved means we should remain open to the resolution and different ways of
debating it
Pezze 6 (Barbara, PhD Philosophy at Honk Kong U, “Heidegger on Gelassenheit”, Minerva, vol
.10, http://www.ul.ie/~philos/vol10/Heidegger.html)
Let us pause for a moment to consider a possible misunderstanding. It could appear, from what we have been saying, that Gelassenheit “floats in the realm of
unreality and so in nothingness, and, lacking all power of action, is a will-less letting in of everything and, basically, the denial of the will to live!” (1966a, p. 80). But
It is a “resolve”
not as an act of will that makes a decision and finds a solution to a
problem or a situation. This “resolve,” as Heidegger himself suggests, must be thought as the one that is spoken of in Being and Time, that is, it is a “letting
this is not the case, for in the Gelassenheit we find something that recalls the “power of action,” but which is not a will.
[Entschlossenheit] (ibid., p. 81), but
oneself be called forth” (1996, p. 283) to one’s ownmost possibility of being. “Resoluteness” — as Entschlossenheit is translated in Being and Time — is “authentic
being a self” (1996, p. 274).
It is quite difficult to think a resolve that is not a matter of will that moves to an action; we tend, in fact, to consider resoluteness as a strong determination to attain
is not an intention
to act; it is not a ‘gathering of energy’ to be released into action. Resolve is the beginning, the inceptual
beginning of any action moved . Here acting is not be taken as an action undertaken
by Dasein in being resolute. Rather, acting refers to the existential and fundamental mode of being of Dasein, which is to be “care,” and which
something. As we read in Heidegger’s Introduction To Metaphysics (2000), the essence of the resolve, as he intends it,
is the “primordial” being of Dasein.
Resoluteness, in its essence, is the remaining open of Dasein for be-ing. In the context of the Conversation, this resolve
should thus be understood as “the opening of man particularly undertaken by him for openness…” [als das eigens übernommene Sichöffnen des Daseins für das
Offene…] (Heidegger 1966a, p. 81). It is a resolve to remain open to be-ing, and therefore to what is ownmost to man’s nature, which is disclosed in relation to be-ing.
This resolve is what Heidegger, in the Conversation, indicates as “releasement to that-which-regions,” the resolve to release oneself to that-which-regions,
to remain open towards the openness itself.
Now, there is another element that pertains to Gelassenheit: there is, in fact, not only a resolve, but also a “steadfastness” [Ausdauer] (Heidegger 1966a, p.81) proper
Thinking, becoming more and more aware of its nature, and experiencing more clarity about it, remains firm and
resolute . Thinking “stands within” and “rests” in this “composed steadfastness” (ibid., p. 81]). The “steadfastness” proper to Gelassenheit
to Gelassenheit.
would be behavior which did not become a swaggering comportment, but which collected itself into and remained always the composure of
releasement [Verhaltenheit der Gelassenheit]. (Heidegger 1966a, p. 81)
Their claims about portable skills, predictable limits, rational decision making,
community norms, policy training, problem solving, critical thinking, activating
agency, etc., all rely on and enforce an understanding of education which frames
subjects as units of rationality to be bettered through civilizing practices. This
form of dispassionate subject construction eliminates care and dooms millions to
suffering and death. - blue
Mourad 2001 (Roger Jr., Director of Institutional Research at Washtenaw College and teaches at the
University of Michigan. His academic credentials include a Ph.D. in Higher Education, M.A. in Philosophy
of Education, and J.D. in Law, all from the University of Michigan. He is the author of Postmodern
Philosophical Critique and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Higher Education ~Westport: Greenwood, 1997!
and several recent journal publications on epistemological, ethical, and legal issues pertaining to the
nature and structure of institutionally organized education and its relation to the social good, “Education
After Foucault: The Question of Civility” Teachers College Record Volume 103, Number 5, October 2001,
pp. 739–759)
EDUCATION FOR IMPROVEMENT, OR “KICKING THE DOG” Too many lost names too many rules to the game Better find a
focus or you’re out of the picture.48 The idea that the fundamental issue of the just civil state is to find the right balance between
preserving individual freedom and constraining individual threat has served as a tacit foundation within which belief and debate
about educational philosophy, policy, and practice develop. This statement is not intended to suggest that there is some direct and
specific historical connection that can be unequivocally demonstrated to exist between foundational political theory and
mainstream educational theories and practices. However, I want to propose that there is a compatibility between them that has
important consequences for a new critique of organized formal education. In the remainder of this paper, my aim is to argue that
the tenor of the theories that I have summarized is endemic in the ordinary ways that we think about and engage in organized
education. How is the idea of the basic human being that is posed as the fundamental social, political, and pedagogic problem for
modern civilization, this human being that must be managed in order to keep it from harming itself and others, played out in
The tacit, unchallenged belief is that through education, the human
being must be made into something better than it was or would be absent a formal
education. There are all kinds of versions of this subject and of what it should become: potential
achiever, qualified professional, good citizen, “leader,” independent actor, critical
thinker, change agent, knowledgeable person. In all cases, the subject before education
is viewed to be, like the subject before civilization, something in need of being made
competent—and safe—in the mind of the educator. From this vantage point, the pedagogic relationship
educational presuppositions?
between teacher and student, between competent adult and incompetent child ~or adult!, contains within it a possibility that it
seeks to overcome, namely, a rejection of the socialization program of the former by the latter. There is an implicit conflict between
individuals as soon as the student walks into the school or college classroom door from outside the civility that the teacher would
have that student become. It
must be resolved, or contained in some way; and this is done
immediately by rendering the student a rule follower – a follower of the social order, both in
and out of the classroom. Or the student must be rendered a challenger of the social order, in
favor of an order that overcomes oppression—to become a competent comrade. The individual
must be taught how to be an individual in accordance with this balance. Being an individual
means being “free”—it means being “self-determined,” it means competing, and it means
obeying the law. This is the case, even if the teaching is done with kindness and sensitivity. The responsibility for dealing
with suffering and limitation lies almost solely with this individual, not the state. In fact, if suffering is viewed at all, it tends to be
viewed as something that is good for the individual to endure or to fight in order to overcome it. Limitation is not acknowledged,
unless the individual is deemed disadvantaged in some way, and
with an opportunity to become competent.
the remedy tends to be to provide the person
Is it any wonder that parents of children with disabilities, aided by many
educators, often must fight for educational and other services? This
situation simply reflects that the basic logic of
education and, more generally, the state, is not predicated upon a recognition that the
human being is susceptible to suffering or that the state’s reason for being should be to care for
people. If caring for its inhabitants were the basic purpose of the civil state, then there would be no need to fight for this
organized formal
recognition. Is it any wonder that the education of the ordinary child is mainly training for a far-off, abstract future that is destined
We talk about equipping children
and adults to “solve problems.” Yet, problems do not fall from the sky; they do not exist
as such until a human being gives them a name. In contrast, the concept of contention suggests
that the practical role of reason should be used to understand the human being as subject to
suffering and to act accordingly as moral agents. That is very different from an educational
philosophy, policy, and practice that views reason as an instrument by which to overcome
obstacles and to conform to the social order. It may be argued that modern education is about reason, about how to
think and live reasonably and, therefore, how to live well and to care for oneself and for others. Yet it is commonly
expressed that we live in a “complex world” and that children and adults must “learn how to learn,” in
order to “succeed in a world of rapid change.” The question that needs to be asked is: Why should a person have
to be better than life at present? Why must school be about overcoming anything?
to? In effect, education expects the human being to have an unlimited ability to think and act with reason sufficient to cope with
increasingly complex situations that require individual intellect to adequately recognize, evaluate, and prioritize alternative courses
of action, consider their consequences, and make good decisions. For the most part, the increasing complexity of civil society and
the multiplicity of factors that intellect is expected to deal with in different situations are not questioned in education. Is this what
education is rightly about? Education is as much about the use of intelligence to avoid suffering and feelings of limitation and about
fending off feelings of fear as it is about learning. It is about acting upon other people and upon the civil order to deal with
perceived threats. One
must be an “active learner” or else. Why? The individual must be acted
upon and rendered into an entity that engages reality in the ways that are deemed just by many
educators, lawmakers, and others with a stake in the perpetuation of the given social
order. Thus, the individual is exhorted to “do your best,” “make an effort,” “earn a grade,” “be motivated,” “work hard,”
“overcome obstacles,” “achieve.” Why should education be about any of these things? Unfortunately, the culture of scholarship is
thoroughly consistent with these precepts. When we question them, we challenge the ends that they serve but not the ideas
themselves. We believe that education is rightly about improvement. This
philosophy of improvement is not
necessarily consistent with enhancement of living. It often has the opposite effect. How is this result
justified? Certainly, it can feel good to accomplish something or to overcome obstacles. Does that mean that adversity should be a
positive value of the civil state? The
modern idea, beginning with Descartes and established through Lockean empiricism
that anyone can be rational leads quickly to the idea that
everyone is responsible for being wholly rational, as that word is understood according to
the social order. The perpetuation of the given social order in education as elsewhere is about
gaining advantage and retaining power. It is about cultural politics and about marginalization of
various groups and about class and about socializing children to believe in capitalism as if it is a
natural law. Yet under the analysis that I have made here, these major problems are symptoms of something
more basic. The more basic problem that I have emphasized here is inextricable from the problem of the just civil state. It is
about the intense pressures on people to think and act in ways that serve broader interests that
are not at all concerned with their well-being in a variety of contexts including
psychological, social, economic, political, and cultural. It is no answer to ground pedagogy in the
notion of “building community.” The idea that something must be built implies that something
must be made better in order for it to be tolerated. Moreover, “community” carries with it the
prerequisite that one be made competent to be a member— again, the presumption that something must be
done to the person to make it better in some way. I do not mean to say that educators have bad intent. I do mean that this ethos
of betterment through competency will inevitably fail to fulfill the dreams of reformers and
revolutionaries. It does not consider the human being as an entity to care for but rather as
something to be equipped with skills and knowledge in order to improve itself. This
failure is not only because there are millions of children and adults that live in poverty in
the wealthiest countries in human history. It is because the state of mind that can tolerate
such suffering is the same state that advances and maintains the ethos of civility as
betterment, rather than civility as caring for people because they are subject to suffering.
The alternative that I have only introduced in a very abbreviated way under the rubric that I called “contention” is intended to
~and made pedagogic by Rousseau’s Emile!,
be pragmatic in the ways that Foucault and Richard Rorty are pragmatic in their respective approaches to the subject of the state.49
It is
intended to address an unacceptable state of contemporary Western civilization,
namely, its repetitive and even escalating incidence of disregard for suffering and harm in many
forms, despite intellectual, social, medical, legal, educational, scientific, and technological
“progress.” We have had two hundred years of modern educational principles, and two
hundred years of profound suffering along with them. The problem of the individual calls for a
new formulation and for a proper response—one that cares for the individual rather than
makes it competent. The “modern project” of betterment through competency and
opportunity must be challenged and replaced by an emotionally intelligent ethos
that expressly and fundamentally acknowledges suffering and limitation in
philosophy, policy, and practice.
Pre-concieved limits to advocacy preclude real world engagement – breaking the
rules makes the change
Foss and Griffen 1995 (Sonja, associate professor of Communication Studies at Ohio State,
Cindy, assistant professor of Speech Communication at Colorado State, “Beyond Persuasion: A
Proposal for Invitational Rhetoric, Communication Monographs, March)Professor of Speech
Communication, University of Denver, HC)
The introduction of invitational rhetoric to the array of rhetorical forms available also serves a
greater heuristic, inventive function than rhetoric previously has allowed. Traditional theories of rhetoric occur
within preimposed or preconceived frameworks that are reflexive and reinforce the vocabularies
and tenets of those frameworks. In rhetoric in which the rhetor seeks to impose change on others, an idea is adapted to
the audience or is presented in ways that will be most persuasive to the audience; as a result, the idea stays lodged
within the confines of the rhetorical system in which it was framed. Other may challenge the idea but only
within the confines of the framework of the dispute already established. The inventive potential of rhetoric is
restricted as the interaction converts the idea to the experience required by the framework.
Invitational rhetoric, on the other hand, aims at converting experience “to one of the many views
which are indeterminately possible” (Holmberg, 1977, p. 237). As a result, much is open in invitational
rhetoric that is not in traditional rhetorics—the potential of the audiences to contribute to the generation of ideas is
enhanced, the means used to present ideas are not those that limit the ideas to what is most persuasive for the audience, the view of
the kind of environment that can be created in the interaction is expanded, and the ideas that can be considered multiply. The
privileging of inventions in invitational rhetoric allows for the development of interpretations,
perspectives, courses of actions, and solutions to problems different from those allowed in
traditional models of rhetoric. Rather than the discovery of how to make a case, invitational rhetoric employs
invention to discover more cases, a process Daly (1984) describes as one of creating “an atmosphere in which further
creativity may flourish … [w]e become breathers/creators of free space. We are windy, stirring the stagnant spaces
with life” (p. 18). The inclusion of an invitational rhetoric in the array of rhetorics available suggests the need to revise and expand
rhetorical constructs of various kinds to take into account the nature and function of this form. Invitational rhetoric suggests, for
example, that the traditional view of the audience as an opponent ought to be questioned. It challenges the traditional conception of
the notion of rhetorical strategies as means to particular ends in that in invitational rhetoric, the means constitute the ends. It
suggests the need for a new schema of ethics to fit interactional goals other than inducement of
others to adherence to the rhetor’s own beliefs. Finally, invitational rhetoric provides a mode of communication for
women and other marginalized groups to use in their efforts to transform systems of domination and oppression. At first glance,
invitational rhetoric may seem to be incapable of resisting and transforming oppressive systems such as patriarchy because the most
it seems able to do is to create a space in which representatives of an oppressive system understand a different—in this case, a
feminist—perspective but do not adopt it. Although invitational rhetoric is not designed to create a specific change, such as the
transformation of systems of oppression into ones that value and nurture individuals, it may produce such an outcome.
Invitational rhetoric may resist an oppressive system simply because it models an alternative to
the system by being “itself an Other way of thinking/speaking” (Daly, 1978, p. xiii)—it presents an
alternative feminist vision rooted in affirmation and respect and thus shows how an alternative
looks and works. Invitational rhetoric thus may transform an oppressive system precisely because it
does not engage that system on its own terms, using arguments developed from the system’s
framework or orientation. Such arguments usually are co-opted by the dominant system (Ferguson,
1984) and provide the impetus “to strengthen, refine, and embellish the original edifice,” entrenching the system further (Johnson,
1989, pp. 16-17). Invitational
rhetoric, in contrast, enables rhetors to disengage from the dominance and
mastery so common to a system of oppression and to create a reality of equality and mutuality in
its place, allowing for options and possibilities not available within the familiar, dominant framework.
You don’t solve – targeted policy research never leads to implementation – to
think the plantext is what sticks is nihilism
Norman, 11 (Johan, 2011, “Political Utilisation of Scholarly Ideas: The ‘Clash of Civilisations’ vs. ‘Soft Power’ in US Foreign
Policy,” Review of International Studies, Ph.D candidate Department of Government, Uppsala University)
IR scholars concerned with the ‘gap’ between the ‘two worlds’ complain about the allegedly limited impact their research has on
the practice of foreign policy.14 They express a noteworthy dissatisfaction, on the one hand with the apparent
lack of interest for ‘policy-relevant’ research in their own discipline, and on the other with a lack of concern for relevant
research among practitioners of foreign policy.15 Although they are not concerned with IR, the available empirical studies of how other social
sciences have been politically utilised confirm that research only very rarely leads to direct implementation of policy
recommendations.16 For two reasons, however, the prevailing dissatisfaction with the lack of discernable policy effects
of research is misguided. Firstly, it expresses a traditional ‘engineering’ perspective, based on unrealistic assumptions of
rationality in social science and public policy.17 Secondly, as public policy theorist Tim Booth has argued, it is far too limiting to conceive of ‘policy relevance’
in terms of effects that ‘will be concrete [. . .] and open to direct and objective appraisal’.18 Expectations of a strictly ‘rational’ or ‘undiluted’ usage of scholarly ideas will only lead to disillusionment.19 In contrast, a
perspective focusing on political utilisation takes into account a much wider array of possible connections between research and policy, which includes instrumental as well as conceptual and symbolic usage
.
Their pedagogical method reproduces neoliberal calculability through laws – the
ideals of civic responsibility re-create macro-level violence
Goodrich 13 (Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws: Half-Written Laws (Google
eBook) Front Cover Peter Goodrich, Mariana Valverde Routledge, Peter Goodrich is a Professor
of Law and Director of Law and Humanities at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law Aug 21,
2013 - Law - 224 pages
http://books.google.com/books?id=VVeBAAAAQBAJ&dq=legalization+state+nietzsche&source
=gbs_navlinks_s – BRW)
Responsibility — which many analysts have argued is the fundamental feature of the
liberal and especially the neoliberal subject16 — does not easily and smoothly grow from the social interactions of
informal private contract, however. There is a long and contingent chain of events and juxtapositions by
which responsibility becomes effective, politically as well as ethically, by being
tethered to Christian (or liberal) guilt. Let us reconstruct these steps. Aside from the determinate and fragile form of
memory that is “the will’s memory," what else is required for humans to be able to make promises, to acquire the right to make
promises from the social contract to the marriage contract? What
is required is nothing less than the
reshaping of concrete human capacities, through the action of the contract and its particular
interpellation of human subjects, into a set of homogenous, comparable, even
quantifiable bits. Now, why do humans have to be turned into disciplined
individuals, into chunks of abstract labor, into interchangeable or at least
comparable units? What is it about the contract and its promise of performance that facilitates or affects17 this rather
astounding feat of human evolution? The answer is that “in order to dispose of the future in
advance in this way, how much man must first have learnt to distinguish necessity
from accident! To think in terms of causality. ... To be able above all to reckon and
calculate!1*18 Making calculations about future outcomes requires flattening out
specificities and separating out what contract law would call “unforeseeable" events. We need to posit
causality as a general ontological machinery because we need to be able to count
on a future that will remain essentially the same even if certain particularities are different. After all. if we make a promise to
hand our house over to a buyer by signing a contract, we are predicting that the experience of living in houses will remain
much as it has been — and that the banking system will keep its rules, that the dollar will not
suddenly collapse, that there will not be a communist revolution that declares the abolition of
private property, and so on. Engaging in contractual relations both facilitates and requires,
then, a full- fledged ontology and a generalized historical narrative, both centered on the presumption of
continuity, even sameness. And — a key step — the calculating subject of liberal political thought
is itself produced (as an entity that can be counted and counted upon by others) by the same process that
constructs the world of interpersonal obligation as predictable and measurable: "it was by
means of the morality of custom and the social straitjacket that man was really made calculable.” So, the
individuals assumed by liberal theory to exist, calculating minds already installed
and functioning, in the state of nature, are in fact produced through the very
activity of calculating.
Radical freedom has to be the starting point
Kelly 9 (Mark G. E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault, Ch. 7 Ethics, published 2009 by Routledge Taylor & Francis
Group) PC
Ethics is for Foucault a logical outcome of his political thought; indeed, he actually claims it serves as the referent
of his analysis:¶ Although the theory of political power as an institution usually refers to a juridical conception of the subject of right,
it seems to me that the
analysis of governmentality—that is to say, of power as a set of revers- ible relationships—must
refer to an ethics of the subject defined by the relationship of self to self. Quite simply, this means that in
the type of analysis I have been trying to advance for some time you can see that power relations, governmentality, the
government of the self and of others, and the relationship of self to self constitute a chain, a thread, I think it is
around these relations that we should be able to connect together the question of politics and the question of ethics.
(HS 252)¶ Here, Foucault refers to precisely the “chain” of links that we have drawn between power and the subject earlier in
the book, the linkage of micro and macro. Still, even though Foucault seems to think that ethics is the natural corollary of
his political analyses, he nevertheless, in almost the same breath, asserts that it may not be possible to constitute the necessary
ethics today:¶ We may have to suspect that we find it impossible today to constitute an ethic of the self, even though it may be an
urgent, fundamental, and politically indispensable task, if it is true after all that there is no first or final point of resistance to
political power other than in the relationship one has to oneself. (HS 252)¶ Both elements of this paradox, the necessity and the
impossibility of the formation of an ethics of the self today are clear. It is necessary, in a sense, precisely because it is impossible: we
need ethics to escape our tutelage. For Foucault, freedom is both a necessary precondition for, and
only possible given, the practice of ethics: “freedom is the ontological condition of ethics,” ethics
being “the reflexive form that freedom takes.”5 For Foucault there was a problem in contemporary liberation
movements, that they did not understand this dimension to freedom:¶ Recent liberation movements suffer from the fact that they
cannot find any principle on which to base the elaboration of a new ethics. They need an ethics, but they cannot find any other ethics
than an ethics founded on so-called scientific knowledge of what the self is, what desire is, what the unconscious is, and so on. (EW1
255–56)¶ Foucault, it seems to me, is referring here to psychoanalysis and Marxism, which both famously make contentious claims
to scientificity. Psychoanalysis
and Marxism, Foucault suggested in 1982, are in fact in the order of what he calls
an answer to
“the problem of what is at stake in the subject’s being (of what the subject’s being must be for the subject to have
access to the truth) and, in return, the question of what aspects of the subject may be transformed by
virtue of his access to the truth” (HS 29). However, says Foucault, neither of these two movements has been capable of
understanding this aspect of itself; they both understand themselves not as pseudo-spiritualities, but as sciences. As such, they do
not understand the necessities of constructing a new subjectivity. Instead, they unreflectively and
unwittingly build a new subjectivity in the midst of a reality they criticise and desire to change.¶
“spiritualities” (HS 29), which is not to say religious movements (see HS 19), but rather movements that offer
There are, on the other hand, lifestylist movements, such as the hippie movement or lifestyle anarchism, which seem to be interested
in building a new subjectivity, but while anarchism does appear in Foucault’s above-quoted¶ list of attempts to reconstitute an
aesthetics of the self, this is an aesthetics of total liberation in the personal sphere, and as such is still universalist and utopian. These
movements lack the asceticism necessary to the constitution of an ethics.¶ “Free
for what?” asks Nietzsche (Z I “Of the
is a fundamental question which is not answered by any of these move- ments, by
negative philosophies of liberation, by sciences that oppose capitalism or neurosis, but do not
provide positive content. They are interested in negative freedom in Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) sense, freedom from; by
itself this is nihilistic. Rather, there is a need to have something to strive for, positive freedom in Berlin’s
sense.6 This is not utopianism, but rather a striving for something different, but which is in itself no final
end, nor a dangerously-fixed plan.¶ “He who cannot obey himself will be commanded,” says Nietzsche (Z II “Of Self-Overcoming”).
And, on the other hand, as Foucault (EW1 288) puts it, “It is the power over oneself that thus regulates one’s
power over others.” The Greeks knew that to exercise power over others, as a free man was required to do, over women,
children, slaves, he needed to exercise control over himself. This means that ethics and resistance are essentially
related, too, however, since if we cannot control ourselves, our capacity for resistance is diminished.¶
One of the attractions of Greek ethics for Foucault is very clearly the kind of relation which is posited in
Greek thought between the ethical and the political. Foucault unites the two under the rubrics of
“government” and “conduct,” which quasi-Hellenistic concepts cover both the way we conduct/govern ourselves and the
Way of the Creator”). This
way in which one may conduct/govern others. While a fundamental relation with the political of course also exists in modern
Western “ethics,” from Kant’s Kingdom of Ends to utilitarian- ism, here the relation is one in which individual action is held to
concat- enate uncomplicatedly into collective action, such that what is appropriate for individuals to do is also what is appropriate
for many to do—“What if everybody acted like that?” Greek ethics, on the other hand, was of course not universal. Not
only did it not prescribe the same values to everyone, but rather general guidelines, it did not even address itself to everyone, but
rather to the small, free, male elite, which is to say, in Athens at any rate, which is archetypically where we are talking about, the
political class.¶ The
deliberate practice of ethical self-formation, modernised and democratised so
that it becomes an ethics of resistance to domination, rather than an ethics of patriarchal domination over hoi
polloi, appears as the solution to the problem of subjection, in which subjectivation is identified
with subjugation by power, offering an alternative mode of subjectivation:¶ The subject
constitutes itself through practices of subjection [assujet- tissement], or, in a more autonomous way, through
practices of liberation, of freedom, as, in Antiquity, starting, of course, from a certain¶ number of rules,
styles and conventions, which are found in the cultural milieu. (DE2 1552; cf. FL 452)¶ The alternatives
are clear: subjection or freedom. This is not a choice we can simply make, however, so much as
something to strive for blindly in the dark. It is the Nietzschean far shore, the Übermensch, what is beyond modernity and
the era of man, but for Foucault this transition is not even outlined to the extent that Nietzsche outlines it. Rather we are left
only with the patient labour of the local struggle and attentiveness to the present, since this
ethics is not a ready-formed template which can be imposed on reality to produce the desired
effect.
Critical rhetoric as a means of resisting the biopolitical state is the catalyst in
creating ruptures in the systems of death control that create a necropolitics of
violence and agency deprivation
McDorman 05 (Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol. 2, No. 3, September 2005,
pp. 257/279 Controlling Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy Todd F.
McDorman Todd F. McDorman Professor and Senior Associate Dean of the College Department
of Rhetoric Wabash College – BRW)
Critical Rhetoric, Bio-Power, and the Right-to-Die Appropriating Foucault, Raymie McKerrow explains critical
rhetoric
as an effort that ‘‘seeks to unmask or demystify the discourse of power’’ in order to
overcome society’s domination at the hands of the power structure. The approach
stresses practicality and encourages critique through pro-active performance-based
analysis. By critiquing discourse ‘‘which creates and sustains practices which control the
dominated,’’ this essay hopes to problematize state control over life and death decision
making.3 A critical rhetoric, McKerrow explains, operates by assembling ‘‘disparate scraps of
discourse which, when constructed as an argument, serve to illuminate otherwise
258 T. F. McDorman hidden or taken for granted social practices.’’4 In this instance, it involves
examining the history of laws controlling death, the rise of the modern hospital and medical procedures, and
legal principles used to determine the criteria for acceptable death. The discursive fragments are
considered according to the operation of two principles*/the critique of domination, which concentrates on
how oppression is carried out, and the critique of freedom, which is analysis of the dominating
discourse undertaken in the hope of, at least temporarily, realigning power relations in a
way that offers protection for the marginalized.5 Here, for example, the critique of domination concerns
ways discourses concerning death have attempted to place control over life primarily
in the hands of the state. As a critical rhetoric, this placement is, first, exposed and, second,
challenged through a reading of the means of domination and their potential
implications.
Specifically deliberation over end of life issues is important because it
functions as a de-traditionalized contestation of values within society Brussel 12 (The discursive construction of the dying subject: mapping the
complexity of an end-of-life care context Leen Van Brussel Centre for Media
Sociology (Cemeso) :: Free University of Brussels :: Brussels Pleinlaan 2 ::1050 Brussels ::
Belgium : Journal of Language and Politics 11:4. 2012. iii, 158 pp. (pp. 479–499)-BRW)
The ‘good death’ as a crucial aspect of quality of life can be regarded as an aspect of this new individualism.
Closely linked to individualism is a thorough going process of de-traditionalization. Traditional discourses on life
stages or trajectories and social relations – incorporating transitions through family, school, occupation, sexuality,marriage,
parenting, retirement and dying – are indeed undermined as the foundations of personal and social
life (Heaphy, 2007: 85). The late modern de-traditionalized discourses on sexuality, marriage and parentingetc. are (partly) the
result of (feminist) hegemonic practices most importantly borne by women’smovements that have brought to the fore new
antagonisms regarding life-political issues such as marriageand abortion. In a similar way, social
movements such as
the ‘right to die’ movement support de-traditionalized discourses which circulate
in a context of the end-of-life (care). Whether dealing with sexuality, marriage and
abortion or end-of-life care, these de-tradtionalized discourses are mainly organized
around nodal points such as individualism, freedom (of choice) and autonomy. Social
(network) structures such as family, friendship groups and work are both socially constituted and
constitutive. They are not only affected by these de-traditionalized discourses, but also
bring them into circulation, confirm and enforce them. Again, institutional structures within the field operate
as discursive machineries. An important discourse on the end-of-life these discursive
machineries (re)produce, is thediscourse on ‘the good death’ as an ‘aware and controlled death’. One
contemporary way of translating this discourse into a concrete end-of-life care
decision is the practice of active euthanasia (that, at several points,opposes the traditional conceptions of the dying process).
The political practices of supporters of the ‘rightto die’ discourse have been very important to the development of the euthanasia
laws in the Benelux. In aBelgian context, the activities of the ‘VZW Recht op waardig sterven’ (‘right to die with dignity’) 4 aimed
at mobilizing subjects with reference to the empty signifier – a concept referring to the
structural impossibly of signification as such (Laclau, 1996: 37) - ‘dying with dignity’. This mobilization resulted in
fiercediscussions on the permissibility of human intervention in dying and eventually, in the
acceptance of thelaw on euthanasia, which remains embedded within a constant sphere of struggle and conflict. The
presence of struggle and conflict illustrates that a de-traditionalized and
individualized discursive order within the social (network) field, and especially within the
sphere of the dying process, is not absolute anduniversal. Alternative discourses building on
traditional conceptions can be regarded as counter-hegemonic projects. This is the case
in spheres of sexuality, marriage and parenting in which counter-hegemonic discourses (often religious discourses) stress the social
value of marriage, monogamy and the traditionalfamily. But more importantly, this is the case in the sphere of end-of-life care in
which palliative care practices have become sedimented, but in which other
end-of-life decisions such as
active euthanasia and assisted suicide maintain their political character since they
remain embedded within a sphere of pubic contestation. In a Belgian context, for example,
religious actors such as the congregation Broeders vanliefde 5 (‘Brothers of charity’) can be regarded as a
discursive machinery bringing into circulation counter-hegemonic discourses on
the end-of-life by taking position explicitly and publicly against active euthanasia.
Our advocacy is one of antagonism – that is uniquely good for producing social
change
Brussel 12 (The discursive construction of the dying subject: mapping the
complexity of an end-of-life care context Leen Van Brussel Centre for Media
Sociology (Cemeso) :: Free University of Brussels :: Brussels Pleinlaan 2 ::1050 Brussels ::
Belgium : Journal of Language and Politics 11:4. 2012. iii, 158 pp. (pp. 479–499)-BRW)
realm. Different
political actions and practices have resulted in the ‘politization’ of
issues that were considered a private matter for a long time. Laws against domestic violence and marital rape, for example,have
been developing under the influence of women movements during the last decades. The way the modern
environmental movement challenges the dominant logic of industrialization in contemporary
societies by pressing for new public policies and principles, offers a more recent example of the tendency
towards politization (Griggs & Howarth, 2004). The challenges that de-traditionalized and reflexive
relationships bring to the fore thus prompt new ‘life-political’ questions about how
relationships should be organised and how moral questions should be handled (Heaphy, 2007: 90). Giddens
(1991: 214) asserts: ‘Life politics concerns political issues which flow from processes of self-actualization in post-traditional contexts,
where globalizing tendencies intrude deeply into the reflexive project of the self, and converselywhere processes of self-realization
influence global strategies.’ Life-political
issues include questions about how we should and should not
live and provide the moral foundation on which should be decided (Heaphy, 2007: 90). Life
politics includes for instance ecological questions and the changing nature of the family (Mouffe, 2007: 43). Yet, life-political
issues are also intrinsically related to the existential questions that illness and death raise.
Under the influence of changesin the medical field (relative patient-autonomy), the social field (relative de-traditionalization) and
thereligious field (relative secularization), institutionalized
politics started to engage in issues on
illness, death and dying. But the (life-)political is not restricted to institutionalized
politics. Following Mouffe’s broad definition, the activities of different groups (including new social
movements) which interact, negotiate and conflict are aslo considered political. In a
context of end-of-life issues, the protest of lay persons (patientsand/or their relatives), doctors and
nurses advocating particular end-of-life decisions and the claims of (representatives of) the
palliative care movement and the right to die movement are also political. One important example here
are the political practices of the right to die movement (e.g., the VZW Recht opWaardig Sterven in
Belgium) that called for the politization and legalization of euthanasia with reference to the
(floating) nodal point ‘dying with dignity’. When a particular societal theme is
considered a public and political issue, particular laws, acts and regulations on that issue
are likely to develop. With regard to end-of-life issues, legal-political frameworks such as the
Patient Self-Determination Act in the United States, the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, theEuthanasia laws in The Netherlands,
Belgium and Luxemburg and the laws on patient’s rights have beendeveloping during the last decennia (Cohen, 2007: 5). More and
more, these laws and regulations define a‘good death’ in terms of a democratic human right. Legal institutions (courts and
tribunals), their representatives (judges, panel of judges, lawyers etc.) and their judgments, then, can
be regarded as
discursive machineries that not only bring the discourses of a ‘good death’ as a
democratic human right further into circulation, but also confirm and enforce
them. These discourses of ‘good death’ mainly buildupon the (sometimes conflicting) discourses of the ‘right to
die’ movement and the palliative caremovement. Very often, then, these laws struggle with questions about the
permissibility of human controlover the timing and manner of death. Unsurprisingly, they are often
difficult to interpret.