The "Every Life is Precious" Idiocy

First, I care for people and every rational effort should be put into ensuring that people get a fair shot at life and decent treatment.

But I don't buy into this over-the-top, life is "infinitely precious" idiocy. From David Ng at BoingBoing:

Access to life-saving medicines is not a luxury, but a human right.
~Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network
To me, the above statement is one of those things that sound like a no-brainer. Put another way, if I were to ask you whether you thought a person's income should determine whether they live or die from something like HIV/AIDS, then I think you would see that the answer is nothing but obvious. But here I am, in Canada, writing this post, because there is a very real danger that members of my government think that this isn't such an easy decision after all - that maybe wealth and business interests do matter when dealing with such ethical choices, and that there is a hierarchy where certain lives are worth more than others.

If you literally believed the above and I told you that I had developed a wonderful cure for a rare genetic disorder that kills 1 person out of the 6.5 billion people on earth each year, and that we could get this precious medicine produced for the modest investment of "only" $45 trillion. Then you, as a believer in the "every life is precious" mantra, would immediately sacrifice the livelihood of the whole planet for a full year -- in other words all 6.5 billion starve to death -- to save this one precious life from this dread genetic disease. Why? Because it would be immoral to use any kind of rational cost-benefit analysis since every single life is absolutely "precious". Nutty!

Having said the above, I actually am close to David Ng in supporting action to make HIV/AIDS drugs available to the world's poor. I would support governments simply seizing drug patents and giving them to factories willing to produce drugs at very modest profits. I have no problem using a "public right" to trump private greed.

But what I don't buy into is the idiotic "every life is precious" credo. If that was so, then if David Ng saw his mother at the hands of a madman killer and he had a gun and could take a clean shot and save his mother. His idiotic "every life is precious" credo would freeze his hand and leave him watching while the madman killed his mother. That's what David Ng is telling you with his patently ridiculous claim of "every life is precious". It is a lie. We do value "all life" but we aren't simpering idiots unable to make rational choices in tough circumstances. Any normal person would coolly kill the madman and free their mother. But David Ng assures us he just couldn't bring himself to do that to save his mother because "every life is precious".

Give me a break!

The first time I seriously considered this matter was nearly 40 years ago when a family living on Vancouver Island had a hydrocephalic child, blind, mentally retarded, with cerebral palsy. The child had undergone several brain operations to relieve pressure on the brain but the condition of the child continued to deteriorate. The parents finally decided "enough is enough!" and told health authorities they wanted no more treatments for their child. But the government of British Columbia took them to court so that taxpayer's money could continue to be flushed down the toilet on a hopeless case where quality of life wasn't going to improve and where the parents wanted needless surgeries to stop. Instead, bleeding heart "every life is precious" types hounded this family through the legal and police systems to try and force them to do what the health authorities wanted done. This while vast sums were being wasted on this hopeless case. I kept thinking: you mean there is no poor child in British Columbia who couldn't benefit from hot meals, warm clothing, better education? Wouldn't the social resources of the taxpayers of BC be better spent on cases where the investment of modest sums will yield outlandish benefits compared to spending outlandish sums where the is little or no benefit to be gained? Sadly, I was in a minority. The government of BC continued to bully this family for years until the afflicted child died of his overwhelming medical problems despite the many, many millions of public funds wasted. David Ng belongs to the camp that would happily throw money at this one hopeless case while turning a cold shoulder to the tens of thousands of young children would have benefited in substantial ways from modest sums spent on them. That's where the blind absolutist logic of "every life is precious" leads you.