Reader A. H. responds to my column on Aaron Bushnell’s self-immolation:
I hope you got brownie points for your self-serving opinion. In contrast, there was nothing self-serving about the young airman’s action.
Brownie points? From whom? On second thought, don’t answer that. In any case, I’ll answer this letter the same way I’d answer all of the negative responses I have received for this column: Please don’t let your misguided admiration for Bushnell lead you to follow his example.
Reader T. S. responds (I assume) to one of my recent posts touching on IVF:
Nobody really believes that microscopic embryos are children, including you. If you had to choose between saving your children or twenty embryos, we all know what you’d do and you wouldn’t hesitate.
As my correspondent may or may not know, this is a stock argument in debates about the morality of killing human beings in the embryonic stage of life. Typically, we are supposed to imagine a burning building from which we can rescue either group A or group B. Since it’s a stock argument, I already have a response — from my old book The Party of Death:
The moral question posed by the burning-building scenarios is the extent to which you can show favoritism without being unjust. That’s an interesting question. But in answering it we might reasonably take account of all kinds of things — family ties, the life prospects of potential rescuees, the suffering they would undergo if not rescued, etc. — that aren’t relevant to the question: Can we kill them?
To put it another way: In affirming that all human beings have an equal right not to be killed, we need not affirm that all human beings have equal claims on us in all respects.
The particular scenario you raised, T. S., makes the flaw in the general argument more stark. I would, after all, save my children in such a situation before I would save (say) the world’s top 20 cancer researchers. That does not mean it would be morally permissible for me to kill the latter.