Terri Schiavo and the Sneerbots

There seems to be a sentiment out there among some of those who support the starvation/dehydration of Terri Schiavo that Terri Schiavo "died" fifteen years ago, and it comes with its concomitant straw man -- that the "save Terri Schiavo" argument is posited solely by Jesus freaks who see the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich and by deluded morons who argue for preserving Schiavo's life because of the hope of recovery. Examples can be found here, here, and here (this last, the "Terri Schiavo as text" crowd, is a particularly chilling example of the state of academic discourse).

All such claims ignore the argument that (especially in the absence of clear evidence about her wishes)Terri Schiavo's life should be preserved regardless of the hope of recovery. And all of the arguments I cited seem to assume a body/person dualism that is by no means a philosophical given.

Bear with me. I'm going to quote at length from Robert P. George's great book, The Clash of Orthodoxies, which nicely encapsulates the problem with the body/person distinction:

Let's take the central issues of life and death. If we lay aside all the rhetorical grandstanding and obviously fallacious arguments, questions of abortion, infanticide, suicide, and euthanasia turn on the question of whether bodily life is intrinsically good, as Judaism and Christianity teach, or merely instrumentally good, as orthodox secularists believe.

If the former, then even the life of an early embryo or a severely retarded child or a comatose person has value and dignity. Their value and dignity are not to be judged by what they can do, how they feel, or what we judge their "quality of life to be. Their value and dignity transcend the instrumental purposes to which their lives can be put. They enjoy a moral inviolability that will be respected and protected in any fully just regime of law.

If bodily life is, as orthodox secularists believe, merely a means to other ends and not an end in itself, then a person who no longer gets what he wants out of life may legitimately make a final exit by suicide. If he is unable to commit suicide under his own power, he is entitled to assistance. If he is not lucid enough to make the decision for himself, then judgment must be substituted for him by the family or by a court to make the "right to die" effectively available to him.

Secularists would have us believe that, apart from special revelation, we have no reason to affirm the intrinsic goodness and moral inviolability of human life. That simply isn't true. In fact, the secularist proposition that bodily life is merely instrumentally good entails a metaphysical dualism of the person and the body that is rationally untenable.

Implicit in the view that human life is merely instrumentally and not intrinsically valuable is a particular understanding of the human person as an essentially non-bodily being who inhabits a nonpersonal body. According to this understanding -- which contrasts with the Judeo-Christian view of the human person as a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit -- the "person" is the conscious and desiring "self" as distinct from the body which may exist (as in the case of pre- and post-conscious human beings) as a merely "biological," and thus sub-personal reality. But the dualistic view of the human person makes nonsense of the experience all of us have in our activities of being dynamically unified actors -- of being, that is, embodied persons and not persons who merely "inhabit" our bodies and direct them as extrinsic instruments under our control, like automobiles. We don't sit in the physical body and direct it as an instrument, the way we sit in a car and make it go left or right.

This experience of unity of body, mind, and spirit, is itself no mere illusion. Philosophical arguments have undermined any theory that purports to demonstrate that a human being is, in fact, two distinct realities, namely, a "person" and a (sub-personal) body. Any such theory will, unavoidably, contradict its own starting point, since reflection necessarily begins from one's own conscious awareness of oneself as a unitary actor. So the defender of dualism, in the end, will never be able to identify the "I" who undertakes the project of reflection. He will simply be unable to settle whether the "I" is the conscious and desiring aspect of the "self," or the "mere living body." If he seeks to identify the "I" with the former, then he separates himself inexplicably from the living human organism that is recognized by others (and indeed, by himself) as the reality whose behavior (thinking, questioning, asserting, etc.) constitutes the philosophical enterprise in question. And if, instead, he identifies the "I" with that "mere living body," then he leaves no role for the conscious and desiring aspect of the "self" which, on the dualistic account, is truly the "person." As a recent treatment of the subject sums up the matter, "person" (as understood in dualistic theories) and "mere living body" are "constructs neither of which refers to the unified self who had set out to explain his or her own reality; both of them purport to refer to realities other than that unified self but somehow, inexplicably, related to it." In short, "person/body dualisms" purport to be theories of something, but cannot, in the end, identify something of which to be the theory.

From these arguments one rationally concludes that the body, far from being a nonpersonal and indeed sub-personal instrument at the direction and disposal of the conscious and desiring "self," is irreducibly part of the personal reality of the human being. It is properly understood, therefore, as fully sharing in the dignity -- the intrinsic worth -- of the person and deserving the respect due to persons precisely as such.

I suppose it would be unfair of me to point out that the "Terri Schiavo died fifteen years ago" argument relies on a body/person dualism which is as much an article of faith as any propounded by the "Jesus freaks" whom the partisans of starvation considers themselves so unaccountably superior to. There's little difference between the "snake handlers" and the cognitive function fetishizers in this regard, and the sneering certainty of the latter is not made more palatable, or more rational, by the fact that it has removed God from the equation -- especially since they appear to think that such an excision is alone sufficient to make their case.

Color this Jesus freak unimpressed.

Update: Wesley J. Smith at NRO has some sobering thoughts about the designation of Terri Schiavo as a non-person.