Conservative "Votes for the Voiceless"

David Brooks claims to discern as the main difference between conservative and progressive bioethics that only one is properly moral in its concerns while the other is largely blind to the values dimension of policy.

This is of course exactly as outrageously false and, frankly, stupid as it was when it was circulated a few months ago in its guise as the fantasy of the conservative "Values-Voter" whose morally righteous hatred of gay people presumably mobilized millions to vote palpably against their own stated interests in November. Well, I guess it distracted Americans from noticing that the Election had been stolen again long enough for the media to cough up some good celebrity trials to do the job, so, who knows, maybe it can work again via Terri Schiavo to take some stink off of the unspeakable Delay, the Iraq Debacle, and the popular revolt against the Republican looting of Social Security.

Here's the case Brooks makes, in a nutshell:

The core belief that social conservatives [have]... is that the value of each individual life is intrinsic. The value of a life doesn't depend upon what a person can physically do, experience or achieve. The life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult...

The central weakness of the liberal case is that it is morally thin. Once you say that it is up to individuals or families to draw their own lines separating life from existence, and reasonable people will differ, then you are taking a fundamental issue out of the realm of morality and into the realm of relativism and mere taste.

I think it is in fact safe to say that in Bush's America "[t]he life of a comatose person or a fetus has the same dignity and worth as the life of a fully functioning adult."

That is to say, not very much.

Conservatives adore claiming to speak for nonpersons (especially fetal not-quite-yet persons, and stubbornly vegetative no-longer-quite persons) who cannot speak for themselves. What better way of multiplying their own voices in a world where sprawling majorities of actual people simply disagree with them, than to claim that their voice stands for countless voiceless voices as well as their own?

The ethical case that drives progressive policy and bioethics is one that foregrounds and consolidates individual consent. Consent is morally thick as concepts go, quite as richly and vibrantly saturated with experience and dignity and quandary as the more mineral mode of "life" the conservatives seem to prefer to concentrate their attentions on.

To denigrate the morality of consent as "the relativism of mere taste" is to confess a complete moral blindness to the way we actually want to do morality here in democratic civilization these days. And it follows as night does day that those who denigrate consent so often go on then to denigrate the dignity of actual democratic citizens with whom they happen to disagree. Notice how often "erring on the side of life" will require a violation of the terms in which citizens with whom conservatives disagree choose to live their own lives.

It's not like this result is a coincidence, you know.

Conservatives pretend to extend the dignity and status of citizens to nonpersons, and in so doing inevitably evacuate actual citizenship of that status. In ascribing "dignity" so uncritically it is conservatives who stretch morality as thin as the skin of a soap bubble. Of course, it matters little to conservatives that their own morality is so thin, for they prefer the dictates of authorities claiming to speak for God, or Tradition, or Homeland, when all is said and done, to the more contingent contentious verdicts of their own best worldly and reasonable deliberation.