No time for blogging today, but I realized that I posted a couple of pictures -- in draft form only, and they might be relevant to recent events.

Mortality is of course natural. Laura at Oddly Normal was kind enough to link to my post on Leon Kass, and she adds a new observation:

[Dr. Kass] recently turned sixty-five years old and is still living and lecturing us that attempting to prolong life beyond "normal limits" is immoral. As Dr. Kass is no doubt aware in his more lucid moments, living to sixty-five is not bloody normal by any standard except that allowed by modern medicine in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. By what rights he presumes to dictate that the raising the mean lifespan from approximately 35 in the wild to 77 in the modern world is fine*, but extending it to 120 or 160 or 300 would be grave heresy, I should like to know.

Why should anyone have the right to tell other people that it's time to die? Modern medicine has extended the human lifespan, and it is our destiny to do so. Kass -- a man trained as a medical doctor -- would thwart that destiny. Perhaps he forgets that famous First Principle, originally enunciated by Hippocrates: DO NO HARM. To thwart those who would stop or reverse the ravages of natural decay -- which it is man's destiny to do -- is certainly not in the spirit of that oath.

Freddie pointing to natural decay:

Well, that's the traditional view. Die and rot away!

But if man can prevent or reverse such things, is it not also natural? Are not advances in science and technology also part of man's nature?

Would we be better off keeping life as nasty, brutish and short as we can? (Until Dr. Kass came along, I would have thought that a rather foolish rhetorical question.)

Two or three minds on the subject:

Everyone, Kass included, is entitled to his opinion. But I think a line is crossed when someone enforces his opinions by wielding the power of the state. I have watched too many people die. That may have been "nature's way" -- but it's our nature to fight it.

Kass is part of the "natural decay" that humanity has been striving over the millenia to overcome.

To me, he represents true decadence just as surely as any "natural" disease.

UPDATE: Leon Kass (who was trained as a physician) does not like something he calls "medicalization":

The “beyond therapy” project has several times touched on the matter of the creeping “medicalization” of life—not only of mental life through the offices of psychiatry, but also of procreation in screening of fetuses and embryos, of the life cycle in dealing with aging or memory, or of athletic and other performances through enhancement technologies. We have so far not made this subject thematic. To do so, we should ask: what IS medicalization—as an idea, as a practice, as social/institutional attitudes and arrangements? Is it really on the rise? If so, what is responsible for it? What are its consequences? Why should we care? What, if anything, could/should be done about it—or some aspects of it? Formulated this way, it is a very big topic, certainly too big for the Council right now, and certainly too big for one session at one meeting. But it is one of the big themes of what ought to concern us.

....[T]he push toward medicalization is thus only partly driven by new technologies, though the availability of effective drugs and other instruments lends much support to a medical conception of the problem, and contributes to creating demand for medical services as treatment. It is also driven by deep cultural and intellectual currents: for example, to see more and more things in life not as natural givens to be coped with, but as objects rightly subject to our mastery and control; to have compassion for victims more than to blame perpetrators, even when the victims are victimized by their own perpetrations; to see the human person in non-spiritual and non-moral terms, but as a highly complex and successful product of blind evolutionary forces (which still perturb him through no fault of his own). It is also driven by commerce and the love of technique, the inflation of human desires to remove all obstacles to our happiness, etc.

Kass's whole "what should be done" approach assumes there is a problem, and that Kass has the solution.

My question is who the hell elected this man to sit in judgment on a profession he obviously deserted in favor of philosophy? And he's doing a lot more than sitting in judgment. His Council is pushing for limits on the human lifespan. The ethical problem I see is far more profound than Kass will admit. He is trying to utilize the brute force of the state to limit medical practice (the relationship between doctors and consenting patients), simply because, in his view, "nature" should dictate that life not be extended.

I cannot think of a more profound violation of the Hippocratic Oath than a doctor trying to stop other doctors from helping their patients. The people (mostly Kass sympathizers, as far as I can see) involved with the "DO NO HARM" website I cited are in my view unaware of the meaning (at least in the life extension context) of the very oath they claim to champion. Talking about harm to embryos (which they see as people, and as a superior form of life to living humans, or even fetuses!) misses the most odious aspect of Kass's mission -- to limit life.

Setting limits to human life (note carefully his carefully chosen code language of "the life cycle") contravenes a central goal of all medicine, whether ancient or modern.

I think Kass hates modern medicine, but he is not honest enough to admit it.

Readers interested in another take on "DO NO HARM" (on the stem cell debate) can also read this piece by Ronald Bailey.

Once again, a seed is not a tree.