FULL DISCLOSURE - I GUESS I'M A PRAGMATIST ON TOP OF IT ALL

To kick things off, I ought to state my biases, at least those rele- vant to hosting this site. I’ll admit, for instance, to being very much a libertarian on social issues, and a bit more reluctantly,
to being a pragmatist as well.

It’s a combination that probably implies a third label too, moral relativist, though I won't cop to that one full bore. Not only are there some things I believe to be absolutely wrong, they will no doubt enter the discussion here on occasion. I just don’t plan to go into them now. Rather, let’s spend a little time on pragmatism.

Inasmuch as humans openly and without a second thought intervene under any number of circumstances to terminate the lives of other creatures we share this planet with, and inasmuch as there have always been grounds—war, self-defense, crimes of passion, and mental incapacity of the perpetrator, to name a few—that are deemed to jusify terminating the lives of even our fellow humans, I thought I’d hatched out a set of very comfortable and, more to the point, consistent positions on the four current biggies regarding sanctity of life.

Even as a church-going church member, I'm fine with stem cell re- search using freely donated embryos, as I am with freely chosen abortions being legal during the first trimester of a pregnancy and legal after that if the life or health of the mother are seriously at risk. I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that persons at the end of life should have a physician’s aid in dying if they wish it, and for many years supported capital punishment for those found guilty of murder.

You can see, then, why I lay claim to social libertarianism, the principle that government should butt out of all such areas unless a compelling state interest can be demonstrated. Still, careful readers will note that my support for capital punishment is in the past tense. That’s because I no longer do, even though I accept that the state has a compelling interest in preventing people from murdering one another; which is where pragmatism sneaks in and consistency goes out the window.

With the advent of DNA evidence having recently invalidated so many murder convictions, with the science on eye-witness testimony consistently showing how unreliable it is, and with the deterrent effects of state-sanctioned executions only vaguely ascertainable, I can’t justify the irreversible step of putting some- one to death as compared to imprisonment for life. Nor am I sure which punishment is worst. I can easily imagine preferring the Big Sleep to waking up behind bars day after day, year after year. So yeah, pragmatism. There it is.

But the purpose of this site is to focus on end of life (EOL) issues. There are already plenty of blogs discussing embryonic stem cells, abortion and capital punishment, and those subjects get tons of coverage in the mainstream media. Frankly, I’m much more interested in the EOL stuff, such as the value of privacy and dignity, who one’s life really belongs to, whether there’s a so-called slippery slope aspect to laws like Oregon’s, how we recon- cile conflicts between the quality of life and the duration of life, and the evolution of law and public opinion on all these matters.

So that’s what you can expect in the weeks and months ahead. Thanks for tuning in, and for commenting if you’re inclined to. Just keep it respectful, and to the greatest extent possible, based on verifiable facts.