Inescapable Ethical Dilemmas

In terms of a potential to generate controversy and heated debates, euthenasia is probably right up there alongside abortion. Or is it? (This is after all a very Vatican-like way of categorizing these issues.)

In over 9 countries in the European Union, Prof. Maurice Adams from the Tilburg University of the Netehrlands and the University of Antwerp in Belgium notes that there has been a common trend in rising levels of acceptance of the practice for the past twenty years. Leading the pack with almost 100 percent levels of acceptance are Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark.

While the United Kingdom and France demonstrated the same pattern of a rising trend, the changes were not as dramatic over the years. Italy and Spain showed a similar rising trend but in less significant levels. The most significant change in Italy noted though is that in the year 1984, the level of acceptance was virtually zero.

I find that discussing euthenasia or what is also called "assisted dying," "patient assisted suicide" (when it is done with the assistance of the medical professional), people tend to be more open about the practice or at least more accomodating in their views when confronted with the specific cases. (Of course there are exceptions to this phenomenon of empathy and the recently controversial case of Shriver in the US comes to mind).

It is a difficult decision and I think I'm not so comfortable with changing that too much. How is that changing? One big way I think is through legislation and legalization. When Prof. Adams speculated that the levels of acceptance probably rose in part because of the new laws in countries like Belgium and the Netherlands.

While I consider my own views on "assisted dying" divergent from the hardest held views against it (say the Roman Catholic position), I found it difficult to accept what Prof. Adams considered as the value of legislation. Legalizing euthenasia, a practice which people already acknowledge as happening out there, seemed to have a purpose of setting standards, thereby (according to Prof. Adams), providing a degree of protection. But who does law here really protect? I would venture to say it protects doctors by relieving them of any "guilt" they would otherwise feel or liability they could otherwise face if ever an accusation comes out regarding the illegality of the act.

While this is no means important, in situations where there is a "common sense" about opening ourselves up to the possibility of cases where euthenasia is the most humane intervention, why should it have to be law and not say professional ethical guidelines that address these issues doctors are confronted with? Law reform can at best not criminalize the practice as long as ethical guidelines are observed but why fix those guidelines in "legal" form?

It was ironic that Prof.Adams was responding to a question about "vulnerable" groups when he made this categorical statement about law. Prof. Flood also raised the argument of relational feminists who also ask whether becoming too liberal around our views about this issue also reflect a perverse trend of "autonomy." Does assisted dying in each case make it easy for the person who is ill or the persons saddled with the care of that person?

In recent years, the same countries where euthenasia has been legalized in cases of competent persons requesting the same, questions have also been raised about the right of children and other disabled or even psychiatric cases to assisted suicide. In his words: "legalization provides protection for the vulnerable by making the problem visible."

So much faith in "law" to provide protection is of course in part explained by Prof. Adam's own observation that in the Netherlands and Belgium, the political system is accessible and that these societies (including Denmark and Switzerland) have reached "post materialist" value systems. He described these post materialist societies as having more emphasis on participation and political processes than material matters (since all basic needs and more are available). He also noted that there is a big and well supported "movement" in the Netherlands advocating for "the righ to die."

I honestly found this theory a little bit unsettling because it is founded upon an assumption of heirarchy of values (who has the better more advanced values than the other) that is so totally based on economic materialist conceptions! It is one thing to claim that because all the needs of these Nordic states' citizens are taken cared of but altogether another to say that those who have less in life and who are saddled with governments who don't give them as much space, are less capable of forming progressive judgements. He didn't exactly spell it out but it was out there, hanging.

I don't know politics in the Netherlands, Belgium or Denmark but didn't the Neo-Nazis make a recent comeback (big time) in Swiss politics? I know it might not exactly be fair to bring this up here but to me these and other things seem to indicate that accessible or no, "politics" doesn't in anyway seem ideal when such types of bigotry prosper.

In another class it we discussed the purpose of "guidelines" in health and medicine, particularly abortions in cases of fatal fetal abnormality and I tend to agree with what Prof. Erdman said. Guidelines don't change behavior but really just provide a basis for doing something the practicioners are already doing. I understand this as somewhat different from how law can "justify" an act because after all it is "a guideline," not really something that sets out a fixed format or procedure. It aids the process of decision making without really removing the aspect of agency in deliberating the specific cases.

This is what upsets me (perennially) about legalization or law-focused strategies I suppose. Affixing a standard as "law" from which deviation is not always possible (if not precluded altogether) has a clear tendency to substitute judgment with pre-defined boxes and categories of thought.

While framing something in law sometimes serves a symbolic purpose of promoting ways of thinking and acting, I still think that most of the time however, the inherent danger of "law" lies in becoming a barrier to thinking. Its as if "legality" of something "saves" us from the trouble of ethical deliberation.

Hannah Arendt's reflection on "compulsory standards," is I think helpful in this respect:

"This categorizing and ordering, in which nothing is decided except whether we have gone about our task in demonstrably correct or incorrect way, has more to do with thinking as deductive reasoning than with thnking as an act of judgment. The loss of standards, which does indeed define the modern world in its facticity and cannot be reversed in any sort of return to the good old days or by some arbitrary promulgation of new standards and values, is therefore a catastophe only if one assumes that people are actually incapable of judging things per se that their faculty of judgement is inadequate for making original judgements, and that the most we can demand of it is the correct application of familiar rules derived from already established standards."

The Art of Googling and Ego Surfing

Now a word, googling is now familiar to Internet fandom as "looking up somebody's name in the Google search engine." On the other hand, if you google yourself, your'e supposedly egosurfing. The first time I was told by somebody that they "googled" me before meeting me, I kind of found it creepy but the feeling soon passed when I realized I had done the same with various authors, celebrities and former classmates in the past. But was it the same? I'm no celebrity. I never even met this person before but now we are sort of classmates or "batch mates" in the same graduate school and since we have gotten to know each other better, we are friends.

It got me thinking about who could be googling me out there so I tried egosurfing. True enough, apart from the real work I do and organizations I work with who have validly placed some of my information out there, there were a few bordering on the libelous. Most were just simply mean. The thread where I was totally "flamed" by pro-lifers on the PCIJ website is still there on the Internet, preserved forever in public space?

I know it sounds a bit paranoid. I also know I shouldn't really be surprised anymore. A few years ago a friend actually forwarded similar stuff to me on a "pro-life" website where I was supposedly a "UNFPA funded abortionist."

The subject came up again when I was with a couple of more graduate school friends and one of them confessed she googled the lot of us (her classmates) but by this time, I wasn't as freaked out. (Maybe because by then I already did it to other people I knew? Or that I already "egosurfed" ?)

The most interesting part of egosurfing though is finding about people with the same name. With all due respect to these people, I am taking great liberty in placing heir information here. However I take consolation from the fact that they already put this information "out there," in the internet. One of them is a Computer Science Professor in Worcester, MA another is a Chilean Supermodel another a Spanish Skiing Champion and yet another is a Women's College Basketball player at University of California, Davis.

I suppose it depends on how "common" your name is but what are the odds of having so many "accomplished" women named like you? I mean I looked them up and these women are at the top of their careers.(Plus this Chilean supermodel is drop dead gorgeous) Geesh. Its all very humbling actually. It makes feel like the "lesser" "Carolina Ruiz!" (I hope they find it also cool to have the same name as an egosurfing feminist lawyer/activist in graduate school.) Now for the really paranoid (with stalker tendencies) ;-) I recommend : samename.com which I haven't tried myself but looks potentially creepy and undoubtedly counts as "egosurfing" par exellence.

Ang Lee Tackles the Banality of Evil

Before watching Ang Lee's "Lust, Caution," I already read many reviews about the movie that weren't really "raving" about it the way critics had been over Brokeback Mountain. I watched it anyway and I liked it a lot. Its really difficult to compare it with "Brokeback Mountain" which is what a lot of critics and film reviewers were doing since it was Ang Lee's most recently well acclaimed work.

I did also like "Brokeback Mountain" and even wrote about it when I started blogging in 2005 and like many people I found it very touching and as love stories go, it was a real tear jerker (at least for me). I know there were a lot of people who were not quite as ready to see two Malboro men making out and falling hopelessly in love but what can I say? Wasn't that Ang Lee's point in making the movie?

"Brokeback" was very Hollywood and in a way that "Lust, Caution" was not so. Based on a novel by Eileen Chang, I am sure the film is very much Ang Lee's interpretation of the story since the book (although I have never read it) is usually classified as a "spy thriller."

In the film, you could say Ang Lee really explored the difficult topics of humanity, morality, evil, conscience and redemption through the unlikely love story that develops from such an unlikely situation. A spy for the resistance whose mission was to seduce her target so that in the end they could assasinate him, is also the unlikely spy. A young woman who has had to "learn" about how to have sex (and skip all romantic hopes about a "first time"), emerges not quite as you expect as a hard bitten or reluctant spy, the likes of which we have seen in La Femme Nikita. Although no less cunning and competent in her espionage, Mak Tai Tai is unlike Nikita because she came from a sheltered background. She falls in love with a "brave talking" young revolutionary who has ambitions of joining the resistance (along with his rag tag group of bored college friends) but in the end, she is braver than the rest of them.

But the idea of falling in love and making a connection with somebody like Yee who was a torturer, murderer and rapist is also what was perhaps most difficult for many who tend to look at the characters just as what they represented in the context of "war." It was World War II after all. While there are fewer remaining survivors and witnesses of WW2, subsequent generations have formed "collective" images of the war mainly from movies about it. Yet unlike any previous WW2 movie I have seen, nothing comes close to Ang Lee's take on people's lives (fictional or otherwise)during war.

Beyond the binary narrative of "good/evil" that plays out in the consciousness of either the occuppied population or the conquering forces (the self-proclaimed liberator), Ang Lee instead sought to take a close look at human beings.

Yet the actors were undoubtedly part of the reason the film was convincing and the subtelties of Ang Lee's symbolism is unmistkably effective. Yee regains his humanity and falls in love with Mak Tai Tai. Numbed by the violence he was expected to inflict everyday as part of his job (as the torturer for the occupying Japanese forces), even the way he has sex with Mak Tai Tai in the beginning portrays both his brutality and his fear.

There is ambiguity in the sex act which takes place between them. It is violent and it looks like rape. It is rape. Mak Tai Tai never expected that in order to be his mistress, she would have to endure brutal sex. Then it changes. He changes. She changes. It is still ambigous. She is on a mission and knows anytime soon, members of the resistance can notify her and arrange to have him killed.

Is it rape? She is on a mission and she knows what she is doing. Even after the brutal rape of the first time he has sex with her, she manages a triumphant smile. She has gotten him where she wants him - she is finally his mistress, and all was going according to plan.

Yet is it? By the time she pleads with the resistance leaders to end her suffering it isn't clear whether she's pleading for them to end her having to go through the sex because she is degraded by it or because she is falling in love with a torturer, a monster who has killed and inflicted suffering on so many in the resistance.

It is however clear that Yee has fallen for her. He buys her extravagant gifts but while an expensive diamond ring can look like and represent simply that: an extravagant gift, it actually means a little something more to the lovers. She breaks down and tells him simply to go. Instinctively he understands and rushes off. He knows he has been targeted for assasination. It is something he almost expects.

Yee of course is still a murderer and a torturer. When his subordinates tell him they have known about the group of college kids turned resistance members and had in fact arrested her Mak Tai Tai's cell members and easily obtained information from the lot of them, he is angry about not havng been told but he is also clearly devastated.

Admitting the profundity of his connection with Mak could spell his own end and also that of his wife and family. It would show him incompetent in his job and also weak. So he denies ownership of the ring she has returned. He even signs the orders to have her executed with her cell members.

Of course here it is expected that reactions will range from disbelief to categorical rejection of any hopes about Yee's redemption. He is beyond redemption. He had her killed after all. Even if he regrets it later, does that make him less of a monster? I think not but I also think it doesn't make him less human.

Before falling in love with Mak, Yee actually carried out his torture without serious thought ( Or even without thought, as Arendt observed of Nazi war criminals). When the clock strikes 10 (the time of his orders to execute Mak and her cell members) he actually although very quietly,vissibly suffers. While others will argue about the triviality of his pain in comparison to what he has inflicted, again I am reminded of Arendt's insights about the banality of evil.

“Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just ‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever … Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” Hannah Arendt

Communication as Child's Play

Children have the uncanny ability to connect without needing (or depending) on language. While this picture looks like any group of school aged children having fun, its actually a picture of a Filipino girl (my daughter) who doesn't speak or understand Japanese and two boys (sons of our friend Mako and Siloy), who don't speak or understand anything but Japanese.

Wev'e seen it happen before of course. Two years ago she met and played with a friend's son who was born and raised in Turkey. He didn't know a word of English (because he hadn't attended school yet) and still he and my daughter played for hours and laughed out loud and made their parents swear to help them keep in touch through the internet.

It shouldn't be surprising that kids communicate well without depending on verbal or written language. Even when pre-school children can already converse well with adults and other kids from the same culture, they really haven't been doing it (using language) long enough to have lost touch of the other ways of connecting.

Scientists have pointed out that just because babies can't speak words yet, it doesn't mean they don't understand what we say. In fact, in a few experiments, babies whose voice boxes hadn't developed yet were taught successfully how to sign fluently, even before they spoke their first word!

In a world where "literacy" or the ability to read and write is a prized skill on which success often depends, in many contexts it also represents our position within societal heirarchies. Up until a few years ago and perhaps even up to this day in many contexts, Dyslexia was always considered as a disability or a handicap, instead of what many experts now consider a different or unique learning ability; orientation or way of thinking.

Yet what language you speak and write also defines your place in the hierarchy. In Manila (as well as other places in the world like India) for instance, a new breed of "yuppies" and office workers are the "English speaking," employees of call centers.

For my daughters' friends, who are half Filipino and half-Japanese school aged boys, there isn't much incentive to learning Filipino (their Father's language). Being half-Filipino already makes them vulnerable to bullying in school.

Of course as cruel as children can be towards other children, we know they learn it all from adults.If it were the other way around and adults looked to their children to learn things, the world would easily be a better place.

Recommended Links:
Center for Japanese-Filipino Families

More than Words