Johnson first came to national prominence when she publicly challenged Princeton’s Peter Singer on the ethics of euthanizing profoundly disabled infants, and dedicated her life to improving the quality of life for those in institutions she called the “gulag”

This woman was a TRUE hero and I never knew her name or her cause before this post. The media has no use for those who do truly good works. But God sees it, enjoy your eternal peace Harriet McBryde Johnson.

hopefully she’s running through the meadows…..

right4life on June 7, 2008 at 9:31 AM

Beautifully said, and echoed by all.

Err on the side of caution, and human decency, not expediency …or an estranged husband.

May she now be free in a better realm.

We need more like her. If she gets her wish, and we do manage to eliminate the “disabled Gulag,” we will probably get more like her, and the world will be richer for it. Thanks for the thoughtful tribute, Ed…….

Russ on June 7, 2008 at 3:27 PM

All the best to you then, my friend.

Rhinoboy on June 7, 2008 at 2:57 PM

Concur.

Warehousing patients is usually, it seems to me, the healthcare equivalent of the gulag. It doesn’t have to be that way, but that’s sure how it seems to turn out, pretty much every time.

I’ve recently faced (and, thankfully, avoided) the need for permanent fulltime care for myself (and I’m only 46) but I’ve always thought that it’s an appropriate use of government resources — whether local, state, or federal is a different argument — to take care of those who are incapable of taking care of themselves, whether due to physical or mental disability, or due simply to having lived a lo-o-o-ong time.

I’m willing to consider whether the caveat “through no fault of their own” might be appended to the word “incapable.”

Russ on June 7, 2008 at 2:31 PM

Lest you think otherwise, I agree with you.

My point was the post could be read that nursing-home care (which I agree, can be pretty horrible) vs. a system allowing for some semblance of freedom and dignity is a conservative advocation.

I also realize that the problem is waaay more complex, and the dissolution of the family who would best care for these people must be taken into consideration. Sometimes there are no good answers.

Lest anyone think that Johnson was a doctrinaire conservative, one should read the Times’ well-written obituary. She argued for public financing for home care…

Hmmm… I didn’t know that assigning these people to dispassionate bureaucratic state-run institutions was a conservative position.

He thinks all babies were non-persons, ergo it is no less ethical to kill a baby than abort a child.

Buy Danish on June 7, 2008 at 12:23 PM

In that he is consistent.

Lest anyone think that Johnson was a doctrinaire conservative, one should read the Times’ well-written obituary. She argued for public financing for home care for the profoundly disabled, calling the nursing-home system a “gulag”. In 2003, she railed against care facilities where the disabled got parked in front of blaring televisions and ignored by the staff. “I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” Johnson once wrote.

Is that really contrary to conservatism? I’m not suggesting that she was a conservative, just that those particular ideas are not unique to liberalism.

His central tenet that critically disabled people are non-persons I always found rather unpleasant.

Ares on June 7, 2008 at 11:51 AM

He thinks all babies were non-persons, ergo it is no less ethical to kill a baby than abort a child.

Johnson always recognized the power of the individual and the spark of the divine in human life.

Wasn’t she an atheist? I’m not going to bother looking it up, but I read a (e)book called The Weight of Things: Philosophy and the Good Life that gave that impression. As Ed pointed out, she was also a liberal democrat IIRC.

That said there is no need to hate Peter Singer. He has a superb mind and has written many excellent articles and books. Whether or not you agree with him (and I largely never have) he has a fine intellect and constructs his arguments extremely well. That is refreshing given some of the utter bilge that comes out of academia.

His central tenet that critically disabled people are non-persons I always found rather unpleasant. When he discovered that his mother had Alzheimer’s he was confronted and forced to effectively disavow that thesis as he would not sanction putting down his own mother. One could say that was abject hypocrisy or one could take a, perhaps, more charitable line and say that he is all too human like the rest of us.

I know that most here are concerned primarily about taxes, free markets, and border enforcement. But I’ll stake my life on the prediction that radical liberalism will hit us hardest in the medical-biological arena.

Watch for increasingly aggressive moves toward genetic “counseling,” prioritization of government health care dispensation based on social utility, and ultimately denial of health care for the weakest among us.

The dam is going to burst soon. Take special notice of leftists’ disdain for “stupid” people, their frequent reference to “inbred” hilbillies, their contempt for people who live in the heartland, their use of the word “retarded” as an insult. Algor himself let the mask come off when he publicly smeared the “extra-chromosome right wing.” Make no mistake, the left has a history of sympathizing with eugenics. Part of the environmental hysteria is to poison our culture with neo-Manichean claptrap that human life is inherently evil. Many radical environmentalists openly advocate reducing the world population from 5 billion to 1 billion. That doesn’t happen without genocide of unimaginable proportions.

There is indeed a culture of death on the left, and it’s a bigger threat than we think it is.

When is a person a person?

HJ may have passed away, but the core issues have not. In our day and age, personhood is being redefined in terms of computational speed or “usefulness to society”, or “utility”, as well as other ways. This has tragic philosophical consequences for the future.

I believe the Imago Dei is more than just a cliche. The tradition, “the Image of God”, actually solves a lot of philosophical problems.

We will see more of these problems pop up when the Bioethics explosion occurs in the near future.

hopefully she’s running through the meadows…..

right4life on June 7, 2008 at 9:31 AM

Indeed. And dancing, and playing…

From Fausta:

In our culture of death, where universities grant tenure to “ethicists” who advocate killing “defective” infants during the first thirty days after their delivery, it is people like Harriet that remind us that every life has value and dignity.

People like Peter Singer hold truly disgusting views. But for those who fight against the culture of death, the extreme views of the intelligentsia are very useful when exposed like billboards to the rest of the country, to show where the more commonly held utilitarian views on human life lead when taken to their intellectualized, “elite and progressive [gag],” logical conclusions.

The controversial and colorful advocate for the disabled, Harriet McBryde Johnson, died earlier this week at her Charleston home. Johnson first came to national prominence when she publicly challenged Princeton’s Peter Singer on the ethics of euthanizing profoundly disabled infants, and dedicated her life to improving the quality of life for those in institutions she called the “gulag
Ed Morrissey

Peter Singer, Mr. Utilitarianism.

The futility and falsehood of Utilitarianism, as a system of beliefs, is revealed in that utilitarism fails to provide a good reason for why it is evil in allowing a human baby infant to be eaten alive by 6 or 7 hungry rats in a Chicago alley.

On the grounds or criterion of “utility” alone, 6 or 7 hungry rats are being fed at the expense of a single helpless baby infant. Given the “alleged truthfulness of utilitarianism,” why do we find that example intrinsically immoral and despicable? Utilitarianism has no answer.
I believe all versions of Utilitarianism, including Peter Singer’s, are false, and should be rejected.

Harriet Johnson will be missed.

For more information on Harriet Johnson’s philosophical foe, check out this very interesting book.