No Straw MenEnlightened discourse proscribes arguments that are weak or imaginary, like straw, set up only to be confuted summarily.

Suffering for the Sake of Suffering

Ayn Rand held that “the purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” Dr. Leon Kass seems to embrace the antithetical view.

As James Stacey Taylor writes in a review of Kass’s book Life, Liberty, and the Defense of Dignity: The Challenge for Bioethics (Encounter, 2002): “[F]or Kass, a life with human dignity is one that is ‘lived always with and against necessity, struggling to meet it, not to eliminate it.’ It thus appears that Kass’s objection to gene therapy lies in its possibility to secure for ‘a painless, suffering-free’ existence for people. Similarly, his objection to voluntary, active euthanasia is that it is more dignified to face one’s ‘troubles and pains.’”

Kass is right that struggle is important. Grunt work is crucial to character. But let us never conflate, say, learning long division before using a calculator with perpetuating a life wracked by anguish. The former has a time and place, even in adulthood. The latter—whether hypertension or hypochondria, scleroderma or stress—is always and forever unwelcome.

It is appalling that a human being as erudite as Kass has the gall to tell another human being in pain that his suffering is dignified. It is unconscionable that this PhD and MD chairs the President’s Council on Bioethics.

Addendum (10/30/2013): According to Dick Cavett, in her German childhood upbringing, the great Marlene Dietrich was commanded to go without a drink of water when thirsty “to build character.” Did it? Cavett asked. “Not one brick’s worth of character was built. It probably injured my kidneys.”