On the Edge of the Knife

The world is as sharp as the edge of a knife, says the Haida proverb, and the image of the knife’s edge or the razor’s edge as a narrow space of safety or certainty between dangers and chaos is widespread.

In our either/or culture, moral questions seem like huge expanses separated by definite borders. Abortion or anti-abortion, Evolution or Creationism, Red State or Blue State, and so on. But the test of moral questions is in the narrow space at the knife’s edge, where the stakes are high but the answers are not so easy.

Still, our politics, our “culture wars” admit of only two sides, and only opposite conclusions. Yet the same people who deride racists or the Right to Lifers and their “abortion is baby-killing” as extremist, will march with blood-curdling yells under signs demanding “Zero Tolerance” for one thing or another.

Of course, this is not to say there aren’t moral principles or moral issues in the political realm. There are, and there are political banners it’s necessary to march under. Often the clearest issues have to do with expanding rights—or, as in the case of many 60s causes beginning with Civil Rights, making Constitutional rights real by enforcing them with law and practice. But even rights are more complex in practice, because reality is way more complicated than slogans or even principles.

The Right To Die

Take the “Right to Die.” Some states have passed laws which describe general circumstances in which doctors can help patients medically defined as “terminal” to end their lives painlessly and at a time of their choosing. Those patients are said to be exercising their “right to die,” which creates an exception to laws against murder and also suicide, bizarre in any case, in that the successful criminal is beyond direct punishment.

Even if granted in principle, the morality of this right to die is complicated in reality because of the danger of abuse, which our bureaucratic, capitalistic and either/or society makes all but certain. The right to die becomes the right to kill for the hospital’s bottom line or even perhaps the family’s profit (in harvested organs) or convenience.

Does that mean such laws should not be passed? No. It's just that we need to think beyond the all-or-nothing discourse of politics, and the whose-side-are-you-on of the “culture wars.” Actually, I do support such laws, though I believe the need to place yourself in the hands of institutional medicine or to lose control to anyone, makes your fate dependent on the dice you can’t even watch being rolled. Despite my doubts, not of morality but of misuse, my reason to support such laws is very practical: I want the right to have the plug pulled before the hyenas of medicine-for- profit bankrupt people I love. With a civilized health care system, I would not be confronted with that possibility. But we make actual moral decisions where and when we are in the world as it is.