Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt)
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Posted by klausen on 07:19:03 2006/07/11
In Reply to:
Re: Cheating Destiny (book excerpt) posted by Marie
As I wrote elsewhere, the determination is always quantitative, and it would make no sense for someone to avoid having children because of an inherited family tendency to hayfever or baldness, or if the person had one second cousin with type 1 diabetes. That said, I believe a rational argument could be made that life, considered with brutal honesty from an existentialist perspective, knowing that the one certainty we have is what we most fear -- death -- is so horrible even for the most healthy, fortunate person, that it is always an immoral act to force such a life on the unborn.
The Ancient Greeks, who were among the most intelligent people who ever lived, expressed this view in the myth of Silenus. Silenus was a wise centaur, and some people caught him, forcing him to part with some of his wisdom as the price of his freedom. "What is the best thing for mankind?" they asked. "Never to have been born, or, failing that, to die as soon as possible," was Silenus' answer.
When you ask whether it would be better for children who become type 1 diabetics never to have been born, I can only give my own answer, which is that, after 40 years of the disease, I would rather I had never been born. Life has certainly been interesting and had some positive aspects, but diabetes was bad enough that it infected life with a nightmarish quality, and this made it, on balance, not worth having lived.
The extremely high suicide rate among type 1 diabetics and other people with serious diseases indicates that many other people feel this way. Our society of course tries to keep this quiet, since there is no more radical criticism of the existing order and value system than to commit suicide. Society even encourages severely ill people not to be honest with themselves, and instead to become so self-alienated that they don't even perceive how bad their lives have been made by disease.
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