Marxist Wisdom

I sent my article dealing with some guardianship issues involved with end of life situations off to Texas Tech.  I’ll have more to say later on that subject.

As part of my research, I read Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel’s 1998 book, “The Ends of Human Life: Medical Ethics in a Liberal Polity.”  Dr. Emanuel is both an oncologist and a bioethicist. He is a graduate of Amherst, holds a master’s degree in Biochemistry, and has both an MD and a PhD from Harvard. Interestingly, his PhD is in Political Philosophy. According to his biography, he is inter alia, an advisor to President Obama. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezekiel_J._Emanuel

Dr. Emanuel is a bright fellow and would be a most entertaining dinner companion. However, his book is uneven. The parts of it that delineate the problems facing physicians in dealing with the issues surrounding end of life are lucid, accurate and well written. However, when he stops writing as a physician and slips into philosopher mode, his writing becomes opaque. It is an interesting read, but not terribly useful, since it assumes lots of things not in evidence to use a legal phrasing.

It is also full of impractical advice, such as telling us that decisions on where to build hospitals should be based on principles of distributive justice.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributive_justice   Having gone to a Catholic university back when Catholic colleges and universities were still Catholic, I understand the concept.  However, having been required to take fifteen semester hours of Philosophy and several more courses in Political Philosophy, I recognize that philosophical questions rarely have cut and dried answers.  My reaction to Dr. Emanuel’s assertion was that hospital construction would cease, if boards of directors were forced to factor into their decision abstract questions of distributive justice along with the more mundane questions of location, costs and similar less weighty matters. I say this because in most cases, the board members could debate the issue of whether location “A” or location “B” offered a more just location until the cows came home and not reach a conclusion.

Perhaps greater wisdom is to be found in the writings of Marx–not Karl, but Groucho.  Groucho, writing about Prohibition in “Groucho and Me,” observed that the world is full of people who think that they can manipulate the lives of others by getting a law passed. He pointed out that Prohibition failed to deter drinking, but it did expose many people to illness and death due to a lack of quality control over bootleg hootch and managed to make quite a few criminals very wealthy.

As usual, Groucho’s skepticism was right on target.