Experience leads to bias
Sarah Swanson
Issue date: 10/29/03 Section: Opinion
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Christopher Reeve‚ who once played Superman‚ now is a quadriplegic due to a horseback riding accident.
He continues his active spokesmanship of stem-cell research‚ even as many states have introduced or passed bills prohibiting the use of human embryos in such a way.
Obviously‚ this research stands to benefit Reeve tremendously‚ and I am drawn to wonder whether his stance on the issue would be different if that were not the case.
This leads me back to a question I have pondered for some time. In matters of policy and legislation (particularly laws with moral overtones)‚ should the voices of those who are most directly affected by the law be disregarded because of bias‚ or should they be embraced as the voices of experience?
I have wondered this since I was a child when the notion of abortion was first explained to me. My first reaction was typical of the "black-and-white" thinking we all utilize in grade school, and I wondered why anyone would kill a baby.
Then I became aware that there are people who didn't have parents‚ didn't live in nice suburban ranch-style houses‚ didn't get regular meals and didn't get treated well in the womb. I developed a belief about when I think abortion may and may not be used.
To this day I marvel at the militant anti-abortion protesters - the middle-aged white men who have no conception of what it would be like to carry a spark of life that he knew he could not care for‚ either inside or outside the womb.
Make one of them an unwed pregnant teen with a drug habit and see if they still hold the same moral beliefs.
The flip side of this issue is the unquenchable selfishness that comes with human nature.
Why should we listen to those who stand to lose or gain the most in a particular situation when we know that they are only looking out for themselves?
Perhaps quadriplegics and raped teens should be ignored when it comes to stem-cell research and abortion laws. They are not in a state of mind to make rational‚ moral decisions.
After all‚ public policy is best created in a moral vacuum and then applied equally to everyone subject to the foibles of real life.
This exact scenario is the one I have always had difficulty with in my studies of formal ethical systems and sociopolitical morality.
How can any laws be made that are utterly inflexible and indifferent to individual cases? They can't be‚ but for some reason we like to think they are.
Life is a fickle game. Because we only know our own experience‚ we must attend to the experience of those around us if we are to make any sense of existence on a grand scale.
People like Reeve have problems we can barely fathom‚ and I think they should serve as tools (not necessarily authorities) when it comes to assigning moral value to solutions to those problems.
He continues his active spokesmanship of stem-cell research‚ even as many states have introduced or passed bills prohibiting the use of human embryos in such a way.
Obviously‚ this research stands to benefit Reeve tremendously‚ and I am drawn to wonder whether his stance on the issue would be different if that were not the case.
This leads me back to a question I have pondered for some time. In matters of policy and legislation (particularly laws with moral overtones)‚ should the voices of those who are most directly affected by the law be disregarded because of bias‚ or should they be embraced as the voices of experience?
I have wondered this since I was a child when the notion of abortion was first explained to me. My first reaction was typical of the "black-and-white" thinking we all utilize in grade school, and I wondered why anyone would kill a baby.
Then I became aware that there are people who didn't have parents‚ didn't live in nice suburban ranch-style houses‚ didn't get regular meals and didn't get treated well in the womb. I developed a belief about when I think abortion may and may not be used.
To this day I marvel at the militant anti-abortion protesters - the middle-aged white men who have no conception of what it would be like to carry a spark of life that he knew he could not care for‚ either inside or outside the womb.
Make one of them an unwed pregnant teen with a drug habit and see if they still hold the same moral beliefs.
The flip side of this issue is the unquenchable selfishness that comes with human nature.
Why should we listen to those who stand to lose or gain the most in a particular situation when we know that they are only looking out for themselves?
Perhaps quadriplegics and raped teens should be ignored when it comes to stem-cell research and abortion laws. They are not in a state of mind to make rational‚ moral decisions.
After all‚ public policy is best created in a moral vacuum and then applied equally to everyone subject to the foibles of real life.
This exact scenario is the one I have always had difficulty with in my studies of formal ethical systems and sociopolitical morality.
How can any laws be made that are utterly inflexible and indifferent to individual cases? They can't be‚ but for some reason we like to think they are.
Life is a fickle game. Because we only know our own experience‚ we must attend to the experience of those around us if we are to make any sense of existence on a grand scale.
People like Reeve have problems we can barely fathom‚ and I think they should serve as tools (not necessarily authorities) when it comes to assigning moral value to solutions to those problems.
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