Should Doctors Be Put In Charge Of Making Decisions About Bodies?

by William M. Briggs

Answer me this: is a man, say a veterinarian, more or less moral because he has memorized all breeds of dog? Does this give him a better grasp of right and wrong? Given a veterinarian who can name all breeds, does it follow that he ought to be able to legally and forcefully take your dog away and subject it to a surgery that makes your dog look superficially like a cat?

I’m sorry, did I say dog? I meant puppy. And kitten, not cat.

Is there any amount of surgery, or surgery plus drugs, that will turn a dog into a cat? What would you say of the veterinarian who insisted there was? Would his pointing to his qualifications, his many degrees and certifications and professional memberships, be sufficient to convince you that a dog can become a cat by the twist of his knife?

Is a man, say a doctor, more or less moral because he has memorized all bones in a human body? Does this give him a better grasp of right and wrong? Given this man can name all bones, does it follow that he ought to be able to legally and forcefully take your little boy away and drug and carve up (surgically) your boy to make him superficially resemble a little girl?

Is there any amount of surgery, or surgery plus drugs, that will turn the boy into a girl? What would you say of the doctor who insisted there was? Would his pointing to his qualifications, his many degrees and certifications and professional memberships, be sufficient to convince you that a boy can become a girl by the twist of a knife?

A doctor is a person who has, to the best of his or her ability, memorized how bodies work. You can ask doctors questions like, “What does this body part do?” or “If I do X to this body, what is the uncertainty Y happens?” And they may or may not be able to tell you, depending on their level of study and intelligence, whether they went to med school pre- or post-DIE, and things like that. That is it, and nothing more. I stress nothing more.

A doctor is no better than a non-doctor, and in our culture is often worse, in answering questions like “Is it mortally right to do X?”

It does not make the doctor wiser or more moral if he can answer, with perfect certainty for every X and every Y, “If I do X to this body, what happens to Y?”

And, even if the ability to answer these questions did make one moral, many cannot answer many of these queries. Others do answer, but their answers are wrong, or insane.

Yet we, as a culture, have most unwisely ceded to doctors moral authority on many of these questions, grateful, perhaps, that we don’t have to wrestle with the ethics and morality of certain difficult situations.

We did this because of scientism. This is the fallacy that those who claim to know how things work get to say what should be done with these things, and under what circumstances. This is like letting your mechanic decide you must install hydraulic lifters on your car, and be barred from driving it to Church. Or it’s like an HVAC technician being empowered to go house to house and convert furnaces he does not like to look of to blow only cold air.

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