The Evil of Moral Agnosticism

I had a professor in graduate school who argued that there is no moral distinction between Hitler and Louis Pasteur -- that if they both came to an emergency room with equally critical medical conditions, morality said nothing about which one doctors should treat first.

Contrary to the widespread myth that philosophy has nothing to do with real life, this evil idea -- moral agnosticism -- governs the field of medicine. Consider this from today's NYT ("Senator Asks About Surgery on Gangsters").

A few years ago, the "executive chariman of U.C.L.A.'s surgery department" performed liver transplant surgery on four Japanese gangsters. To justify keeping killers alive, the U.C.L.A Medical Center said "that they do not make moral judgments about patients . . ." To echo this moral agnosticism, the senator investigating the surgeries (Charles Grassley, R-Iowa) agrees with the view that "surgeons do not seek to pass moral judgment on the patients they treat . . ."

Of course, moral agnosticism -- as with every form of skepticism -- is self-refuting. The moral agnostic is quick to judge as wrong those who do in fact pass judgment, with silly notions like: "Who are you to judge?" And in fact, no man can escape the power of morality -- as the agnostics in this case rely on the talent-destroying view of Rawlsian "justice" called egalitarianism.

As is striking in this case, the moral agnostic seeks undeserved values for losers and nihilists. Given the severe shortage of livers available for transplant, one can only wonder whether there were truly talented, intelligent, productive individuals (a young Michelangelo or Ayn Rand) who died because a liver they deserved was used to save the life of a gangster. And one can partly blame moral agnosticism, the professors who peddled it, the surgeon and the hospital's management for any robberies, rapes, and murders committed by those gangsters since the surgeries.

Disarmed by the moral agnosticism in medicine, it is no wonder that so few doctors are protesting against the creeping socialization of their careers and practices. How are they to get righteously indignant over that when they have been taught by their professors that "surgeons do not seek to pass moral judgment"?