On Monday, June 8, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an op-ed by bioethicist Art Caplan. Expressing his concern over the news that Al Pacino plans to play Jack Kevorkian in a movie for HBO, Caplan thought it was time to do some preemptive truth-telling about Jack Kevorkian. His commentary is titled “The truth: Kevorkian was less than noble.”
Caplan does an excellent job in describing the callous, self-aggrandizing reality behind the mythology that was built around the man:
Kevorkian was always about Jack as much as he was about the strangers he briefly met and dispatched. When I asked him once if he were aware that one of his victims had a long history of severe depression and had spent many years in a psychiatric hospital, he snorted and replied, “How am I supposed to know all the details of her life?”
Where I depart from Caplan is in his description of Kevorkian’s relationship to the efforts of the movement – of the organizations and activists who pushed legalization of assisted suicide:
Despite his skill in administering potassium chloride to the fearful, disabled, lonely, and inadequately treated, Kevorkian was a poor choice to lead the movement to legalize assisted suicide.
This is where I start to scratch my head. No one ever seriously suggested that Kevorkian lead the movement to legalize assisted suicide. Nevertheless, I would argue – seriously – that Kevorkian was the best thing that ever happened to the movement, due to the shrewd way in which the “mainstream” organizations dealt with him.
Here’s where I have to give a little history. Before the start of Kevorkian’s career encouraging and facilitating sick and disabled people to kill themselves, there were two “extremes” to the assisted suicide debate. At one end were people who opposed the practice and at the other end were organizations – Hemlock and Compassion in Dying – that advocated for legalization of the practice under superficially strict conditions.
Then Kevorkian came along – his demeanor, his open defiance of the law, and his wide-open acceptance policy in terms of “helping” defined a new extreme edge – which moved organizations such as Hemlock and Compassion in Dying closer to the middle in terms of public perception, even though their goals remained unchanged. (Note: Compassion in Dying and Hemlock combined to form the current organization Compassion & Choices).
While I have been aware of this dynamic for years, I really didn’t have a good framework with which to talk about it.
I do now.
There are a number of names for this type of argument or political strategy. “Gonzo Galore” at the Gonzolog has listed and described a number of these variations of a logical fallacy (fallacious but often effective) in her blog post “Argument to moderation“:
Hey, it’s like Tuesday, idk, time for picking on quitical thinking, LoL, ‘cos like wtf is wrong with some pplz logic? But first, check out this fallacy:
Argument to moderation:
argumentum ad temperantiam, also known as middle ground, false compromise, gray fallacy and the golden mean fallacy) is a logical fallacy which asserts that a compromise between two positions is correct. The middle ground is often invoked when there are sharply contrasting views that are deeply entrenched. While an outcome that accommodates both parties to some extent is more desirable than an outcome that pleases nobody, it is not necessarily correct.
WikipediaFalse compromise:
X and Y are opposite alternatives. So Z, a middle path, is the best choice.
Avoid extremes. Seek compromise, a moderate, middle way. Take averages. Assume that any polarized view is automatically wrong.
ChangingMinds.orgMiddle ground:
This fallacy is committed when it is assumed that the middle position between two extremes must be correct simply because it is the middle position. this sort of “reasoning” has the following form:1. Position A and B are two extreme positions.
2. C is a position that rests in the middle between A and B.
3. Therefore C is the correct position.
The Nizkor ProjectOh good, now that we’ve learned something, we need examples!
Gonzo is just one of the many prolific and outstanding writers in the neurodiversity community. Her series on logical fallacies are an effort to help other autistic people and others somewhere “on the spectrum” to counter the bs masquerading as logical argument that get lobbed their way – mostly by people who are offended that someone who has a label like aspergers/autism/nonverbal learning disabilities doesn’t want to be “cured.”
She’s right to jump on it. Going beyond argument to strategy, this approach – fallacious or not – is highly effective.
That’s where Kevorkian and the “mainstream” organizations come in. As I said before, Kevorkian’s activities and rhetoric defined a new extreme edge. But it didn’t stop there. Obviously realizing the value of no longer being the ones defining the extreme edge, leaders took efforts to paint Kevorkian as “extreme” and themselves as “moderate.”
Here is just one example of prominent assisted suicide advocates using Kevorkian to reposition themselves and their organizations away from the “extreme” to more comfortable middle ground.
From a Seattle Times article published on March 27, 1999, after the conviction of Jack Kevorkian on second-degree murder charges for his role in the death of Thomas Youk:
“It demonstrates just how far outside the mainstream his actions are,” said Barbara Coombs Lee, executive director of the Compassion in Dying Federation, a national right-to-die organization based in Oregon.
“This was not about assisted dying as we know it here in Oregon, or as Compassion has advocated for it. Or as we have counseled patients since 1993,” she said.
“This has more to do with Dr. Kevorkian’s unique and flamboyant way of flouting the law than it has to do with physician-assisted suicide, as an issue or a policy.”
Farther down, though, is what I like to refer to as “the money quote”:
(Faye) Girsh and Coombs Lee agreed that Kevorkian’s actions help define a mainstream position on assisted suicide. “If you see the extremes, clearly, you can recognize the moderate, compassionate middle,” Coombs Lee said.
I want to stress that I got to this article through a very quick search using google. If I wanted to spend the time sorting through my files, I could come up with many more examples of Coombs Lee, Tim Quill and others doing their best to use Kevorkian to shift themselves to the middle – and presumably higher moral – ground.
There are other points and critiques I could make of Caplan’s commentary, but they would take a lot of space. As Caplan’s own attempt at clarifying the Kevorkian mythology shows, it takes a lot of information and space to counter well-established misinformation. –Stephen Drake
ADDENDUM: I received a comment to this post that I think should be added here. It’s from Gonzo, whose work was central in helping me write this piece:
Hey thanks Stephen!!
I want to point out, that my “idk, wtf, lol” writing style in this post was satirizing the mindless comments in a facebook group.When it comes to disability rights, there are issues, that are highly complex: eugenics, assisted suicide and ethical science, etc, and the problem is that most people form opinions based on barely any information on the subject.
Words like “cure” sound really harmless, so the casual onlooker will not realize all the ehical implications that need to be considered.
Same with assisted suicide, to most it sounds like mercy to let someone with say incurable cancer die, without thinking what this actually means for the disabled.
It’s telling that Kevorkian didn’t care about the woman’s depression, any depressed person without a disability would have been encouraged to get psychiatric help.
In her case it was a good excuse to be rid of her.
Again, I really hope people check Gonzo’s blog out. She’s one of the many autistic bloggers I have listed as “favorites” on my networked blogs feature on facebook.