A Professor’s Perspective: John Lachs
April 26, 2010 No Comments
Interview conducted by Allegra Noonan and Matthew Taylor
VPR: Do you think that health care reform is ethically imperative?
Lachs: No. It has some good features to it but some very problematic ones. If you consider companies that turn a profit, you have to consider that they’re now going to have to take everyone no matter their medical condition. and they are going to have to make no exceptions. What does that mean? Inevitably, the price of insurance will rise. That’s a given. People are going to game the system because they always game the system, and they’re going to go ahead and not sign up until they need to sign up. It will be very costly. The real problem grows out of this. That is, sooner or later costs will get so high, there will have to be choices made about what is covered. They will have to decide what will and will not be covered and who will and who will not be covered. This will be very bad for older people. Inevitably, there will be things that simply will not be done. And we’re gonna give the reasoning that they’ve already had their lives. A death sentence for seniors is too dramatic, but there’s no question there will be some rationing. We have rationing now, but it operates on different principles. This is systematic rationing. What worries me is that when governed by a panel, bureaucrats and politicians will make it so there are no exceptions. That is very inhuman. If you put the three together (the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the rationing), it becomes very problematic.
VPR: Do you think that it’s the “rationing” that has made people so violent, or is it something else?
Lachs: I think people view it as they view their relationship to government….In the U.S. more than in Europe, deep suspicion in government is not always valid, but it is real. Actually, it’s not valid, but it’s real. [It's] the idea that somehow bureaucrats and politicans will govern the treatment that we’re going to going to receive at the hand of our physician, that there’s not going to be a personal relationship between physician and payment, but instead there will be a third party. It’s bad enough if it’s an insurance company, but it’s real bad if it’s the government. I think that’s got something to do with it.
VPR: Do you think some of it is mean-spiritedness?
Lachs: Sure. You know that people are not nice. At least, not always.
VPR: Another major problem people have with the health care bill is its provision for abortion funding, what do you think about that?
Lachs: That’s a special deal for some people. That’s very problematic for some people. I, personally, don’t believe it’s very problematic at an early stage. It’s a huge issue for some people but not for me. Whether that should be paid for by federally sanctioned funds is not an issue that I… it’s a huge issue for some people, but not for me.
VPR: On the other end of the spectrum, what do you think about the death penalty?
Lachs: The classical justification for capital punishment may not work, but it’s the classical one. It was worked out, oddly enough, by Kant, who is known to us as the person saying things like, “You must never use human beings as a means only.” What the hell are you doing then? Death is an ends to itself. The justification works. You do something, and you know that it has consequences. So, you don’t just choose the act, say of killing somebody, you choose the entire bundle, including the consequences. So, therefore, we put you to death. Suppose we have laws saying, you kill someone we put you to death. We’re not using humans as means, we’re honoring your choice. But, I am not a Kantian, much closer to a sensible utilitarian. I want to know, does killing people work? And we have all sorts of contradictory data on that. It’s full of contradiction. All I can be sure of is one thing: anybody put to death is unlikely to commit the same crime again.
VPR: During President Obama’s campaign, he promised to close down Guantanamo Bay, and he hasn’t. What do you think about the ethics of using that as an extraterritorial place where the government does what it wants?
Lachs: What the government does tends to be heavy-handed, almost always. Guantanamo Bay is a classic case. We don’t know who’s a killer, we don’t know who’s in Al Qaeda, and we don’t know who is a terrorist so we keep them. That’s not good. On the other hand, you release them and they’ll be in Afganistan within two weeks, so that’s not good either. It’s really a very nasty situation. Now, there’s no easy way out. We don’t want the nasty ones next door. Other countries won’t take them. The real bite is that there were some among them. A number of them were actually harmless but were swept up in an operation and they ended up in Guantanamo. It’s like a pit–once you get there you dont get out. The problem is, what will you do that’s any better than what Bush did? That’s the question, and we haven’t gotten the solution.
VPR: Is there a specific philosophical idea that we should take into account?
Lachs: A tremendously forgotten, but crucial idea is that even with the sharp division in this country, all of us are citizens and all of us, nevertheless, respect each other. There’s a lot of hate going around, there’s a lot of name calling, but nobody got killed. You know in other countries, they bomb people they don’t like. We’re Americans. We’ll disagree. We’ll call each other nasty names, but then we go home and have a drink, maybe even go to a bar and have a drink together. So, I think that’s so crucial. In other words, the democratic ideal is alive and well.
VPR: Is there any one piece of legislation or something that especially worries you, ethically? We addressed capital punishment and abortion, but what about euthanasia or the debate over affirmative action and is there anything that you think is an ethical issue?
Lachs: Let me move to one level higher than that. When legislation is passed by Congress, senators and representatives ask, “Will this promote public good?” and I think that’s very important. But nobody asks, “What is the cost of this in liberty?” Liberty is something that you can’t overlook. Liberty is crucial for human happiness. You know this, [and] I know this, from our personal lives. When somebody tries to tell you what to do, you’d like to kill the son of a bitch. But nobody asks, “What will this law do to people’s liberty?” Will this give them more choice or inhibit choice? I think this is far more important than any given piece of legislation. Not that there aren’t very important pieces of legislation. This just needs to be part of the legislation.
High security is dangerous, [such as] giving government an opportunity to listen in. Is it worth the intrusion? A lot of the recent developments, [like] the full body scanners and the wire tapping, do you think those are the most dangerous?
Lachs: Extremely dangerous. Giving government the opportunity without getting court permission for this, to listen in to conversations. You can always justify this by saying, “We’ve got to catch some people! They’re dangerous!” Well, of course you will, but is that worth the intrusion into our privacy? I think that question needs to be asked. Is it worth the intrusion?
VPR: Do you think American society as a whole is advancing morally or do you think we’re regressing?
Lachs: Clearly advancing. I was around when there was segregation of blacks and white. And you know we’re still talking about racism and so on and no doubt there is racism, but nothing like what there was. Nothing like what there was. A black person couldn’t buy a house in my neighborhood when we first moved to Nashville. They couldn’t do it because it was illegal to do that. Nothing like that existed. I think that we’re morally confused about many things, but in the mean time, decency seems to spread. I think there’s far more decency today than we’ve ever had in history.
VPR: Are there any ethic responsibilities that Vandy students have or our generation has to help out in the future?
Lachs: Well you know…I think that ethical responsibilities are terribly important, but ethics is broader than that. It’s not only a matter of responsibility…it’s so important to organize your life in a way that when you die or when you get close to dying you can look back on it and say that it was good. So I talk a lot in the ethics class about spontaneity. I talk a lot about happiness; I talk a lot about self-control. And one of the things that I come to again and again is that I don’t believe that there is such a thing as addiction. This usually gets a rise out of people. They say, “What do you mean by that?!” If you mean by “addiction” that you absolutely can’t help yourself, I invite them to surrender themselves or their addictions to me so I will have complete power over what they do and I will be able to give them motives for not doing what they are addicted to. Why do they need what they’re addicted to? I think that to me is what is so crazy about addiction. Everything is addictive. Someone said, “I am addicted to McDonald’s coffee,” [Tiger] Woods is addicted to sex. What the hell does that mean? It means he likes it. Is that all it means? I want to say a lot about the personal side of ethics. That doesn’t mean that I’m not interested and don’t talk a lot about responsibilities. One of the main responsibilities is decency towards others. But I think we’re told a lot about decency and about our obligations but very few of us focus on how to make a life meaningful.
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