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Even great thinkers sometimes speak evil. Plato advocated infanticide because he thought of handicapped children as "inferior creatures." Francis Parkman, one of America's premier historians, associated "Indians" with "leeches" and "contagions." And the 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard's Museum of Natural History, called black people a "degraded and degenerate race." Such rhetoric not only dehumanizes the vulnerable but, as history shows, sets the stage for deadly violence against them.

In late September, Britain's Lord Justice Alan Ward joined the ranks of the dangerously wrong and famous. He decided that physicians in Manchester could separate conjoined twins who shared a common aorta, a surgery that—as expected—resulted in the death of one twin while probably saving the life of the other. In his judgment, Ward said that Mary "has little right to be alive. She … sucks the lifeblood of Jodie and her parasitic living will soon be the cause of Jodie ceasing to live."

As a member of Britain's highest court, Ward has a special responsibility to adjudicate such cases in a way that protects the powerless and the vulnerable. Such prejudiced language, especially by a powerful and respected judge, contributes to the rapid dehumanization of those who don't measure up to contemporary standards of beauty, health, and usefulness. The dangers of such language are documented in William Brennan's excellent (but sadly out of print) book Dehumanizing the Vulnerable: When Word Games Take Lives. Brennan examines the language used to dehumanize oppressed groups throughout history: women, European Jews, blacks, Native Americans, the disabled, and the unwanted unborn.

Oppressors, it seems, are not very creative. In their propaganda, they have all resorted to the same basic categories of dehumanizing terminology. Brennan identifies eight categories of semantic oppression: deficient humans, nonhumans, animals, parasites, diseases, inanimate objects, waste, or nonpersons. Ward's judgment on the "parasitic" infant Mary echoed earlier statements that reinforced prejudicial ideologies against blacks, Soviet peasants, Jews, women, and the unborn. This language is not accidental, Brennan argues, but is always part of a larger, more cohesive ideology of denigration, oppression, and in many cases, extermination.

The best moral and legal path was not immediately clear in this tragic case of Jodie and Mary, the conjoined twins from the Mediterranean island of Gozo. Were we under obligation to save a life at any cost? What are the rights of the parents in the decision-making process? What were the duties of the courts?

Even Christian ethicists disagreed. Dennis P. Hollinger of Messiah College argued compellingly that the doctrine of "double effect" came into play in this case. According to this classic argument, one is not culpable if one intends to do good but some unintended (though perhaps foreseen) evil should occur in the process. We recognize this truth in many "easy cases." For example, suicide is not morally permissible. But we count as heroes those nurses, firefighters, and martyrs who lose their lives for the sake of others or a higher cause.

Christian ethicists also apply this to "hard cases." For example, it is not morally permissible to abort a living fetus. But when a woman has a fetus developing in her fallopian tube instead of her womb, even the Roman Catholic tradition recognizes the legitimacy of removing her reproductive organs to save her life, even though the child may be destroyed.

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November 13 2000, Vol. 44, No. 13