2 B R 0 2 B - a critical review - A body is a body

I just re-read Kurt Vonnegut's short story '2 B R 0 2 B' (it can be read here if you want although a word of warning, it isn't a nice story). It's a piece that I think would be universally regarded as "not right" and yet, logically and, if we keep it outside of anything else and in a strictly humanistic sense, its premise is quite brilliant and should probably be implemented as soon as we can. It is focused around the happenings in a maternity ward waiting area, but it isn't as happy as we would expect due to the fact that since the population needs to remain stable, ie, for every birth, there needs to be a death - and there are triplets. The father only has one person willing to die for his kids (their great grand father), and so he will have to choose two of the three to die - I said it wasn't nice. For those who want more information on it I recommend reading, I haven't given much of a spoiler at all and so the story won't be ruined. For a little while (due to the fact that otherwise I'm going to have a very long post) I'm going to show how this view that he puts forward (but I don't think affirms or is a proponent of) is wrong.

As I say, humanisticaly and indeed evolutionarily, it is not just true, it is also a brilliant idea - the old, sick and those unable to care for themselves should die so that the young can live, they are only holding back the evolution and survival of the species. However, only one person that I know of (name withheld due to my inability to remember his name) that would support this (and surprisingly, he takes it to the conclusion that if ever he becomes useless for the survival of the species he should also die). This means that it will be hard to do without calling on some other power other (and definitely greater) than humanity so to do it I will take parts of it out that make up the premise of the story and hopefully refute them.

"A body's a body". In one sense, yes this is true. A dead body is nothing more than a dead body no matter what you say or do about it. The difference is with a live body, more commonly known as a person. A person is not simply the sum total of their experiences, nor is a body merely a vessel for a brain. When a person dies, that person is dead and they become a body, but (and here comes my personal views which means a Christian view) the soul lives on. What happens after that is irrelevant for the purposes of this post, but that means that at some stage the body and soul were connected and therefore, the death of a person for the purposes of making easier the life of another person or even for what is laughingly referred to in many circles as the greater good is wrong. Christians, Jews, Most Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Animists, those who have ancestor worship and others all agree with me on this point (even satanists agree with this in principle - the Satanic Bible puts it plainly that you shouldn't harm a child as children are innocents, and this idea of not harming innocents is carried through the entire book). We can play at disagreeing, but even the staunchest Darwinist, the one that would say that death always improves the species due to death being part of some defect (and there are none of these that I know of) would say that the death of a person so that someone can take their wallet or other personal belongings (note that I have used a different example to the book, but I think that it is an appropriate example) and thus afford to eat, therefore carrying on the species while weeding out a weakness (alertness, strength, speed etc) is wrong and should be punished. This is because every person feels the gravity and enormity of Death and most try to avoid it. Even in the story, this is acknowledged. read this short excerpt
"I want those kids," said Wehling quietly. "I want all three of them."
"Of course you do," said Dr. Hitz. "That's only human."
"I don't want my grandfather to die, either," said Wehling.
"Nobody's really happy about taking a close relative to the Catbox, [the place that people are taken to die, a glorified gas chamber otherwise known as 'Ethical Suicide Studios']" said Dr. Hitz gently, sympathetically.

And yet, this other view that is put forward is the logical conclusion that you must come to. As humans we pride ourselves on being Homo Sapien - Human, The Wise. We should be able to accept this without any qualms and yet, we feel sad when people that we know die. Interesting isn't it. Either we aren't as wise as we think we are or there is something important about life that should be held on to. Dylan Moran puts it this way; we should be as alive as we can until we're totally dead.

Watch this space for another couple of arguments in this vein.