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Abstract
Our project is intended to supplement and extend research that emphasizes how the rhetoric informing the euthanasia debate admits a call of conscience and how this call would have us act heroically as we acknowledge what is arguably some particular truth that is at work in the debate (e.g., only God has the right to take a life). The relationship between conscience, acknowledgment, heroism, truth and rhetoric, we submit, presupposes the workings of our metaphysical desire for perfection—a desire that is definitely on hand when debating issues of the “good life” and the “good death.” The relationship constitutes a rhetoric of perfection that plays an essential role in the euthanasia debate as a whole. Such a rhetoric lies at the heart of the recent and much publicized case of Terri Schiavo—a young woman who lived in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years before she was allowed to die the “dignified” death that she supposedly wanted all along.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank David Henry and two anonymous reviewers for their instructive suggestions during the development of this essay.
Notes
1. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis, IN: LibertyClassics, 1985), 82–83.
2. David Hume, 583.
3. David Hume, 583.
4. David Hume, 585.
5. David Hume, 583.
6. See, for example, James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Wesley J. Smith, Forced Exist: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder (New York: Random House, 1997); Michael J. Hyde, The Call of Conscience: Heidegger and Levinas, Rhetoric and the Euthanasia Debate (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001); Margaret Pabst Battin, Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Garret Keizer, “Life Everlasting: The Religious Right and the Right to Die,” Harper's (February 2005): 53–61.
7. On his February 2, 2006, MSNBC news hour show Countdown, Keith Obermann interviewed Michael Schiavo (Terri's husband) about the continuing debate over the case. The interview centered around the question asked by Obermann:
“How did it happen, how did the name Terri Schiavo become as significant a political issue, as much as a lightning rod of all matters of controversy, the center of so much debate and hysteria, as much as any other political issue last year?”
8. Hyde, The Call of Conscience. See also the following by Michael J. Hyde: “Defining ‘Human Dignity’ in the Debate Over the (Im)Morality of Physician-Assisted Suicide,” Journal of Medical Humanities 22 (2001): 69–82; “The Interruptive Nature of the Call of Conscience: Rethinking Heidegger on the Question of Rhetoric,” in Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy after Postmodernity, ed. Martin Beck Matustik and William McBride (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 253–69; “The Gift of Acknowledgment,” in Experiences Between Philosophy and Communication: Engaging the Philosophical Contributions of Calvin O. Schrag, ed. Ramsey Eric Ramsey and David James Miller (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), 109–24; “The Ontological Workings of Dialogue and Acknowledgment,” in Dialogue: Theorizing Difference in Communication Studies, ed. Rob Anderson, Leslie Baxter, and Kenneth Cissna (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004), 57–73; “Introduction: Rhetorically, We Dwell,’ in The Ethos of Rhetoric, ed. Michael J. Hyde (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), xiii–xviii; “Acknowledgment, Conscience, Rhetoric, and Teaching: The Case of Tuesdays with Morrie,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (Spring 2005): 23–46; and “A Matter of the Heart: Epideictic Rhetoric and Heidegger's Call of Conscience,” in Heidegger and Rhetoric, ed. Daniel M. Gross and Ansgar Kemmann (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), esp. 94–95. Hyde extends his work on conscience and related terms in The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment (A Philosophical and Rhetorical Inquiry) (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2006). Directives drawn from that work will also be employed here. In that work, Hyde argues for an ontological grounding of rhetorical theory. He makes his case initially by responding to Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar's argument (“The Forum: Publics and Counterpublics,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 [2002]: 410–12) regarding the necessity of a discipline to create a rich and specialized vocabulary of “key terms” that speak to the scope and function of the discipline's specified areas of expertise and that thereby help to “credential” the discipline's claimed worthiness and status. See Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 289–90 (note 7).
9. Bruce Jennings, “The Long Dying of Terri Schiavo—Private Tragedy, Public Danger,” presented at the Garrison Colloquium, The Hastings Center, May 20, 2005: 1–2. This perfect storm controversy was often referenced in the media as it covered the U.S. Supreme Court's January 17, 2006 decision in Alberto R. Gonzales, Attorney General, et al., Petitioners v. Oregon et al., 368 F.3d 1118. This decision acknowledged the right of a state, conforming to well-detailed and strict regulations, to support the moral action of physician-assisted suicide.
10. See Wade Kenny, “A Cycle of Terms Implicit in the Idea of Medicine: Karen Ann Quinlan as Rhetorical Icon and the Transvaluation of the Ethics of Euthanasia,” Health Communication 17 (2005): 17–39; “Thinking about Rethinking Life and Death: The Role of Dramatic Irony in Public Discourse,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 659–88; “The Death of Loving: Maternal Identity as Moral Constraint in a Narrative Testimonial Advocating Physician Assisted Suicide,” Health Communication 14 (2002): 243–70; “Toward a Better Death: Applying Burkean Principles of Symbolic Action to Interpret Family Adaptation to Karen Ann Quinlan's Coma,” Health Communication 13 (2001): 363–86; and “The Rhetoric of Kevorkian's Battle,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 386–401. Also see Todd F. McDorman, “Controlling Death: Bio-Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (September 2005): 257–79; “Crafting a Virtual Counterpublic: Right-to-Die Advocates on the Internet,” in Counterpublics and the State, ed. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 187–209. Both Kenny and McDorman reference some of Hyde's work, but do not extend their ontological and existential interests to the phenomenon of perfection; neither do they examine the rhetoric of the Schiavo case.
11. Anjula Razdan, “Shiny Happy People: In Our Quest for Self-Improvement, Have We Gone Too Far?” Utne (June 2005): 59.
12. Jennings, “The Long Dying of Terri Schiavo,” 2, emphasis added.
13. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 16–20.
14. For an extensive and excellent analysis of the problem, see Carrie Anne Platt, Starving for Acknowledgment: A Rhetorical Analysis of Pro Eating Disorder Websites (M.A. Thesis, Wake Forest University, May 2004).
15. This point is discussed brilliantly in Jack Miles’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book, God: A Bibliography (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
16. John Rawls, Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy, ed. Barbara Herman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 111.
17. Robert Nisbet, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), ix.
18. We expand on this point in our study of the Schiavo case. For a popular and very supportive discussion of the point, see Joni Eareckson Tada, When Is It Right to Die?: Suicide, Euthanasia, Suffering, and Mercy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1992).
19. Karl Jaspers, Way to Wisdom, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 121.
20. Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1962), 11.
21. Quoted in Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 23.
22. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 69.
23. Crispin Sartwell points to one of the fundamental ways this ontological dialectic shows itself in everyday existence when he writes. “Perfectly ordered systems are boring and perfectly chaotic systems are merely bewildering. … We love unity and rationality, yearn for it. But we also focus obsessively on the possibility of a release from it.” Six Names of Beauty (New York: Routledge, 2004), 99, 105.
24. Levinas, Time and the Other, 58.
25. See, for example, Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
26. See Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause, Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001); Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
27. See Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 21–115, for a detailed discussion of these related points. Also see Hyde's The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 34–78.
28. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 2.1.10.
29. Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 77–78.
30. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: HarperPerennial, 1983), 94.
31. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 15–33.
32. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 9.
33. Hyde makes much of this point in his The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 256–87.
34. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 256–87.
35. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 52–53, 60–61, 109.
36. Scarry, 28.
37. Scarry, 69.
38. Scarry, 90.
39. Lloyd F. Bitzer, “The Rhetorical Situation,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1 (1968): 1–17.
40. Todd F. McDorman is the only rhetorical critic that we know of who has referenced this history in one paragraph of his “Controlling Death: Bio Power and the Right-to-Die Controversy,” 264. For our purposes, a more detailed account is necessary. Examples of sources that inform our historical account of the case include: Daniel Eisenberg, “Lessons of the Schiavo Battle,” Time (April 4, 2004): 23–30; Dan Gilgoff, “The Schiavo Case is Just the Latest Front in a Much Nastier War,” U. S. News and World Report (April 4, 2004): 15–21; Lawrence O. Gostin, “Ethics, the Constitution, and the Dying Process: The Case of Theresa Marie Schiavo,” Journal of the American Medical Association 293 (May 18, 2005): 2403–407; Robin Toner and Carl Hulse, “Schiavo Battle Brings Life's End Into Discussion,” The New York Times (March 20, 2005): 1, 19; Schiavo v. Schiavo, United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit (March 23, 2005): D. C. Docket No. CV-05-00530-T; “The Misery Goes On [Editorial],” The Economist (March 26, 2005): 29–30; Mark Fuhrman, Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo's Death (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Mary Schindler and Robert Schindler (with Suzanne Schindler Vitadamo and Bobby Schindler), A Life that Matters: The Legacy of Terri Schiavo—A Lesson for Us All (New York: Warner Books, 2006); Michael Schiavo (with Michael Hirsh), Terri: The Truth (New York: Dutton, 2006).
41. For an in-depth rhetorical analysis of the Cruzan case and the court's decision, see Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 187–204.
42. Quoted in Fuhrman, Silent Witness, 245.
43. S⊘ren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. and ed. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 188.
44. The issue was, however, a common staple of media accounts of the case. See, for example, Eisenberg, “Lessons of the Schiavo Battle.”
45. Gostin, “Ethics, the Constitution, and the Dying Process”; Bill Nichols and Andrea Stone, “Schiavo Autopsy Confirms Diagnosis,” USA Today (June 16, 2005): 1A; Abby Goodnough, “Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain Withered, Was Untreatable,” The New York Times (June 16, 2005): A1, A25.
46. Hyde develops this point throughout The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment. With their argument that God created the world but then leaves matters alone and never intervenes, Deists need not trouble themselves with the phenomenon of acknowledgment.
47. Cited in Jay Tolson, “Wrestling With The Final Call,” U.S. News and World Report (April 4, 2005): 22–23.
48. USA Today (March 25, 2005): 5A.
49. Commonweal 131 (April 23, 2004): 10.
50. Anna Quindlen, “The Culture of Each Life,” Newsweek (April 4, 2005): 62
51. See Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 119–50. In the Schiavo case, no living will was ever legally filed.
52. The Life Legal Defense Foundation, “The Truth About Terri Schiavo,” USA Today (March 25, 2005): 5A.
53. Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 26.
54. Winston-Salem Journal (March 26, 2005): B9.
55. Much is made of the phenomenon in Tada, When Is It Right to Die?
56. Susan Brink, “Inside Terri's Brain,” U.S. News and World Report (April 4, 2005): 24–25; Benedict Carey, “For Parents, the Unthinkability of Letting Go,” The New York Times (March 20, 2005): 5WK.
57. John Schwartz and Denise Grady, “A Diagnosis With a Dose of Religion,” The New York Times (March 24, 2005): A16.
58. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 117–41.
59. For a detailed discussion of the ontological, metaphysical, and rhetorical nature of heroism, see Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 187–263, and The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 256–83.
60. Paul McHugh, “Annihilating Terri Schiavo,” Commentary (June 2005): 29.
61. McHugh, 29–30.
62. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: The Modern Library, 1954), 1367b37.
63. McHugh, “Annihilating Terri Schiavo,” 31.
64. Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 1–14.
65. McHugh, “Annihilating Terri Schiavo,” 32.
66. Hyde, The Call of Conscience, 204–19.
68. Ibid.
70. See Hyde, The Life-Giving Gift of Acknowledgment, 60–116.
71. James VanTrees, “Horrible Death for Terri [Letter],” USA Today (April, 1, 2005): 12A.
72. Martin Foss, Death, Sacrifice, and Tragedy (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 43.
73. Schiavo v. Schiavo, 10.
74. See, for example, Phillip Gailey, “Cynical Political Display by Congress,” Winston-Salem Journal (March 23, 2005): A13; Molly Ivins, “Man Behaving Badly Shouldn't Lecture,” Winston-Salem Journal (April 21, 2005): A10; Andrea Stone, “Schiavo Autopsy Results Reach a Divided Congress,” USA Today (June 16, 2005): 11A; Dan Gilgoff, “The Schiavo Case.”
75. James Rachels, The End of Life: Euthanasia and Morality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 71.
76. One reviewer of our essay offered an observation related to this point that is particularly noteworthy: There is “something fundamentally anti-rhetorical (or at least a-rhetorical) about the notion of perfection: it presents itself as beyond debate—which of course is what makes debate that relies on it so difficult and intractable, as in the Schiavo case.”
77. Quindlen, “The Culture of Each Life,” 62.
78. For an artifact proud to announce such accusations, see the Life Legal Defense Foundation's advertisement: “The Truth About Terri Schiavo.” The media feeding frenzy was clearly exhibited in Larry King's “special” three-hour CNN program (March 31, 2005) on the Schiavo case. The frenzy was also stirred by the media as it gave consideration to how the Schindlers and their supporters took exception to the message promoted in Clint Eastwood's Academy Award-winning film, Million Dollar Baby, which was playing during the final weeks of Terri's life. The message spoke of the morality of assisted suicide. A fuller discussion of the “entertaining” media frenzy that contributed to the Schiavo case is not possible here. We believe, however, that a rhetorical analysis of the matter would be well worth the effort.
79. Quoted in “Bill Might Return Tube: Federal Courts Could Decide Fate of Schiavo,” Winston-Salem Journal (March 20, 2005): A1, A9.
80. John Schwartz, “Neither ‘Starvation’ Nor the Suffering it Connotes Applies to Schiavo, Doctors Say,” New York Times (March 25, 2005): A14.
81. Georges Gusdorf, Speaking (La Parole), trans. Paul T. Brockelman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Unversity Press, 1965), 122.
82. An example of how the point was made is found in Craig M. Klugman's letter to the editor:
The one positive aspect of this case is that Ms. Schiavo has given this country a gift. She has shown to everyone how important it is to have end-of-life conversations with our loved ones and that we must all complete advance-care planning documents. (The New York Times, March 24, 2005, p. A22)