| | Mr. Thompson,
It is currently time for me to venture onto the offensive, by presenting a story of the logical implications of the stance that only those who possess a volitional consciousness here and now can be considered rights-possessing human beings.
X. Quintus Grummond is a biotechnology magnate in the near future, who has amassed a gargantuan and unprecedented fortune by commercializing cloning and genetic disease-treating technologies. He has always maintained himself in splendid health, and his hierarchy of values is unobjectionable; he places his personal life and well-being first, and the sole purpose of his wealth is to lengthen its duration and quality indefinitely.
X. Quintus Grummond also possesses an unfortunate abundance of heirs, with the major one being his hedonistic playboy son, Oswald. Oswald is of the people-pleasing type and possesses a knack for guessing others’ expectations precisely, including those of his father. Since early childhood, Oswald has feigned genuine interest in science, truth, and business, as well as a devotion to expanding the fortune he would inherit into even further record territory. However, his sole purpose, his one lifelong dream to be accomplished after his father’s death, is to purchase every monster truck and racecar in the country, as well as a horde of showgirls, rappers, drug dealers, rabid environmentalists, and a football-field full of champagne bottles, and hold the most raucous and Dionysian spectacle of orgy and destruction the world has ever seen. Since Oswald is absolutely incompetent in every respect, he yearns, within the most arcane reaches of his scheming mind, for his father’s prompt and speedy death. Yet X. Quintus Grummond has a different plan in mind.
In his will, Mr. Grummond has specified clearly what fraction of his fortune is to be allocated to whom, with Oswald, of whom he suspects nothing, to be receiving the principal chunk. However, in that same document, it was proclaimed that Mr. Grummond wishes to be sustained indefinitely on life support in the event of a terminal condition, regardless of the expense, even if this action were to bankrupt him.
Oswald is furious, but he has a devious recourse thought out, to be used when the time should come. It is an idea, a deadly idea which shall be unraveled later.
Several days following his ninety-fifth birthday in 2102, while out jogging on his private marathon trail, X. Quintus Grummond’s heart suddenly goes into fibrillation. The cause is simply the expiration of the mechanism, which has performed far more than the average amount of human heartbeats. Oswald dallies in calling the paramedics, and, besides, the marathon trail is immensely long and concealed at the sides and from the air by lush greenery. By the time emergency help locates Mr. Grummond, his brain has already suffered permanent damage from loss of blood and oxygen.
As per the detailed instructions in his will, Mr. Grummond is placed on superb life support that rejuvenates and restores to functionality every organ in his body, even his heart, which is infused with fresh muscle tissue to enable it to gradually recover its vitality; every organ, except one, the brain. Mr. Grummond is officially “brain dead.”
Oswald repeatedly seeks to sway Mr. Grummond’s physicians into issuing a Do Not Resuscitate order, but the doctors are swayed to the contrary by more potent persuasion, Mr. Grummond’s fortune and their million-dollar annual salaries. After a year, a plan is announced by a budding young bioengineer from Grummond Laboratories. Dr. Everett Waltonford has outlined a scheme for an half-electronic, half-organic artificial brain into which the entirety of Mr. Grummond’s memories, habits, ideas, and personality traits can be uploaded within another year. In effect, with the burgeoning field of biotechnology already rendering the remainder of his body secure from harm, this project, if successful, will render Grummond effectively immortal (as the brain can be reproduced multiple times) and deprive Oswald of any chances of employing his father’s fortune to realize his perverse fantasies. Oswald must act, and he must act now.
The younger Grummond (now in his sixties, and rapidly descending into a condition so sordid and unattractive that no courtesan will soon even look at him for a million dollars) calls forth a gathering of his distant relatives and the entire cadre of his lawyers, corners Dr. Waltonford and his staff, along with Mr. Grummond’s physicians, and unveils before them his brilliant treachery.
“You must terminate the entirety of your activities,” he proclaims to them, “by my command, as I am now the executor and heir of the greatest part of Mr. Grummond’s fortune, and my lesser endowed colleagues here fully support me in this demand. For, you see, upon entering a state of brain death, my father has ceased to be a legitimate, living human being. A living being requires the exercise of self-sustaining, self-generating action, a volitional consciousness which can be actualized, partway or in whole, immediately. My father is not merely asleep and capable of being awakened and resuming his state of consciousness at any time; if tapped on the shoulder, or even kicked about, he will not recover. He is just a chunk of meat that is eroding my comfort and quality of life. He is dead, DEAD I tell you!” Restraining that most untactful outburst, Oswald Grummond clears his throat and resumes. “A slab of inert tissue is a parasite on the rights and opportunities of the living. He does not repay his useless consumption of my resources with the immediate function of his mind, hence he is no longer anything but an exploiting corpse, which must be disposed of promptly.”
“But,” responds Dr. Waltonford with indignation, “it is absolutely not certain that his brain should not recover. Coma patients have, for example, resumed brain activity after years, even decades, of passivity. Moreover, my project is meticulously planned out. It is bound to bring in brain back into existence. I state this because I rely on the competence which my men have been observed to exert throughout their careers. While this triumph of technological achievement is not a metaphysical certainty, its progression does classify as a volitional dynamic continuum which, my will unchanged, will tend toward Mr. Grummond’s emergence into a state far healthier than yours, I might add.”
“A potential is NOT an actual!” Oswald erupts with rage, as he points with a jerking, fluctuating finger at a holographic screen in front of him, depicting a website forum from one hundred years ago, on which a group of early Objectivists had upheld the morality of abortion under that very standard against him who was, in Oswald’s opinion, a certain pretentious upstart who presumed that he could remedy a sacrosanct dichotomy inherent in stasis-thinking. “You see here, many of those who argued against Mr. Stolyarov had stated explicitly that, by that very same calculus, a brain dead person is no longer a human being and can be disposed of as any person endowed with substituted consent deems fit. Volitional consciousness in the present—that is the criterion, and my father does not meet it.”
Oswald, then, in ecstatic revelation of his deep-rooted savage emotionalism, erupts in a hyena-like frenzy of wheezing giggles (as the low villainous cackle does not quite fit his personality). While slightly disgruntled at this outburst, those present within the room are paralyzed into inaction, as most of them have tacitly accepted the validity of abortion as not to be questioned during the great Objectivist Renaissance of several decades earlier, when original Randian ideas were absorbed not discerningly or even fundamentally, but fully, along with all stances on particular issues.
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