Silent Scream of the Asparagus

You know me, I strongly believe that we should show more respect and stewardship (versus exploitation) for the natural world. But the Swiss government bioethics panel arguing in favor of "plant rights" is asinine. Wesley J. Smith writes that the plant rights sentiment funny, but not ha-ha funny.

What is clear, however, is that Switzerland's enshrining of "plant dignity" is a symptom of a cultural disease that has infected Western civilization, causing us to lose the ability to think critically and distinguish serious from frivolous ethical concerns. It also reflects the triumph of a radical anthropomorphism that views elements of the natural world as morally equivalent to people.

Why is this happening? Our accelerating rejection of the Judeo-Christian world view, which upholds the unique dignity and moral worth of human beings, is driving us crazy. Once we knocked our species off its pedestal, it was only logical that we would come to see fauna and flora as entitled to rights.

The intellectual elites were the first to accept the notion of "species-ism," which condemns as invidious discrimination treating people differently from animals simply because they are human beings. Then ethical criteria were needed for assigning moral worth to individuals, be they human, animal, or now vegetable.

Rising to the task, leading bioethicists argue that for a human, value comes from possessing sufficient cognitive abilities to be deemed a "person." This excludes the unborn, the newborn, and those with significant cognitive impairments, who, personhood theorists believe, do not possess the right to life or bodily integrity. This thinking has led to the advocacy in prestigious medical and bioethical journals of using profoundly brain impaired patients in medical experimentation or as sources of organs.

In Switzerland, you can help your yodeling partner kill himself legally. You may, of course, abort your unborn child. But what you may not be able to do, one of these days, is harvest greens without facing government sanction. First they came for the chard, and because I was not a chard plant, I remained silent...