Western nations must resist the pressure to “scapegoat, abandon, even kill, the elderly as a cost-cutting measure,” an Australian bishop said in a major bioethics lecture. Bishop Anthony Fisher of Parramatta, a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life, said health economists and utilitarian philosophers were placing the elderly at risk by treating them as a “swarm of voracious but unworthy consumers of a resource which doctors must guard from them.” Delivering the 2012 Anscombe Memorial Lecture on Oct. 15 at St John’s College, Oxford University, he accused health economists who focused disproportionately on costs of “showing us how to get most efficiently to the wrong place.” He said that as the number of people over age 65 rises, the strain on governments will increase proportionately. “Of course we need principles of fairness here and virtues like medical temperance,” the bishop said. “But to wish we were dead before we are old or that the old were dead so they’d stop burdening us is no anthem for a good society.”
Scapegoating the Aged
Show Comments (
)
Comments are automatically closed two weeks after an article's initial publication. See our comments policy for more.
The latest from america
The day before he died, Pope Francis made one final circuit through St. Peter’s Square in his popemobile. “That’s my last image of him alive,” Gerry O’Connell remembered. “He drove among the people.”
Universities need to change. But Trump is attacking the wrong problems.
Editor in chief Sam Sawyer, S.J., reflects on praying with Pope Francis’ body in St. Peter’s Basilica.
Just about two weeks before he died, Francis announced that Archbishop-elect McKnight will be the next archbishop of Kansas City, Mo., and that Bishop Lewandowski will become the next bishop of Providence, R.I.