Biomedical Engineering Reference
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knowing full well what he has already done, and cannot now undo, and
doesn't want to tell her. But Jean pleads with him, to the point where he
grows angry “at the docile stupidity of her, at the pleading, whining kind-
ness of her, at her naïveté. 'Well, you'll have to wait and see, won't you?'
I said to her.”
50
Then he hangs up. Was that in any sense fair? Was it
just?
Spiegelberg asserts, in a certain sense addressing just this sort of issue,
that there is a much “deeper sense of justice” and “injustice” than is
usually discussed, something genuinely “cosmic,” at the core of our lives.
His point is that since “
undeserved discrimination calls for redress
,” and
since “
all inequalities of birth constitute undeserved discriminations
,” he
concludes that “
all inequalities of birth call for redress
,” therefore that
“
inequality is a fundamental ethical demand
.”
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If that is so, on whom
does the responsibility for redress fall? But is this true for Ben? Will it
eventually be true of his child, who will eventually be born from Jean's
body? Is it true for Jean, too?
Does Ben's “inequality of birth” call for redress? Indeed, is it not
rather the case that, while we may well feel how profoundly unjust it is
that Ben was born, we cannot avoid the awesome, awful question,
Was Ben's birth unjust? Even if it were, does that imply a demand
for redress? If so, who redresses, and what exactly can be redressed?
And finally, what exactly is unjust, cosmically or otherwise? Is it that
through no fault of his own, Ben is a dwarf? At the same time, however,
each of us must know that who and what we are did not come about
through our own choice—and just because of that, each of us, dwarf
or supposedly normal, is essentially in the same quandary as Ben
might be.
Beneath the Scandal That I Am Myself
Each of us, then, is born with some initiating condition that is utterly
unchosen, undeserved, and surely, an inequality of the first order. Does
Spiegelberg's passionate focus work here? I think not, and
that it does
not seems outrageous, a real scandal
. What happens after the brute acci-
dent of birth, that's something else, something with respect to which this
or that course of life may or may not ensue, with responsibility properly
meted out for these as for all other people. But for the bald, brutal fact
