The culture of death advances...

... and we in the West need a base from which to resist it. Baroness Warnock, an influential moral philosopher in the United Kingdom, has rightly provoked outrage over her suggestion that people suffering from dementia have a moral obligation to commit suicide. "If you're demented, you're wasting people's lives – your family's lives – and you're wasting the resources of the National Health Service." Of course, this claim entails the further conclusion that those demented patients who refuse to do their duty should be euthanised.

To this appalling and predictable moral claim, one would expect a devastating response from those in the UK who value human life. Instead, we get this:

Neil Hunt, the chief executive of the Alzheimer's Society, said: "I am shocked and amazed that Baroness Warnock could disregard the value of the lives of people with dementia so callously. With the right care, a person can have good quality of life very late in to dementia. To suggest that people with dementia shouldn't be entitled to that quality of life or that they should feel that they have some sort of duty to kill themselves is nothing short of barbaric."

Hunt's response is equally as troubling as Warnock's claim. According to Warnock we should protect the right of demented patients to live because they might enjoy a "good quality of life." On that reasoning, those patients who do not or cannot enjoy a good quality of life -- one imagines that this is a majority -- are perfectly legitimate targets for termination. So Hunt has not refuted Warnock's claim, he has merely reduced by a small fraction the pool of candidates for Warnock's proposed euthanasia program.

This is the bind in which hyper-secular Europe finds itself. Having rejected the natural law and adopted consequentialist moral reasoning, it has no ground on which to resist the culture of death. Mr. Hunt and others who care about the mentally infirm could learn a lot from reading this blog.

UPDATE: The American Thinker makes an interesting point. Is this where we're headed if we adopt socialized medicine?