A Modern Inquisition

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Besides, what is ethics? Can you define it? My definition is simple: Ethics is saying and doing what is right, at the time. And that changes. Seventy-five years ago, if I told you that for Christmas I was going to have a truck deliver 10 tons of coal to your house, you would have been delighted. If I told you that today, you would be insulted. Doing the right thing changes with time.

That's true of human society also. There is a primitive society -- I don't know which one exactly -- whose members were shocked to learn that we embalm our dead, place them in boxes, and then bury them in the ground. Do you know what they do? They eat them. To them, it's ethical and moral and honorable to devour the corpse of your loved one. We're shocked at that, right? It's all a matter of acculturation, time, where you are, and who you are. If I visited this primitive society and I was a real humanist, I'd say, 'Oh, that's interesting.' And if the so-called savage in turn said 'Gee, that's interesting what you do,' then he or she would be a humanist. I used to define maturity as the inability to be shocked. So I guess in some ways we're still immature. But if you're truly mature, and a true humanist, you can never be shocked. If they eat their dead, so be it -- that's their culture. But you know what our missionaries did, don't you? That's immoral action.

I think you get the gist of my position.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a proponent of physician-assisted voluntary euthanasia, received the 1994 Humanist Hero Award from the American Humanist Association. The adaptation of his speech from which this excerpt is taken appeared in The Humanist (Nov./Dec. 1994).

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