Missed the NYT Magazine yesterday (off at Tanglewood), so I was glad to be directed to Jim Holt’s piece on infanticide by Laura over at 11D.  The question of whether society should permit the killing of disabled babies is not a new one.  Peter Singer famously made the case for infanticide in the 1970’s.  I come back at Singer in the last chapter of my book, Aidan’s Way. 

     All I want to do here, in a limited blog sort of way, is to make a few points about how Taoism engenders toleration of disability, providing a counter to the pro-infanticide arguments.

     Taoism can be taken as supportive of a passive "let the baby die" stance, growing out of its general skepticism about the efficacy of human action to shape the course of nature.  Not seeking an operation for a child with a malformed esophagus could be acceptable to a Taoist, depending upon the totality of circumstances.  It would not be a hard and fast rule, however, and if parents pressed for intervention, a Taoist would yield (that’s what Taoists do!).

     Taoists would strongly reject a more active euthanasia, in line with their general aversion to killing.

     The bigger point, however, is how we value human life.  Lurking behind the infanticide issue is the question of whether a particular life is worth living.  To Chuang Tzu, the answer is clear: all lives are equally valuable in the grand sweep of Way.  Here is one of my favorite quotes from him:

So the real is originally there in things, and the sufficient is originally there in things.  There’s nothing that is not real, and nothing that is not sufficient.

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange – in Tao [Way] they all move as one and the same.  In difference is the whole, in wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again. (23)

     This is not quite the same as the contemporary American right-to-life argument that each and every human life is sanctified.  It extends beyond human life to "all things," including the blade of grass.  Thoughout his book, Chuang Tzu uses images of the disabled, the disfigured and the excluded to bring down the high and mighty and remind us that we are all limited and fragile and fleeting.

     And that should be something we all remember when we are passing judgment on the value of another’s life: it is neither more nor less valuable than our own.

     As for moral progress, Chuang Tzu would probably say that we have always faced difficult moral choices, we have always been imperfect in how we deal with those choices, and monotheism has not changed that substantially.