five top things i’ve been reading (forty-second edition)
the latest in a regular 'top 5' series
Gemini and Mercury Remastered, Andy Saunders
JWST reveals mysterious new features in Saturn’s atmosphere, Amit Malewar
Weird Sea Creatures, Erich Hoyt
Active and Passive Euthanasia, James Rachels
Virginian animals
This is the forty-second in a weekly series. As with previous editions, I’ll move beyond things I’ve been reading, toward the end.
1) The newly published Gemini and Mercury Remastered is a prequel to the greatest photobook of all time: Apollo Remastered (2022). Both are the work of science writer and digital restoration expert Andy Saunders, who chose and rehabilitated their contents from thousands of long-frozen official NASA space-mission images.
The Gemini and Mercury photos document sixteen manned flights, which took place between 1958 and 1966. These photos range from small black and white snaps of training days and launch days, to the grand landscapes of Earth in astonishing blues and oranges, to close-ups of calm faces during mission emergencies — all captioned with quotations from ground/space communication transcripts.
The few sections of long-form writing are excellent, too. I particularly enjoyed the analysis of the Grissom hatch mystery. As with Apollo Remastered, this is much more than just a picture book, though it would be easily worth searching out just as that.
2) While we're on space, tonight I read this Tech Explorist piece about Saturn, by Amit Malewar. Malewar reports on the recent James Webb Space Telescope discovery of some unusual halos and a "lopsided star-shaped structure" in the atmosphere above the planet's north pole.
The balance between colourful description and careful explanation is a bit too tabloid for me — all the twists are “dazzling” and all the gazes “piercing”, in this tale of a "10-hour rotational ballet of Saturn"! But the substance is really cool.
I’ve said it before, but we live in the most amazing time for benefitting from ever-increasing opportunities to know about and experience space…
3) While we're on picture books, and in a first for this Substack, I'm now going to recommend a book aimed at children. Weird Sea Creatures, by Erich Hoyt, which the kids of some friends introduced me to the other day, has likely the coolest cover of any book I’ve ever seen. The photos inside are beautiful — and just as literally awesome as the space shots — too.
4) Now, finally, some philosophy. Active and Passive Euthanasia (1975) is a classic paper by James Rachels. The core argument of this paper is that the moral significance of a distinction between active and passive euthanasia — and an underlying distinction between killing and letting die — has been strongly overstated.
In particular, Rachels levels four objections against the idea that while passive euthanasia is sometimes permissible, active euthanasia is never permissible. Here, he takes the former to refer to cases in which a doctor “withhold[s] treatment and allow[s] a patient to die”, and the latter to refer to cases in which a doctor “take[s] any direct action designed to kill the patient”.
Rachels begins by arguing that if the reason you support passive euthanasia in certain cases comes down to avoiding the “prolonging” of “suffering needlessly”, then you should note that active euthanasia can reduce such suffering even more. In other words, that on that sole consideration, perhaps killing is even better than letting die!
But the most important section of this paper is the section in which Rachels levels his third objection. Here Rachels claims to show that letting die is not “less bad” than killing, per se. He does this by telling us the horrific story of two men: Mr Jones, who stands by while a child drowns in the bath after the child slips and bumps his head; and Mr Smith, who actively drowns a child in the bath.
Rachels tells us this story in order to conclude that if the two men share the same motive for pursuing the same end (e.g., they each want the child in question to die, in order to gain an inheritance), then their behaviour is equally “reprehensible”. Indeed, Rachels goes as far as to state:
“suppose Jones pleaded, in his own defense, "After all, I didn't do anything except just stand there and watch the child drown. I didn't kill him; I only let him die." Again, if letting die were in itself less bad than killing, this defense should have at least some weight. But it does not. Such a "defense" can only be regarded as a grotesque perversion of moral reasoning. Morally speaking, it is no defense at all.”
Now, Rachels does accept that euthanasia cases aren’t neatly comparable to his Jones/Smith example. But there are various points you could raise to emphasise why the Jones/Smith example doesn’t show what Rachels thinks it shows — not least, the fact that there could be good reasons why Mr Jones acted as he did, which could not be applied to Mr Smith. Perhaps, for instance, Mr Jones has a crippling fear of water that caused him to ‘freeze’ when he saw the child drowning, even though he did want the child to be dead so he could gain the inheritance.
Ok, Rachels tries to account for this kind of objection, by telling us that Mr Jones stands by “delighted” while watching the child drown, ready to pounce if “necessary”. But such behaviour is fully compatible with Mr Jones nonetheless freezing at the point of necessity, or being unable to fulfil his desire to bring about the child’s death for many other reasons.
And ok, Rachels points out that being “mentally deranged” would not divide the two cases: that is, that if Mr Smith were excused from being considered to be a “bad man” for the reason of madness, then Mr Jones could also be excused for the same reason. But unlike Mr Jones, Mr Smith could not be excused from being considered to be a “bad man” on the grounds of having a crippling fear that caused him to freeze — or, indeed, for any other reason that prevented him from fulfilling his desire.
Because Mr Smith did fulfil his desire; Mr Smith did not freeze. Unlike Mr Jones, Mr Smith intentionally brought about the death of the child, and the death of the child would not have happened without Mr Smith’s intentional action.
To push back much more strongly against the idea that letting die is not “less bad” than killing, per se, however, all you need to do is modify Rachels’ example a little. All you need to do, that is, is create a situation in which it’s very clear that a bystander is not perfectly obligated to try to save a dying child.
I mean, if Rachels had considered an example in which Mr Jones stood by at the top of a rocky cliff while a child was drowning in a dangerous sea down below after having accidentally fallen off the cliff, whereas Mr Smith had pushed a child off the rocky cliff to drown in the dangerous sea, then it would have been much much harder for Rachels to conclude that Mr Jones letting the child die wasn’t “less bad” than Mr Smith killing the child.
Indeed, if Rachels had thought to consider moral obligations at all, then it would have been a very different paper.
5) On Sunday, I saw chimney swifts for the first time. While the sun set, hundreds of these fantastic little birds swarmed in changing loops around and about a big brick chimney, before finally dropping down it, one by one, to rest for the night. A few months back, I saw fireflies for the first time, further out into Virginia, a little later in the evening. I love the animals here. Even the lanternflies. Sadly, I’ve only found one other person, so far, who agrees with me that it’s wrong to stamp on them.
