A true and bizarre story with, I hope, more down to earth applications

I'm quoting an article by Anthony Daniels calls "The Felicific Calculus of Modern Medicine":

"Recently in Britain, a surgeon caused a stir by amputating the perfectly healthy leg of a patient who claimed that, ever since adulthood, he was convinced that nature had made a dreadful mistake in supplying him with two lower limbs and that he could not be happy unless the appendage surplus to his requirements were removed. The surgeon justified the operation by saying that, in satisfying his patient's desire, he was improving the quality of his life. He was also reducing the risk of a dangerous, botched auto-amputation. And since the operation was performed under Britain's National Health Service, the surgeon was also able truly to claim that he had no pecuniary interest in the operation, and, living as we do in a highly materialistic age, a lack of pecuniary interest in an action almost automatically justifies it from the moral point of view ill the eyes of a population rendered cynical by universal greed.

"The surgeon's approach, to satisfy the autonomous desire of his patient whatever his desire might be, leaves doctors permanently open to blackmail. A person has only to say to a doctor that his life is miserable without drug or operation X and threaten either to procure it for himself by illicit or dangerous means or to commit suicide for the doctor to feel obliged to comply with the demand. Oddly enough, an emphasis on personal autonomy goes pari passu with the demand that doctors should bring about harm reduction: individuals being autonomous only as far as the satisfaction of their desires is concerned, not for the ill consequences of the satisfaction of their desires, the responsibility for the diminishment of which they are only too happy to delegate to doctors and other authorities.

"It would not have surprised Edmund Burke to learn that the surgeon who amputated his client's leg was soon inundated by people requesting the same operation. There is nothing quite like the prospect of satisfaction to provoke bizarre desire; and, as if patriotically to preserve her nation's reputation for rococo excess, an American woman flew to Britain in the hope of having both her legs amputated--by a trained and competent surgeon, of course. The public revelation that there exists a sexual underworld, complete with its own websites, of people who are erotically excited only by amputees, put a temporary stop to the amputations, but surely only a temporary one, until a court somewhere in the world rules that it is man's inalienable right to have bits lopped off him if he so wishes."

...

"The idea that extension of choice is invariably a good (indeed, is the whole and sole purpose of life) is now deeply entrenched the world over. The triumph of the American Declaration of Independence has been complete: if every man has the right to pursue his happiness, and his happiness entails the amputation of his leg, it follows (does it not?) that he has a right to pursue and eventually to have such an amputation. No possibilities should therefore be ruled out a priori , certainly not on the grounds that they are unseemly, disgusting, or sacrilegious, for to do so is to impose standards that are not provable or universal, and therefore constitutes an abridgement of freedom."

"Consumer choice has become itself the beginning and end of wisdom."

"The unwillingness of modern man to place limitations upon his own appetites --the natural consequence of a pagan worship of the right to choice in everything--is seen around us every day. Shortly before I wrote this, The Guardian newspaper reported that a British judge had ordered DNA tests on the five men with whom a woman had slept in four days, with a view to finding out (for purely financial reasons) who was the father of her child. Apparently, she had been so desperate to have a child that she had slept with as many men as she could find during her fertile period, in the hope that at least one of them was himself fertile.

"The egotistical shallowness of such behavior beggars description, let alone comment, but it is now undoubtedly a mass phenomenon. The woman had taken her right to a child--that is to say, the absence of any legal authority with the right or duty to prevent her from having a child--to mean that she had a positive right to one, regardless of circumstances. Her right soon transmuted itself into a desire, as such imagined rights so often do, until it became the existential itch that she had to scratch. All other considerations, such as the welfare of her future child, or a regard for the decent opinion of mankind, counted for nothing: she was but an atom in a social vacuum, the Brownian motion of her whims being for her the measure of all things.

"We live, moreover, in an age of equity and equality (the two are usually equated). If one person in the world is entitled to something, then it follows that everyone else in the world must be entitled to it also. Thus, if a woman in her sixties in Italy is helped by in vitro fertilizationin vitro fertilization (vē`trō, vĭ`trō), technique for conception of a human embryo outside the mother's body. Several ova, or eggs, are removed from the mother's body and placed in special laboratory culture dishes (Petri dishes); and hormonal manipulation to have a baby, it follows that every other woman in the world who so desires it must have a right to similar treatment: for otherwise an injustice will have been done. This is the way that desires previously unheard or undreamt of enter the mind and there fester."

Thoughts?

http://www.thefreelibrary.com/The+felicific+calculus+of+modern+medicine:+the+survival+of+culture:...-a080554088

with Freedom of Choice is that for it to work correctly, one needs a good sense of Morality,
I.E. 'Do NO Harm to another'.

Or the 2 Commandments which, correctly followed, cause the above.

The doctor fulfilled the self serving request of the patient.
I would think it odd that a doctor would cause intentional physical harm to the Body,
even for the Mental health of the Patient.
Sounds kinda risky to me.

about equity and equality is quite important.

I file this in my head with all of the other recent signs of the decay of western civilization. God help us.

overnight becomes a right.

I believe in the UK, one has a "right" to a sex change operation. That's amazing, if rights mean what I think they mean. That would mean you had a right to a sex change 100 or 1000 years ago as well.