Fake, but Aristotelian?

[Selene]

<h1 class="tb22" style="margin: 0px;">Fake but Aristotelian? </h1> Actually, the great Greek philosopher probably didn't endorse ObamaCare. By JAMES TARANTO

Yesterday we received an email from a loyal reader who nonetheless seems to disagree with everything we write--a type of reader for whom we have a special, if slightly perverse, affection. Our correspondent included a quote that he attributed to Aristotle:

If we believe men have any personal rights at all, then they must have an absolute moral right to such a measure of good health as society can provide.

Could an ancient philosopher, a man who lived and died many centuries before the advent of either socialism or modern medicine, really have been in favor of socialized medicine? We were skeptical, to say the least, and decided to do a bit of Web sleuthing.

We punched the quote into Google, and up popped a series of references, mostly from left-liberal outfits like truthout.org and Bill Moyers Journal. This heightened our suspicion that the quote is a "progressive" urban legend, but it didn't prove it.

<h3 class="b13" style="text-align: center;">Podcast</h3> James Taranto on the supposed Aristotle quote.

Then we tried searching Google Books, figuring that if this appeared anywhere in Aristotle's works, it would turn up there. The only reference to the quote was from Thurston Clarke's 2008 book, "The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and 82 Days That Inspired America." Clarke reports that RFK, during his 1968 presidential campaign, attributed the quote to Aristotle in a speech at the "University of Indiana Medical School" (presumably he means the Indiana University School of Medicine).

Of course, Aristotle wrote in ancient Greek, not modern English, so it's possible that Kennedy was using his own translation. But a March 2008 paper by Edmund D. Pellegrino, a professor of medicine and philosophy at Georgetown University, suggests that in fact RFK was using a fabricated quote. Here is what Pellegrino, with the assistance of the staff at the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature, found:

In attempts to establish the provenance of the text in question we have conducted an extensive search for its source and original wording. We have not been able to locate it. Our initial curiosity was aroused by several things, including that rights language did not seem to have the Aristotelian context, and health care, as such, was not included in Aristotle's works. We searched

Nicomachean Ethics

and

Eudemian Ethics,

and the

Magna Moralia

without successfully locating the quote. Nor could we find it in other of works of Aristotle:

On Length and Shortness of Life, De Anima, Economics

or the

Fragments

. "Rights" language certainly would stick out in Aristotle's virtue-based ethics.

Curiously, the earliest reference to the purported quote that Pellegrino was able to find was from an article published in 1979, more than a decade after RFK's death, whose author claimed to have translated it himself from a Latin edition of the Nicomachean Ethics. We haven't been able to find a transcript of the RFK speech, or any contemporaneous account of his quoting Aristotle in it.

Maybe he was quoting Aristotle Onassis.

'Futile' Vassals

Whatever Aristotle might or might not have said, the flip side of establishing a "right" to medical care is that it also entails empowering the government to define the limits of that right. An Associated Press story offers a chilling hint of the potential implications:

A surprising number of frail, elderly Americans in nursing homes are suffering from futile care at the end of their lives, two new federally funded studies reveal.

One found that putting nursing home residents with failing kidneys on dialysis didn't improve their quality of life and may even push them into further decline. The other showed many with advanced dementia will die within six months and perhaps should have hospice care instead of aggressive treatment.

Medical experts say the new research emphasizes the need for doctors, caregivers and families to consider making the feeble elderly who are near death comfortable rather than treating them as if a cure were possible--more like the palliative care given to terminally ill cancer patients.

We have no basis on which to quarrel with the findings of the study, and certainly it is true that some treatments are futile and circumstances exist in which palliative care is the least bad of all available options. But when government becomes the decision-maker, you end up with stories like the one we noted Wednesday, in which a British hospital manager tried to persuade a woman to make her grandmother "comfortable" (read dead) when, as it turned out, the old lady's breathing difficulties were easily treatable.

In that same item Wednesday, we called attention to a speech Robert Reich, President Clinton's labor secretary, gave, in which he set forth what he described--approvingly--as the "truth" about so-called health-care reform: that it amounts to telling old people, "We're going to let you die," forcing young people to pay more for insurance, and suppressing medical innovation.

We weren't the only one to notice this Reich speech, and Reich has posted a response on his blog to the commentary that has ensued:

Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity, Rush, and the right-wing blogosphere seem interested in a talk I gave in September, 2007 to students in a political science class here at Berkeley, in which I played the role of a presidential candidate so politically incorrect and tone-deaf as to pummel every sacred cow in sight--including the notion that our society could afford and would continue forever to pay whatever amount of money was required to keep everyone alive forever. The whole point of the mock exercise was to show that presidential candidates can't state what everyone knows to be the truth because they'll be taken apart by the Right or the Left. I slew many other sacred cows in that mock exercise, some of which are held dearly by the Left. Nonetheless, two years later the Right has exhumed the lecture and taken my words completely out of context purportedly to show that Obama and the Democrats plan death panels.

If their desperation weren't so pathetic it would be funny. After all, they have proven the whole point of my lecture. UC Berkeley maintains

an archive of webcasts

and my speech is available there

verbatim

, should you wish to listen to it in its entirety.

This is bizarre. We don't know exactly what Dobbs, Hannity and Rush Limbaugh said, but we were in complete agreement with "the whole point" of Reich's lecture, at least as it applies to President Obama and other politicians currently pushing "health-care reform": that they are not telling the truth about their intentions. Reich almost certainly gave a far more accurate description of how ObamaCare would work in practice than Obama has ever given.

[Reidy]

1. "Personal rights," "absolute moral right" and "society can provide" are grossly anachronistic and out of character for Aristotle, no matter how bad the translation.

2. With Aristotle (among other historic authors) the burden is on the one who does the quoting to provide a citation in standard form so readers can look it up. For Aristotle this is a Bekker citation, giving page, column (a or b) and line of Bekker's 1837 Berlin edition (e.g. 1012a13-14). Without that you can dismiss it as bogus without any searching.

The left has a long history of fabricated quotes: Hitler, Caesar, Chief Seattle, Jefferson, Einstein and "it takes a village..." all come to mind. In one week, the list has grown by two: Aristotle and Limbaugh.

Edited October 17, 2009 by Reidy

[Robert Campbell]

I hadn't run across that one before. One look at it and I knew it was fabricated.

Aristotle was a trained physician and a member of the Asclepiad Guild, and he referred to medicine on quite a few occasions in his writings.

But not to "health care"...

And there's no way "absolute moral right" would be an acceptable translation of any phrase in the Aristotelian corpus.

Robert Campbell

[Selene]

Exactly gentlemen.

And, as usual I learned something important and new from both of you.

This rose through the electronic cacophony because of my interests in Aristotle and politics...I wish he had written a book on that.

One of the major problems that we have in terms of propaganda or persuasive campaigns with "Randian ideas" is the electronic hammering that goes on 24/7

that rejects her basic ideas.

Not by design, mind you.

I happened to watch a piece of The Time Machine today, where he and Weena are talking around the fire, he speaks about her becoming a better human tonight

because she came out into danger to bring him to safety and that was noble because it was self sacrifice.

I also heard that O'biwan has the tv stations running "service" shows which will extol "service".

Adam

[Robert Campbell]

Adam,

Aristotle produced a treatise on Politics, and another on Rhetoric.

But there was nothing in his time that resembled today's mass media, or today's campaigns for elective office.

Robert Campbell

[Selene]

Adam,

Aristotle produced a treatise on Politics, and another on Rhetoric.

But there was nothing in his time that resembled today's mass media, or today's campaigns for elective office.

Robert Campbell

Bob, I am so sorry, that was a kinda bad joke by me. I used 4 of Aristotle's books as my texts when teaching rhetoric.

Sorry, that was not meant for you.

My bad.

Adam

[Robert Campbell]

Adam,

Aristotle produced a treatise on Politics, and another on Rhetoric.

But there was nothing in his time that resembled today's mass media, or today's campaigns for elective office.

Robert Campbell

Bob, I am so sorry, that was a kinda bad joke by me. I used 4 of Aristotle's books as my texts when teaching rhetoric.

Sorry, that was not meant for you.

My bad.

Adam

I did kind of wonder about that remark....

Robert Campbell