A Culture of Living

Abstract

Remember Gardasil? A vaccine against Human Papillomavirus (HPV), its initial claim to fame was its potential inoculating role against cervical cancer. Alas, it targets a virus communicable through sexual contact, and therein lies the rub. Recommended initially for prepubescent girls, its introduction met with predictable opposition. The cult of life, while granting its prospects as a life saver, decried the apparently equally compelling prospect that its use might sanction premarital promiscuity among those vaccinated. Sexually transmitted diseases, this position implies, are in fact goods, at least instrumentally, as fear of acquiring them may discourage indiscriminate sexual activity. The operative moral logic of this position, i.e. better dead than sex unwed, would seem incongruent with the claim that human life is an absolute good. Yet it reflects the extent to which the life that this cult valorizes is not only wholly divorced from the human body in any biological sense, but is defined in opposition to that body, which bears neither natural, nor instrumental, nor intrinsic goods. For the cult of rights, the use of such vaccines is a matter of parental rights. At the same time, this cult holds that parents should not impose such decisions upon their children. As previously indicated, both cults suffer from the same insuperable challenge: whatever we do, through our actions and even inactions, imposes some future upon our children, whether we like that or not.