For the purposes of this thread you have been granted the ability to heal other people from all illnesses and diseases, physical or mental. All that is required is skin to skin contact with the other person. However you also want to keep your new ability quiet and don’t want anyone else to find out.
So you make casual acquaintance with someone who uses a wheelchair, they have been paralysed from the waist down in a car accident, it would be a simple matter for you to heal her without her knowledge (the process is gradual but it only requires one moment of contact and it doesn’t alert the other person that something has occurred) but do you have the right to do so without her consent?
For the purposes of this thread its a binary choice, either you heal her without her consent or you don’t heal her at all, you can’t talk her into keeping your secret or anything like that.
I was mulling this one over and I’m not sure on my personal feelings on the matter, certainly you would be doing a good thing but the other person might not see it that way.
I find out if she wants to be healed via regular conversation. If she’s spoken of being interested in new treatments, experimental processes, etc. then I heal her. If she speaks of how she’s happier this way, I don’t.
The problem is much trickier with strangers you don’t know, and can’t be acquainted with enough to get an idea of what they want (and won’t meet again). My first impression is to err on the side of healing because I’d think that’s what most want. But just because that sees like what most would want. I actually (for the sake of a fanfic) was looking for controlled polls/followup on what percentage of people with paralysis wanted to be healed recently (preferably broken down by age of injury or born with it, person’s age, gender, etc.) but couldn’t find anything. Question wasn’t really appropriate anywhere I could find (tried for scientific followups on injuries under the idea of psychology). I’m not going to an online community of paralyzed people to ask, of course, as that seems stunningly inappropriate to me. I really wanted more statistical than anecdotal info, anyway.
Given the binary choices, I would make the assumption that most people in a wheelchair would prefer to be healed and do so. I might be wrong, but I’d have to think that even if she is happier in the wheelchair, for some reason, that she wouldn’t greatly lament her cruel fate at having suddenly healed.
In practical terms – and this may be stretching the hypothetical a little – that if I want to keep my ability secret, I’m going to have to skip over the chance to heal LOTS of people. I can’t just go and heal everyone I bump into: that’d give the game away mighty quickly.
So I’m going to have to be strategic. I’m going to have to do sneak-and-heal raids, with long periods between them, and in geographically distant places. And even so, it won’t take investigators long to perceive patterns.
Thus, no, I won’t take chances on marginal cases, where the patient might or might not want healing. I’m going to go to places where there are people who clearly do want it. I think I’d go to mass faith-healing rallies, where I can blend into the crowd (although it’d be a shame for the faith-healing ministers to get credit for my miracle!)
I far prefer the model where I come out, publicly, and extend healing in a systematic manner, with an organization behind me.
EX-LEPER: Yes, sir, a bloody miracle, sir. God bless you.
BRIAN: Who cured you?
EX-LEPER: Jesus did, sir. I was hopping along, minding my own business. All of a sudden, up he comes. Cures me. One minute I’m a leper with a trade, next minute my livelihood’s gone. Not so much as a by your leave. ‘You’re cured mate.’ Bloody do-gooder.
This sort of reminds me of the nurses who do (so they say) mercy killings in hospital and nursing homes by give massive doses of morphine. I grant you, there are people who would gladly accept this as an easy way out. But most folks consider it murder, in a Dr. Kevorkian kinda way. So no I don’t think I could heal people without asking consent, anymore than I could assist or aide someone dying.
I agree. If for some reason, I can’t ask a person what their views are, my default assumption would be that most wheelchair-bound people would prefer to be able to walk.
Given that the right answer (get consent) is off the table, it seems to me that this is fairly clear. In lieu of consent, you’re giving them choice – the healing will be gradual, and as it occurs they can choose which identity they want to keep.
But there are going to be consequences: do this to enough people, and you’ll eventually be “responsible” for someone killing themselves attempting to re-inflict their former injury (people’s motivations, desires, and self-image vary widely) or for some other negative life outcome that would not have been possible in their unhealed state. And as someone above indicated; the “credit” for the healing might go somewhere it doesn’t belong, possibly with widespread societal effects. Consider: could you heal Jahi McMath? A “miraculous” recovery from the dead that will forever after prevent anyone from accepting an end-of-life diagnosis? After three years of tending a corpse, would the benefits for her parents (and Jahi herself) be worth that?
But it seems like – particularly on a large enough scale – that the good will not just outweigh the bad, but will do so overwhelmingly.
For example, imagine someone who is schizophrenic. They’re not dangerous to anyone else now, and they never have been in the past, but they’re a burden on their family because they’re non-compliant and unable to hold down a job when they’re not medicated. Do you heal that person because they’re going to be a burden on their parents and siblings the rest of their life otherwise, even if they refuse? How about if they refuse while they’re not medicated, and refuse because they think you’re one of those thought-stealers from the CIA-Mossad All-Seeing Controlling Machine Complex?
Then you can leave mental illness behind and enter the wide world of high-functioning autism. (Low-functioning autism is, to my understanding, blatantly and obviously a disorder, and is often paired with things like epilepsy and mental retardation.) Is HFA necessarily a disease? It can put people at a social disadvantage, but so can being Black or female. Should we cure people of their Blackness or femininity? What about the advantages in ability and willingness to focus on minutiae?
As it is, sneak-healing without even the consent of the healed is morally wrong in this instance, when the mind is sound but the body is damaged.
Obviously the way to reach as many people as possible would be to arrange a meeting with the pope and let him in on the secret. Not easy, but not impossible. He appoints you as an attache and he gets credit for your miraculous cures.
But as to the OP, I’ll agree with the others that absent knowledge that my friend wants to be in a wheelchair I would heal her.
In the case as given, probably yes but ------------
I had a very good friend who was blind since birth. Once, as we were talking about stuff in general, I asked if she would want to become sighted if it was possible. She seemed really hesitant to rule it out but her gut reaction was no. She was in her late 20s and the thought of learning to read again and other things just wasn’t something that interested her at that time. She laughed a little and asked me to check back in 20 or 40 years but that was how she felt at the time. That conversation ran through my brain before I voted here.
I don’t find the two things to be very comparable; certainly they are both violations of consent, but healing without consent is something for which we already happily make exceptions - consider: an unconscious patient arrives in ER, bleeding to death and requires urgent treatment; next of kin are uncontactable or nonexistent. We decide that on balance, the patient would wish to be healed, and we act accordingly. At least, I think that’s what we do.
If I was aware the person was a Jehovah’s Witness, I would assume that was an implied refusal for blood transfusions even if the person was not able to specifically refuse this transfusion. Refusal would become my default assumption in this case.
I would just do it. Before healing people I’d like to know if they objected to being healed for some reason, but that wouldn’t happen often. I don’t see the harm of healing someone without their permission if they want to be healed, and I don’t think there are many cases where someone wouldn’t to be healed. So if I need to keep this quiet (and that sounds like a good idea) I’d take the chance that I’ll heal someone who doesn’t really want to be healed (whatever that may mean).
Well to be fair I did include mental illness in the OP
As for your other point I wouldn’t include being female or black under the heading of something that can be or should be ‘cured’ but it does raise the question of people suffering from Gender Identity Dismorphia, I can’t think of very many people in that position complaining if they suddenly started changing into their target sex. But it would raise a lot more eyebrows than someone recovering from paralysis or cancer certainly.
Although I’m a Catholic myself and I do like that idea I’m not sure how comfortable I would be at people converting to Catholicism based on what would after all be an untruth, even if one with the very best of intentions.
I also imagine the Pope and others would be very interested to determine exactly where your healing powers are coming from.
