Implied Consent: Act II, Scene V

This is a part of Mr. Stolyarov's play, Implied Consent. To navigate through the various parts of the play, go here.

(Enter MARK into a conference room where RAYMOND NEVILLE and EVERETT WALTONFORD are seated, examining stacks of papers and conversing.)

NEVILLE: Ah, greetings, Mr. Mark.

WALTONFORD: Mr. Mark.

MARK: Greetings, gentlemen. I have been to the Grummond Mansion and have become familiar with Trent Roberts' arguments, as espoused in his press conference.

WALTONFORD: What Roberts says to the press may not necessarily correspond with what he will say in court. When one treats ideas as not eternal and immutable truths, but as mere weapons, some of which will work for one audience, others for another, we can never quite be sure if the man really believes anything, much less what he believes.

NEVILLE: We know at least one belief that he holds: his utter and inexcusable contempt for ideas. This is why I see it as necessary to craft a firm set of principles of our own which we will support in argument against any kind of attack that Roberts might devise. Perhaps we may think of Roberts as a mosquito; we never know where he will land to perpetrate his malice, but, if we encase ourselves in a full suit of armor, every one of his attempts will be repelled. Our case must then be, like a suit of armor, impregnable to Roberts' wily maneuvering.

MARK: I have come to learn the arguments you have to offer. This will greatly assist my understanding of the case and my ultimate stance on it.

NEVILLE: As I see it, there is a difference here between our legal burdens of proof and our filosofical ones. Legally, we represent the defendant, and, thus, are innocent until proven guilty. We are not required to prove anything-we just need to hold our own. However, Roberts will utterly devastate us if we adhere to this mentality, for his arguments, though misguided and inconsistent, will then be the only arguments on the floor. They will win by default, no matter how bad they are, if we do nothing to present a clear, consistent alternative that will conclusively disprove whatever accusations Roberts sends at us. Thus, our filosofical burdens of proof are twofold. We must demonstrate that Mr. Grummond is in fact alive, and that his will is immutable by the wishes of his family.

WALTONFORD: If I have six months to fully implement the revival of Quintus Grummond, we could prove conclusively that he is alive by having him make a personal appearance in the courtroom! It is in our interests to protract this matter as long as possible, but it is similarly in Roberts' interests to hurry it along, even though he does not know of the existence of our project. He still expects an ample fraction of the settlement, and would likely wish to get his hands on it as soon as he can.

MARK: How certain are you that your revival project will work?

WALTONFORD: Without a doubt in my mind. Every single variable has now been meticulously tested, and every element of the design backed by nearly a century of data and evidence.

MARK: Would it be possible to disclose your project in the courtroom, thus demonstrating that Mr. Grummond will, absent the plaintiffs' intervention, regain the use of his consciousness? Then it might be possible to liken his state to an extremely long period of sleep, in which, though his present use of consciousness is lacking, his future use of it is an enormously high probability, if not a certainty.

WALTONFORD: Or the certainty will be reduced to an impossibility, if the court issues a warrant to shut the project down. The majority of bureaucrats will be outraged over it, and one of them will inevitably find some minor statute that we had overlooked or some obscure license that we forgot to obtain. The rest will be just a matter of sending enough raiders to the laboratories to break everything and arrest everyone. No, we must delay exposure of the project until we have irrevocable results.

NEVILLE: However, even without this disclosure, we can still refer to the argument that the present use of one's consciousness is not required for one to be considered alive. Consider a man who is asleep. Though his consciousness is not functioning, numerous other bodily processes are, enough to sustain his organism in such a state that his consciousness will be able to function once he awakens. Thus, we can say that so long as we are examining the status of an entity whose fundamental nature includes the use of volitional consciousness, it can be considered alive when even some of its body is performing certain active functions.

MARK: So, then, you are claiming that, because Mr. Grummond is a human being, his fundamental nature can never change; he can be asleep or awake, eating, talking, taking a walk, healthy, ill, or even comatose. Any of these states will not alter the deeper and more essential fact that he is the same person, defined by his capacity for rationality at some point in time, rather than by his immediate use of it.

WALTONFORD: Well, if men were defined by their immediate use of rationality, all too many homo sapiens would never meet the definition! Men can be rational; they can make that choice, but, alas, far too many of them refuse to entertain it. Yet men they remain, and their rights stay as sacred as ever, just in case they finally decide to make good use of them.

NEVILLE: Moreover, simply because a life support machine is required to maintain the beating of Mr. Grummond's heart and all the other internal mechanisms that sustain him does not mean that he is not alive. It is perfectly acceptable for a living entity to have some external source supporting it at every instant. All three of us are in fact just as dependent on external support as Mr. Grummond. We must eat regularly to introduce necessary energetic content into our bodies. We must breathe in oxygen in order to provide components for the synthesis of the compounds our bodies need to survive. Were it not for the external support provided to us by the planet on which we stand, we would float off into oblivion in outer space, unless we had the external support of a spaceship and spacesuit. Every component of our survival we must ultimately take from the external world, and, the moment we fail to do so, we fail altogether.

MARK: So, then, by denying Mr. Grummond the life support machine that links him to reality, the plaintiffs would essentially be saying to a person who had once directly exercised his rationality that he is no longer deserving of life in this world. This would be an arbitrary imposition that they would have no right to carry out. They would be stating that Mr. Grummond is dead because he has a link to the external world that sustains him. In effect, their claim amounts to: "He is dead because he is alive."

WALTONFORD: Most compelling. When we bare such contradictions in a theory, we know that we have disproved it.

NEVILLE: Moreover, I think that we can clearly establish a connection between Mr. Grummond's past use of rationality and his will, both the will that made him choose to be rational, of course, but, even more importantly for this case, the will that he wrote as an instruction for the use of his property and the treatment of his person in the event of an incapacitation such as this one. First, the insightful and masterful planning that Mr. Grummond undertook in the document to create the Estate and specify the conditions of his own upkeep qualifies it for a rational decision, made with consideration to the facts and arrangements of reality. This rational decision, like all other rational decisions, had its effects deferred, but so what? Let us say that I make the very rational decision of eating food when I recognize that my body requires it. Its consequences are also not immediate. After I make the decision, I must still deploy the food on the table, and reach out toward it in order to then go through the physical motions of eating it. Since every physical motion is delayed in time, so will, by necessity, the implementation of every decision.

MARK: Ah, I see. And it should not matter that the particular condition a man is in has also changed during that lag period between decision and implementation. For example, I may decide to put money in a bank account which earns continuous interest. At a later time, when I am, say, asleep, I cannot directly claim that interest, nor can I make any financial transactions whatsoever, but that interest is still mine, because it has accumulated as a result of a past decision I had made. If we indeed have the right to be the beneficiaries of our own rational actions, which is indeed what all legitimate rights are, then this right applies to the consequences of all our actions, at all times, at all states of being we happen to be in.

WALTONFORD: We are beginning to use terms which suggest property rights, both a person's right to ownership of the interest earned in your hypothetical example, and Mr. Grummond's right to dispose of the property that was his. We cannot, after all, dispute that Mr. Grummond had earned his wealth through his own efforts and through voluntary cooperation with others. He should therefore have the right to determine what shall happen to it in cases of emergency.

MARK: There is even more to this, I think. For what is property but that which belongs to a person? If we employ this extremely but necessarily broad definition, we will find that property consists of everything about a person, not merely his wealth or the possessions external to his body, but also of his body itself and of his mind. For, if a man has a right to act on the conclusions of his own mind, it must mean that his mind belongs to him and him alone, and nobody may violate its use. The mind is the faculty which decides how a man will act, but the body is the mechanism that does the acting. The two cannot be severed from one another in the realm of rights. The right to independently use one's mind is nothing without the right to apply the conclusions of one's mind in the material world. Thus, if a man has a full property in his mind, he must also have a full property in his body, and in deciding what it shall do and what shall happen to it, so long as this violates nobody else's rights. Thus, Mr. Grummond's will can be said to be a manifestation of his property rights in a threefold manner: the right to determine the workings of the Estate, which is his property, the right to decide with the property which is his mind what he deems best for his future, and the right to have the conclusions of his mind be applied to his body by means of the life support which he had decided to remain under until some improvement to his condition results.

NEVILLE: Mr. Mark, I thought you were a novice to the field of ideas! And yet you were able to derive and formulate on your own the idea of property rights as the logical extension of the idea that man is a rational being entitled to the freedom of his mind.

You are fast becoming a master of the abstract, and I would be honored to have more of your input on this case.

MARK: Thank you, Mr. Neville. I was able to learn all the prior ideas on which this one is built through a friend, and the remaining conclusions seemed to logically follow from putting the pieces together.

WALTONFORD: Taken even further, property rights imply the absolute freedom of men in all that belongs to them: the freedom of businessmen to trade and structure their businesses as they wish, the freedom of all men to keep 100% of their incomes unless they wish to otherwise dispose of them, the freedom of scientists to innovate in whatever fields they see fit to extend their knowledge of truth and method into, the freedom of men to associate with whomever they wish and to set whatever conditions they wish on their association, the freedom of men to own as much land as they can afford to buy, and to do with it what they see fit-these are freedoms that logic necessitates but, alas, that the government and all too large a fraction of the public do not understand. Among them is the freedom to extend the life of one's property, including one's body, for as long as one deems fit.

MARK: But then, will a government that violates everybody's property rights in a multitude of grievous ways understand the arguments of property rights on which our case is based?

NEVILLE: Hopefully, we shall be dealing not with the government in all of its convoluted bureaucracy, but with a single individual, a judge amenable to reason and able to make a personal judgment based on the arguments.

WALTONFORD: Yes, many factors of this trial are subject only to our hope that we will be encountering a rational audience. Nevertheless, others are entirely within our control. My work necessitates that I presently take my leave, and accelerate the pace of the revival project. I shall work overtime if need be to see if this can at all shorten my timetable. Gentlemen. (He departs.)

MARK: Best wishes to you, Doctor. Mr. Neville, I shall return here periodically in order to check on further developments. In the meantime, I shall leave you to polish your presentation. I have gotten word that you will be representing the Estate in court.

NEVILLE: Yes, I indeed have the license of an attorney, which Mr. Grummond had managed to procure for me after learning that Harvard would not give me one since I refused to write my paper on why laws are mere social conventions determined by the general will and variable from one era to the next. It seems now that I shall have a chance to prove to my former professor that failing me was an extremely poor choice on his part.

MARK: Your professor?

NEVILLE: Trent Roberts, J.D. from Harvard, head of its law department for some time.

MARK: Then it is no wonder that our legal system is in trouble, if the people who do manage to graduate from the most elite schools can do so only if they absorb the ideas of men such as Roberts.

NEVILLE: Indeed, Mr. Mark. Farewell. May Reason prevail.

MARK: Farewell.

(The spotlight focuses on MARK as he begins to walk out toward the end of the stage. Along his way, he stops and begins to speak to himself and the audience.)

MARK: My, what new power I have obtained! It is a power that has helped me understand the very essence of the fundamental laws governing this world and the state of man. It is a power that, when used consistently and systematically, will leave no question unanswered, and no knowledge beyond man's eventual reach. And I have Victoria to thank for it. I think I am drawn toward her entire person, for she is the very embodiment of Reason, the human ideal made flesh, and I should seek to reside with her in her world of purity and clarity for the remainder of our days. So I shall go, then, to confess the reverence that I for her possess.

(Curtain)

To read other parts of Implied Consent, go here.