Where is the line between humanitarian and inhuman? A surgeon in California is on trial for administering a deadly drug to a fatally ill handicapped man in order to get him to die more quickly so that they could harvest his organs while they were still useful. His lawyer thinks he did nothing wrong:

The doctor's lawyer, M. Gerald Schwartzbach, said that Roozrokh, 34, who moved to Wisconsin from Iran when he was a toddler and excelled as a collegiate swimmer, did "nothing that adversely affected the quality or length" of Navarro's life.

The man is not innocent. He admits having administered a deadly drug with intent to kill, in clear violation of the Hippocratic oath. Thus, the Kevorkian logic takes its next fully predictable turn of the screw. Handicapped advocates had fought voluntary suicide laws because the line between right to die and duty to die would never hold. As soon as it is OK to take yourself out when you find yourself a pain in the butt, the next step is that someone else will feel entitled to reach the same conclusion.

And they will cloak it in humanitarian logic. These resources -- your organs -- will be better devoted to someone who can better use them. The greatest good for the greatest number. The harsh, inhuman utilitarian logic.

The slippery slope of the abortion logic is in play here. And it's not just found in hospitals with doctors. It's also found in the most prestige universities. Take Peter Singer, the "bioethicist" at Princeton, who believes that infants are not fully human because they lack self-awareness: "I do not think it is always wrong to kill an innocent human being," and "Simply killing an infant is never equivalent to killing a person."

The controversy has the organ donation community flummoxed:

David Fleming, the executive director of Donate Life America, a nonprofit group that promotes donations, said the case had "given some support to the myths and misperceptions we spend an inordinate amount of time telling people won't happen."

Yeah, well, when you spend an inordinate amount of time explaining a myth that people in their gut know is entirely possible unless stiff ethical barriers are in place, and you see society all around you busily disassembling those barriers, it does get a little tough.

Once Nietszsche declared that "God is dead" it was, I suppose, inevitable that the little punks He created would promote themselves to fill the vacancy.