The headline panel featured two heavyweight Australian philosophers – Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton, and John Finnis, a professor emeritus of philosophy in the University of Oxford. The two debated the “Moral Status of the Fetus."
Singer defended his support for infanticide, stating that self-awareness confers moral status, and not species membership. Abortion is the killing of a human being, but is not immoral because the child does not meet the self-awareness test, said Singer.
In his utilitarian view, Singer believes that there can even be a moral duty to kill humans lacking self-awareness, including the disabled, which he has been criticized for not following in the case of his mother.
The fact that "Catholics for Choice"leader Frances Kissling is a 'visiting ethics scholar'at University of Pennsylvania when she is niether ethical nor a scholar is also disturbing.
These monsters will be the ones who determine who lives or dies in this nation, if Obamacare is not overturned. These are the people whom Obama considers his peers and advisors.
VOTE pro-life.
Read the entire article here.
3 comments:
you clearly mis-represent Singer, and this is just a straw-man attack. A "duty to kill humans lacking self-awareness"? Please quote his texts (e.g. "practical ethics") and show us where he says that.
Here is a quote about Singer's view of the disabled infant.
Down syndrome, once again a genetically based condition, gets the most attention in Singer’s recent work. His 1994 book Rethinking Life & Death, whose aim is to articulate “a social ethic where some human lives are valued and others are not” (p. 112), recapitulates the arguments in favor of selective infanticide outlined above. There he endorses the view that “it is ethical that a child suffering from Down’s syndrome…should not survive” (p. 123) because “the quality of life of someone with Down syndrome [is] below the standard at which medical treatment to sustain the life of an infant becomes obligatory” (p. 111; in Singer’s terms “treatment to sustain life” doesn’t refer merely to surgical intervention but to simple feeding as well). This “quality of life” reasoning is sometimes cast in more colorful terms; in Should the Baby Live? Singer quotes, entirely approvingly, the grandmother of a Down syndrome child: “Had the poor little mongol been allowed to die, as he so easily could, my daughter might have had one or two healthy children in his place” (p. 66). Singer goes on to suggest lethal injection “in the case of a Down syndrome baby with no other defect” (p. 73).
I always felt like his point was that it is not immoral for a parent to put their children out of misery in certain circumstances; and not that all Down syndrome children should be euthanized...
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