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Dr. Singer’s Utilitarian Mores…

I was amazed at seeing Dr. Singer on the O’Reilly Factor sounding off on what is and isn’t ethical vis-à-vis current American policy, when he advocates that a newborn baby shouldn’t be considered human until twenty-eight days after it is born, still giving the parents a choice of “aborting” (infanticide) him or her. He even goes as far as making a moral equivalence between a pig and a newborn child. What a disgrace to our brave men in the military that such a man is given a forum to speak of them! (Dr. Singers stance on infanticide – stated above – can be found on pages 160-161, and 231 of his book “Writings on an Ethical Life.”)

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Any Thoughts?

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Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychology and a leading popularizer of evolutionary psychology, says it is a genetic imperative. Writing in the New York Times, Pinker argued that what he termed neonaticide is not attributable to mental illness because “it has been practiced and acceptable in most cultures throughout history.” Rather, he went on to say, a capacity for neonaticide is hard-wired into the maternal genes by our evolutionary history.

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Or take these excerpts from the book, Writings on an Ethical Life, by Peter Singer (the Ira W. De Camp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University’s Center for Human Value). I am curious if you agree with him or not?:

“We have already seen that the strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals have in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation between an embryo and a newborn baby. The standard liberal position needs to be able to point to some such line, because liberals usually hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or fetus [all nine-months an abortion is legal] but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to a nonhuman animal. Thus while my position on the status of fetal life may be acceptable to many, the implications of this position for the status of newborn life are at odds with the virtually unchallenged assumption that the life of a newborn baby is as sacrosanct as that of an adult.” (p. 160-161)

“In our book Should the Baby Live? my colleague Helga Kuhse and I suggested that a period of twenty-eight days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others. This is clearly well before the infant could have a sense of its own existence over time, and would allow a couple to decide that it is better not to continue with a life that has begun very badly.” (p. 231)

Would you agree with Pinker’s and Singer’s statements? Is infanticide morally wrong? Or just culturally wrong, and nor really morally wrong? You are equating animal sexual behavior to that of human, much like Pinker and Singer.
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When do you define life as beginning?

“The most merciful thing a large family can do for one of its infant members is to kill it.” - Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood

“What we are saying is that abortion becomes one of the choices, and the person has the right to choose whatever it is best that they need as necessary and best for them in the situation for which they find themselves, be it abortion, to keep, to adopt, to sell, to leave in a dumpster, to put on your porch, whatever; it’s the persons right to choose” - Michael Tooley, professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia.