July 30, 2010

Peter Singer Asks, "Should This Be the Last Generation?"

By Dave Andrusko

Editor’s note. My family is on vacation until next Monday. While we are gone I’ll be running past articles that you've indicated you liked. This first ran June 7. Dave.

One of the many reasons our benighted opposition finds us so irritating is that we force them to face the consequences of their own logic. Instead of just mindlessly accepting their gibberish ("choice," "autonomy," etc.), we challenge them. In effect, we say, "Are you serious? Do you have the first idea how the exception you just carved out [to kill unborn babies or the medically vulnerable, for example] undermines the foundations that make a civilized society possible and will inevitably be extended to other vulnerable populations?"

Peter Singer

But you can NEVER get ahead of some anti-life philosophers. They are way ahead of us, so to speak. For them there is no such thing as reductio ad absurdum, no way to make them feel foolish by showing them that their argument leads to an absurd conclusion. Their response is, "And your point is…?"

They celebrate nihilism--although with a couple of meaningless qualifiers--and lecture us to that everyone is better off if we attack the most vulnerable, starting with the victims. The ultimate example is probably Peter Singer, who (I kid you not) is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values. In his latest essay, he extends his profoundly pessimistic logic to the whole of the human community.

Think of Singer this way. If you think of his worldview as if it was a film, left on the cutting floor is every frame of human compassion, every sense that there are any "givens" that we foreit at our mortal peril.

To take just three representative quotes (the first two are from the 1993 text book, "Practical Ethics"):

"Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse affects on the others, it would, according to the total view [of utilitarianism], be right to kill him. The main point is clear: killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.

Very often it is not wrong at all." And "The only difference between killing a normal infant and a defective one is the attitude of the parents."

From, Should the Baby Live?," co-authored with Helga Kuhse, "For more than fifteen hundred years, Christian teaching dominated Western moral thinking. ... During this long era of totalitarian enforcement, Christian moral view gained an almost unshakable grip on our moral thinking. The idea that all human life has a special sanctity has become an important part of our moral consciousness" (emphasis added).

Whereas "all human life" was previously code for the unborn, children born with disabilities, and the medically vulnerable elderly, Singer has upped the ante.

The New York Times runs something called "The Stone," described as "a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless." Yesterday, Singer contributed "Should This Be the Last Generation?" He is not kidding.

The piece runs this way and that, but the nub is let's consider this question: "Is a world with people in it better than a world with no sentient beings at all?" He's not talking about Animal Liberation (of which he is an enthusiastic believer)--whether they'd be better off if we'd stop taking up space--but rather whether enough of us live a life of sufficient "quality" to justify keeping us "sentient beings" going.

If the answer is no, then we probably ought to be about the business of obtaining universal agreement to sterilize ourselves universally. Now in the next breath he says we couldn't get that agreement, but adds, let's pretend we could.

"[A]nything wrong with this scenario?" he asks. "Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than [African philosopher David] Benatar [author of "a fine book with an arresting title: "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence"], we could still defend it, because it makes us better off -- for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations -- and it doesn't make anyone worse off, because there won't be anyone else to be worse off."

However, he doesn't mean that, judged by what he has already said in this piece and in all his many previous books. He tells us, "Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint." I'm sure that's true at Princeton.

But, he says, "the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about."

Get it? We'll assuage Singer's guilt by volunteering not to replace ourselves.

In the concluding paragraph, Singer concludes, "I do think it would be wrong to choose the non-sentient universe." Lucky for us.

But Singer also remarks, "[J]ustifying that choice forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?"

"Should This Be the Last Generation?" A better question/request is, "Could This Be the Last Time Anyone Takes This Man Seriously?"

Please send your comments to daveandrusko@gmail.com.

Part Two