This Blog considers assisted suicide/euthanasia, bioethics, human cloning, biotechnology, radical environmentalism, and the dangers of animal rights/liberation. My views expressed here, as in my books and other writings, reflect my understanding that the philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters. (The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of any organization with which I am affiliated.)
The newest edition of my podcast Brave New Bioethics is now up. Using my earlier First Thing blog entry as my script, I compare the love of a father whose son has Down syndrome with the infanticide permissiveness of bioethicist Peter Singer.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:18 PM
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I am a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the author of 12 books, including A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy, which is relevant to the issues considered by this blog.
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4 Comments:
That was great. I especially was impressed by the father's statement that the denial of his Down Syndrome child's value would be a denial of himself and his statement that human beings will not be better off with out Down's syndrome.
I like how you inflected Peter Singer's term "new start" that he used to refer to killing that might be effected through his license to kill so that resources might be freed up. Sounds like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment plotting to kill an old haggish woman and take her money for utilitarian motives. All cognisant citizens, licenses to kill are being handed out to our gullible citizenry. Oppose these cynic shriveled hands' works of destruction with brave and robust countersurging love!
Thanks raskolnikov. We need to talk more about love and less about capacities.
I read that in the Congo allegations of witchcraft are now considered the number one cause of child homelessness. The question that occurs to me in the context of notions of eugenic infanticide is if there is not a subtle similarity despite the later being carried out under the banner of science and claiming it's auspices. Both have a kind of mystic view of fortunes and allege mysterious knowledge- in the case of the witchcraft allegations a knowledge based on gisting similar to the predictions of ill-fortune for parents of Down Syndrome's children and for the child itself. In the case of killing the children in civilized societies (versus kicking them out in less civilized societies), it is often done under the mysterious heart throbbing self-stroking gist of how they would not have a life worth living, belied by a typical photograph of a Down syndrome child.
Both take an unrealistic view of life. The witchcraft allegations seem to me to actually engage in a type of magic in that they manipulate in their minds signs, etc. The Down syndrome eugenics takes an instrumentally manipulative approach in search of dreams of titanism, refusing to wrestle with the given in the depths just as magic refuses it. It is like quick fixer assassins balking reality.
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