Peter Singer and the trap of logic: Part I
Disability activists would very much like to see Princeton University bioethics professor Peter Singer lose his job. The reason is fairly obvious: Singer advocates the killing of disabled infants if the parents request it.
What’s less obvious is why Singer has a job as a bioethicist at Princeton in the first place—although of course I know the answer, and it lies in the politics of today’s universities.
“Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies,” Mr. Singer continued. “My view is different from this, only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life support – which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection – but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.”
Interesting how Singer skips from situation A to situation B as though it represents merely a small and logical step, when in fact in the moral, legal, and spiritual sense it represents a gap the size of the Grand Canyon.
Singer’s stance is certainly a chilling one, because although the sort of infants Singer has in mind are so profoundly disabled and undergoing such suffering that we’re not talking about the “merely” blind or halt or lame, it still is a position that smacks of the Nazi “life unworthy of life” campaign and seems (despite his label as “ethicist”) to be just plain wrong:
“The day had to come, just as the day had to come when Copernicus proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe,” Singer told me…“It is ridiculous to pretend that the old ethics still make sense when plainly they do not.”…
“The notion that human life is sacred just because it’s human life is medieval,” he continued, talking about the treatment of the hopelessly ill. “The person that used to be there is gone. It doesn’t matter how sad it makes us. All I am saying is that it’s time to stop pretending that the world is not the way we know it to be.”
Singer clearly thinks of himself as logical and right. But what an odd and revealing analogy, and how much is left out and/or misunderstood! Singer is discussing the work of scientists who are trying to study and describe phenomena “out there” in the physical world, something that we can measure and describe, and is comparing that to rules to guide human behavior in the moral sense, something entirely different. I think it is telling that Singer says we are pretending the “old ethics still make sense,” as though it’s something we could know in that same, factual sense as astronomy. “Make sense” how? To whom? Based on what values?
What is Singer missing? Just about everything. He doesn’t appear to understand—not just human beings, although there’s that—but something about human life itself. He writes as though we are robotic automatons going by the numbers:
Singer argues that proximity means nothing when it comes to moral decisions, and that personal relationships don’t mean much either. Saving your daughter’s life is a fine thing to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the lives of ten strangers. If you were faced with the choice, Singer’s ethics would require you to save the strangers. “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away,” he wrote in his essay. Singer believes we are obliged to give money away until our sacrifice is of “comparable moral importance” to the agony of people starving to death. “This would mean, of course,” he continued, approvingly, “that one should reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.”
It is easy to recognize the leftist origins of such thinking, as well as the denial of nature. Even in animals the maternal instinct is extremely powerful. Why? We are constructed that way; it has survival value. Taking care of our own families first works when everybody does it; it is what love is about, for example, and communities, which also run on love and closeness. It’s not a numbers game, although the “do no harm” prohibition is a good one. But if humans uniformly followed his prescriptions, try to imagine the sum total of love and joy in the world: none. Life would be a sort of utilitarian statist re-education camp where all decisions must be based on maximizing numbers (until overpopulation would change the calculus to a priority for reducing numbers), and no human ties would matter in a crisis (all leftist dictatorships try to weaken family ties, and it’s no accident).
Singer would create incredible suffering to play his numbers game, and require of people that they be saints, which (among other things) has the flaw of being impossible because it goes against human nature and human emotion. If we are thinking of maximizing the good for humanity (based on what criteria? Happiness? Food? Number of lives saved? Or quality of life?) we have to take human nature into consideration and not try to twist mankind into some sort of machine it is not. That is the utopian impulse that always ALWAYS makes for a dystopia.
Here’s more about Singer’s philosophy:
When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. Few people will ever consider infants replaceable in the way that they consider free-range chickens replaceable, and Singer knows that…
His philosophy is called preference-utilitarianism. It has a more nuanced version of what Mill had in mind, with personal preferences taking the place of happiness. Singer’s thought is shaped by the assumption that the results of your behavior should agree with the preferences of anyone whom your behavior would affect. For Singer, killing is wrong because when you kill someone who wants to live you make it impossible for that person to fulfill his preferences.
Singer believes that killing those who are so severely disabled that (in his opinion) they can’t be said to have “preferences” is different in some basic way, and ethically okay in some circumstances. But why does he elevate preferences to such a lofty position? What about your own relationship to other humans you should be taking care of? And I won’t even ask what about your relations to God, because that’s a question Singer believes humanity has outgrown, like the idea that the sun revolves around the earth.
[Go to Part II.]
Chilling. I’d rather be “medieval” than a Godless progressive.
What’s upsetting is this is already in practice in the Netherlands via their Groningen Protocol (and was implemented to some extent w/the the old, some disabled, with the UK’s Liverpool Care Pathway). How soon before other countries implement something similar?
[i]The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second.[/i]
That seems to make a large assumption that both lives are possible. What if the couple’s 1st child is disabled, but cannot conceive/carry to term a second – what is the value of the 1st child then according to Singer?
Also, it assumes siblings (or any two infants) are exactly the same. They are not; they are unique beings, each with their own strengths, weaknesses and human potential. Just imagine this theory applied to, say, one of your siblings and yourself (as if one of you were disabled) – could one of you be swapped out for the other? Nope,
Singer has pretty successfully rebranded himself as a vegan and animal rights crusader. And does he ever love animals — his words in a radio interview in Europe in May:
That was while on a European tour to promote his latest book. Fortunately, some Germans read about it and since they still remember the Nazi period, they got him disinvited from a German philosophy festival. Unlike the two universities in Athens and Bucharest that gave him honorary doctorates.
the video that will make you cry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GphmdhLMGE
my parents had similar attitudes, but never the seriousness of hoyt’s problem
http://www.teamhoyt.com/
Rick was born in 1962 to Dick and Judy Hoyt. As a result of oxygen deprivation to Rick’s brain at the time of his birth, Rick was diagnosed as a spastic quadriplegic with cerebral palsy. Dick and Judy were advised to institutionalize Rick because there was no chance of him recovering, and little hope for Rick to live a “normal” life. This was just the beginning of Dick and Judy’s quest for Rick’s inclusion in community, sports, education and one day, the workplace.
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With $5,000 in 1972 and a skilled group of engineers at Tufts University, an interactive computer was built for Rick. This computer consisted of a cursor being used to highlight every letter of the alphabet. Once the letter Rick wanted was highlighted, he was able to select it by just a simple tap with his head against a head piece attached to his wheelchair. When the computer was originally first brought home, Rick surprised everyone with his first words. Instead of saying, “Hi, Mom,” or “Hi, Dad,” Rick’s first “spoken” words were: “Go, Bruins!”
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In 1975, at the age of 13, Rick was finally admitted into public school. After high school, Rick attended Boston University, and he graduated with a degree in Special Education in 1993. Dick retired in 1995 as a Lt. Colonel from the Air National Guard, after serving his country for 37 years.
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In the spring of 1977, Rick told his father that he wanted to participate in a 5-mile benefit run for a Lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Far from being a long-distance runner, Dick agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair and they finished all 5 miles, coming in next to last. That night, Rick told his father, “Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not handicapped.”
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This realization was just the beginning of what would become over 1,000 races completed, including marathons, duathlons and triathlons (6 of them being Ironman competitions). Also adding to their list of achievements, Dick and Rick biked and ran across the U.S. in 1992, completing a full 3,735 miles in 45 days.
In a triathlon, Dick will pull Rick in a boat with a bungee cord attached to a vest around his waist and to the front of the boat for the swimming stage. For the biking stage, Rick will ride a special two-seater bicycle, and then Dick will push Rick in his custom made running chair (for the running stage).
Rick was once asked, if he could give his father one thing, what would it be? Rick responded, “The thing I’d most like is for my dad to sit in the chair and I would push him for once.”
-=-=-=-=-=-
257 Triathlons (6 Ironman Distances, 7 Half Ironman)
22 Duathlons
72 Marathons (32 Boston Marathons)
8 18.6 Milers
97 Half Marathons
1 20K
37 10 Milers
36 Falmouth 7.1 Milers (1 Falmouth in the Fall)
8 15K’s
218 10K’s
161 5 Milers
4 8K’s
18 4 Milers
167 5K’s
8 20 Milers
2 11K’s
1 7K
1 20 mile bike for Best Buddies
1118 Total Events (as of October 20, 2014)
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what a horrid man
and what a horrid liberal system that would so normalize the ideas of the nazis, sanger, and the desire of those who think themselves perfect, to exterminate those that are less than human in their eyes.
those same people have prevented me from having a home, having a family, living a decent life and not be afraid all the time…
sad people doing sad horrible things to fee big and important.
Art, what were you going to say again about how the Left doesn’t want to kill us?
Singer has signed his own death warrant. Any executioners out there can feel free to do their job, without any guilt or social appropriation.
what a *soulless* person, (sigh)
lets ask the doctor if they should have not given Stephen Hawking the seat that newton had?
i bet he would not say FDR should have been tossed… then again, he did not have his affliction as a baby…
i wonder if he would have killed Stevie Wonder, or blind willy mctell? and a few others?
or how about my friend? Marlee Matlin
the deaf woman… she was always happy to see me on the fashion circuit, as i would always brush up on my sign language to say hi to her..
i am 50% deaf
lets throw Ralph Braun in an oven why dont we?
Born with muscular dystrophy, Ralph started his career in 1966 when he created the first wheelchair accessible van with hand controls and in 1991 Ralph’s company, BraunAbility, created the first accessible minivan.
and given the doctor is an avowed communist fascist leftist liberal progressive. would he have negated the life and times of Frida Kahlo? and of course who she married?
of course, the doctor never cared much for Helen Keller, and what she went through… but i guess he forgot his history… maybe sit and have him watch the movie where she learns to say water
Sudha Chandran a one legged dancer
Albert Einstein had a learning disability and did not speak until age 3.
Alexander Graham Bell had a learnig disability
the sad part is that where i work in healthcare, they treat us handicapped horribly, when i worked for capitalists they treated us great as they only cared what work we did, not much about us personally was part of the equation
they have me so locked down in healthcare that my life is pretty much over and all i can do is wait to die unless something good breaks, as i will nevr have a raise or promotion for the rest of my life… (when with the capitalists i got raises evry year for working so hard)
this despite you would think healthcare would know better, and that performance is the mark, but the truth is that healthcare is full of idiots like this doc that do nothing but judge others and ignore themselves
George Washington could barely write
Francsico de Goya was deaf
as was a famous composer we all know Ludwig van Beethoven
Ian Dury had polio, but she still wrote “Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick” – her song “Spasticus Autisticus”was kept off radio as the normal people deemed it offensive to the people they want to murder and remove
John Milton lost his sight
Lord Byron had mental issues
rembrandt did too
Marla Runyan the great runner was legally blind
Robin Williams adhd and bipolar depression
Sarah Bernhardt had her leg amputated
Opps, didn t mean to offend him by calling him a
(gasp) person, he’s a Pigophile !
There seems to be two moral axioms: individual dignity and intrinsic value. Liberal societies favor the former, and offer a pretense of recognizing the latter, selectively. In principle, rejecting intrinsic value denies the exceptional value of human life and asserts a negotiable value. In practice, it reveals ulterior motives for human and civil rights advocates who adhere to a pro-choice religious doctrine.
What exactly is the “logic trap” that Singer has gotten himself into?
Presumably it involves an antinomy, contradiction, or redounding implication of some kind.
I’d like to see it spelled out in no uncertain terms.
There are those who would make an issue of humanity by defending the notion that the subhuman, less than human, incipient human, unborn human, old human, ostensibly human, imperfectly human, impaired human, disfigured human, unloved human, hated human, may be done away with – for humanity’ sake.
I had long referred to this as the Raskolnikov Defense. It will hereby be known as the Raskolnikov-Singer Principle.
This is the Left’s ethics. No matter how many times Art talks about the Left not wanting to kill us or harm us, Art can look out his door right now and see the refutation of his own position.
You may not want to look, but the Left is still there. A lot of people don’t want to deal with the Left’s motivations, because it’s too in their face. They don’t want to have to deal with it.
i think you have the focus wrong… what they want is to have their idea of how the world works be vindicated by their own telling of it to work… but it doesnt… so there isnt much to do about it other than to make sure that what you believe cant be tested and then bias against any information that would negate or weaken that belief while at the same time, show confirmation bias of the infinite kind.
they dont want you to die, but they are unwilling to accept reality, and if you die because of that, its not their fault, as reality should be what they think it should be (and nevermind that the person next to them has a different group of things about life saying how it should be)
Turning your face from the truth doesn’t change things.
They want you, as in you personally, to die and suffer. You yourself know this from life experiences. What’s the point of denying it? It won’t make them show mercy or compassion. So what’s the problem with facing it?
People don’t want to face it, they are too weak for it, that’s why.
Singer’s position is not modern, and not NAZI. Rather, the modern and the NAZI are recurrences of Paganism from the ancient world.
Christianity and Christianity alone fought tooth and nail over many centuries to expunge such practices and claiming an ontological dignity for each person, for each human soul.
If there is anyone who thinks that human ontologicla dignity will remain when Christianity is driven from the field are delusional and insane.
That will become more and more clear as their fangs are bared and a full-throated defense of barbarism is given. The Orcs from Morder are just getting revved up. Wait until they actually open the Gates of Mordor.
Then there will truly be hell to pay.
If it wasn’t end-of-the-world epic tragic it would be funny to watch.
It won’t be funny to watch.
BTW, Peter Singer would be a fine target of the Right, allied with the disability activists and any others, to attack, work to disqualify, dismiss, and have discharged. Make his bioethecism tantamount to that of the Todesengel (Angel of Death), Josef Mengele.
Is his bioethecism not more egregious than Nobel Prize winner Professor Timothy Hunt’s joke about women? Is it not worse than Lawrence Summers observation of women in tech/sci/engineering? Can conservatives stop lusting after a few more seats in Congress and the oval office to make an issue of this? Imagine a shot not across the bow but into it at the waterline. Imagine if a concerted effort twice as hard and unrelenting could have him discharged?
Singer is an Australian, and in 2012, the Australian government saw fit to make him a Companion of the Order of Australia, one of that country’s highest honors:
Disgraceful. And indicates just how hard it is to fight such a man and his influence.
Ymarsakar:
Artfldgr is right. They don’t want to kill us. Not even the unwanted and inconvenient babies, despite killing over 60 million in America, and millions more globally, since their effort to normalize abortion. The unprecedented death and destruction they wreak, the violation of human and civil rights, is mostly incidental to their intended actions. They do intend to marginalize or eviscerate their competing interests. Still, their principle motive is to control capital (i.e. wealth) and people (e.g. labor) in order to establish a stable environment and realize a profit. In that respect, they are their own stereotype of capitalists.
The strategies and tactics to realize these goals vary based on their leverage in a society. Consider how differently they treated “apartheid” in South Africa and now in Israel. In the former, they massacred the native black and white populations. In the latter, they are working to marginalize and isolate Israelis, and Jews specifically. Then there are the expanded military and social conflicts initiated and provoked throughout the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and even Europe.
That said, beware of overlapping and convergent interests.
I am pretty sure I could argue with better logic that killing people like Singer is good than he does the idea of killing disabled infants.
When people support the idea of abortion or infanticide (well infanticide after birth since abortion is infanticide) because the child would suffer, I’m pretty sure you could use the same idea to justify wiping out the human race. Everyone is going to suffer in life. I’m not even sure suffering is always bad. Some of the bad things in my life have been beneficial in the long run. When you burn yourself by sticking you hand in the fire, you learn not to stick you hand in a fire.
His statement that the life of his daughter is no more important than someone in Bengali shows his lack of understanding of human nature. A person who does not care about his daughter will not care about anyone in Bengali. It the same problem with internationalism, if you don’t care about your country, you are not going to care about some other country.
Artfldgr:
You have to give them credit for something. They are master marketeers and unconventiionally ruthless in pursuing their goals. In a word: effective.
You have to give them credit for something. They are master marketeers and unconventiionally ruthless in pursuing their goals. In a word: effective.
Yes, yes! For example, Professor Singer is generally in favor of sex with animals but not with chicken.
Chicken are out of bound forit is bad for the chicken.
Rabbi Lapin is not pleased with this unglorious bastard of a coreligionist of his…. not pleased at all.
It is the numerological soulless arrogance that seems to be rising in the digital age. Ezekiel Emanuel and his numerical “bioethics”, cost-benefit analyses based on Quality-Adjusted Life Years, is basically in the same camp. That leads to Death Panels.
I do not know how even the super-arrogant can bleat about the suffering felt by a new-born in the first stages of extra-uterine life; say, with paraplegia associated with myelomeningocele. Particularly because these same people have no hangups about fetal murders-on-demand by brutal (to the fetus, unless one is a Dr Gosnell) methods. They garb themselves in “Ethics” but are totally devoid. They stand meaning on its head.
Tangentially related note: last night I overheard a twentysomething state that “Psychology is the study of the soul.”
As someone with an incurable, progressive disease I always worry about these kinds of people… who, whether they’ll come out and say it out loud, may well try to kill me at some point.
Some people in the medical profession have been very kind to me. I especially fear the bureaucrats — as well as the professional do-gooders who have a “plan.”
“Singer clearly thinks of himself as logical and right. But what an odd and revealing analogy, and how much is left out and/or misunderstood! Singer is comparing scientists who are trying to study and describe phenomena “out there” in the physical world, something that we can measure and describe, and is comparing that to rules to guide human behavior in the moral sense, something entirely different.”
Neo, I think you are like the young child in the Emperor Has No Clothes!
Many on the left and in academia (oops, I repeat myself) would find themselves nodding in agreement with the likes of Singer’s “logic.”
And, then, wham! along you come with true common sense logic and point out the flaws in their way of thinking. Thank you!
The false premise here is that medieval =wrong.
As an ex pat medievalist, I can attest to the fact the Middle Ages was much more advanced than given credit for in the popular narrative which is most likely Singer’s benchmark. The medieval mind was not only correct about a great many things, it was, ironically, the time of the origins of the university a system to which Singer owes his livelihood (University of Bologna, founded 1088 AD).
Here Singer seems to even discount evolutionary imperatives. It is to each of our advantage to secure our own genetic continuation, not the continuation of ten strangers’ DNA; I suggest that the evolutionary moral act is four each of us to save our own daughter’s life.
The implication here is that neither can the severely disabled be said to have a soul. If, to Singer, the soul were paramount, then a concern over “preferences” would not even show up on his list of criteria. This souless-ness goes directly to Singer’s condescension of the medieval and as Neo writes: ” It is easy to recognize the leftist [secular Marxist] origins of such thinking . . .” and in writing this, Neo, I offer that you answer your own question (“. . . why does he elevate preferences to such a lofty position?).
Ann, this make you sound like so many on the left and I don’t think you intend that. The best disinfectant is sunlight.
Matthew, well and succinctly stated.
A good point. Also this same Ezekiel Emmanuel logic should also speak to the elimination of the welfare state which supports those who cannot or will not contribute. Isn’t it interesting that the left would condone the elimination of the sickly and the not normal (i.e., being the norm) and yet not carry this logic to the welfare state, gays, the transgendered, etc. all of whom they ruthlessly support.
The deeper one delves, the more despicably capricious the left appears (“There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world”).
He’s definitely missing something.
Although Singer might consider himself logical and presents his arguments in what appears to be a logical fashion, logic has nothing to do with his “ethics.” Logic is a form of a priori reasoning which is useful to check statements for consistency and can eliminate hypotheses which are internally contradictory but can not deal with whether the original statements self consistent statements which are logically consistent have truth value. If the original statements such as Singer’s are not verifiable truth statements then the rules of logic can not verify that the logical conclusion is truthful. It’s the old case of “garbage in garbage out.”
Since Singer’s original hypotheses are nothing but statements of his own preferences at the moment, his “morality” is no more valid than anyone else’s morality. Without any universal standards, each person has equal right to his/her own personal preferences and thus to his/her own morality. When Singer compares his “ethics” to the Copernican revolution in science he is either betraying profound ignorance about science or else he knows better and is simply lying. The reason Copernicus was able to “prove” that the Earth orbits the Sun is because in science there is a universal standard for truth – nature itself – which is revealed through experimentation. Since Singer has rejected the only universal moral standard – the good god – he has no right to compare his ideas to genuine science.
The best disinfectant is sunlight.
I disagree. Some things are unspeakable and must be shamed. I think of Singer in the same way I do Holocaust deniers.
DNW Says:
“What exactly is the “logic trap” that Singer has gotten himself into?”
His individual existence might bring more unhappiness or suffering to the majority (or at least many disabled people). Ergo his existence is not justified… at least according to his own ‘value’ system.
The ‘trap’ of logic, is more accurately defined as logic’s inability to examine its original premise.
Example; if you accept the premise that whites are inherently and substantively superior to all other races, then the Nazi ‘rationale’ is perfectly logical. All other races being a devolution from the ideal.
Singer rejects the premise of a soul, of a transcendent spirit independent of the physical plane of existence. He ‘believes’ this to be all there is and from that premise extends his ‘logic’.
“Some things are unspeakable and must be shamed.”
I do not disagree, but one can not shame what Singer says if he is prohibited from saying it.
Mike:
Actually, Judaism came up with something similar some time before Christianity.
G6loq:
Peter Singer is not a co-religionist of anyone, except his fellow atheists.
Singer declared himself to be an atheist as a child, and rejected Judaism as a religion so early that he refused to have a Bar Mitzvah.
This man has been a blight on his profession for decades. None of his theories are workable because they don’t comport with human nature. He also shows a disturbing lack of humility. Hubris, I would call it.
Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he were a sociopath.
” Lord Byron had mental issues “. Now THAT is an understatement!
Singer does impress me as an evil man. But even more as one who does not understand humans. As mentioned above, someone who would not save his daughter first, will not lift a finger for those hypoyethical Bengalis.
Please read hypothetical for Hypoyethical.
Dostoevsky prophetically predicted all this in his novel “Demons” 150 years ago: to achieve their goals, “progressives” must first dismantle institution of family and then murder God.
Judeo-Christian ethics is not medieval, it is at least 2 millenia older.
I’ve always (well, since I was first introduced to his vile illogic) – and simply – considered that Singer is a particularly evil Changeling.
What really bothers me though, isn’t that such a being exists – great evil is, after all, despairingly mundane these days – but rather that so many apparently nod approvingly at this monstrosity.
2Ths 2:11 “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie” (KJV)
Ymarsakar Says: Art, what were you going to say again about how the Left doesn’t want to kill us?
the left doesnt WANT to kill us, the left feels it HAS to kill a few to make a better place and then decides who has more value or not.
you should learn the specific use of language, it makes understanding better. i know people today say something they dont mean and then feel you understand them, but if you knew the difference between want vs has.
desire vs compulsion
this is how such good people could twist logic in such a way that moral killing is moral…
the desire as socialists put forth is so compelling that sacrifices have to be made, hard decisions have to be enjoined, and such outcomes accepted
see the game?
now, in my point, you may pick up that we went from your point, the desire to murder, to a half point in that its a desire for a better outcome and pragmatic understanding that “a few eggs have to be broken” to pitty me i am a victim and a martyr for having to conclude and act upon this.
on one fail swoop you go from murderer to martyr compelled against their will to act for the good of all.
and so, ovens were built, methods were evolved, and various cultures through history have justified state murder, genocide, democide (which is what we have now, indirect policies that lead to the same end but are more socially acceptable and can hide the bad in the idea that what happened was no intended), and so on.
its failure to understand this that causes lack of opposition to such things…
as far as the man suggesting it, he doesnt have kids, and if he did, he was sociopathic towards them much as bf skinner was to his own.
pragmatism would say that the easiest thing to do is off them, morals say that this is never justified as life is precious, even if not perfect, and so on.
one can even look at his position as a munchausens by proxy proxy… or martyrs complex…
In psychology a person who has a martyr complex, sometimes associated with the term victim complex, desires the feeling of being a martyr for his/her own sake, seeking out suffering or persecution because it either feeds a psychological need, or a desire to avoid responsibility.
The desire for martyrdom is sometimes considered a form of masochism.[6] Allan Berger, however, described it as one of several patterns of “pain/suffering seeking behavior”, including asceticism and penance
though the current use is insufficient to describe people who masochistically take up such a position and then find power in their victimhood and justification in being the one who knows what must be done even if the fools dont.
but i DID lay out years ago these flaky organizations and such… but i could enver get the discussion going early on when its easy to stop or influence it… by the time neo covers it its a done deal with no ambiguity and nothing we can do abuot it but flap our gums and move on to the next failed to stop item (or at least put an effort into it rather than reacting with little effort)
do note that many nazi party members acted and seriously thought they were victims and that the people judging and hanging them were not considering the value and the importance of the effort they were making in their behalf…
from harvard
Germans as Victims?
Thoughts on a Post—Cold War History
of World War II’s Legacies
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic499800.files/Moeller%20on%20Germans%20as%20Victims.pdf
When Ronald Reagan joined West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl at Bitburg to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the war’s end in 1985, he honored soldiers of the Waffen-SS buried there, “victims of Nazism also…. They were victims, just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps.”
But many rejected this symbolic act
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r, the firstdecadeorsoafterthe war’s end. In these years, Germans–East and est–devoted considerable energy to assessing their losses and incorporating heir victim status into public memory and politics. It is worth remembering ow extensive those losses were
to the left, anything is moral and anything is justifiable, all one has to do is be a victim… and if you read this mans work, you will see, he carries a cross so that you dont throw him out for being more akin to mengele the doctor in the concentration camps, and not the savior of mankinds genetic future.
after all, he is going down the same line that sanger, rhom, hitler, and those went down…
if we didnt ejecvt the euthanasia and abortion and infanticide of SANGER The feminist hero, then working off her acceptance by women, et al, is perfectly fine..
that is, working from SANGER is ok, Working from the man who invented the final solution (to the jewish problem as coined by marx), who wrote for her paper and had glowing comments on her work, is not fine – but only because without hitler, germany would have been more soviet and less capitalist…
Ymarsakar
just so you know.. my family was exterminated by stalin and hitler except for a few who came to the US only to be exterminated by democide and policies that somehow equated victims of those ideologies with democrats in the civil war
your not thinking carefully as to what i am saying
i know, i know.. you use langage as a cudgel and cant fathom that its proper use is as a scaple, and that fine divisions of meaning are lost on such people who cant see that..
think harder Ymarsakar, think harder
Matthew Says: I am pretty sure I could argue with better logic that killing people like Singer is good than he does the idea of killing disabled infants.
your probably could… but whether that would resonate with the people that sanction, promote, and feel he is doing the right thing in what he claims to be a good idea, is another thing
however, this all boils down the the lefts problem with VALUE… the whole problem socialsits have is with VALUE… an academic has more value than a common beggar, and so they cant enjoin the christian idea that the beggar is an equal… in fact, if you get rid of said begger you then can accept equality easier…
but marxists and socialsits are forever gaming VALUE… what value does a dollar have? why are baseball players paid more than teachers? (they make more people happy in a day than teachers make happy in a lifetime individually).
the idea is that values should be fixed, and equalized and so on…
jews were equal, but they did better, so they must be cheating, we have no value for cheaters – said the nazis
men and women are equal, but men do bette,r so they must be cheating, we have no value for cheaters – said the feminists
infirm babies can never be equal, and equal persons dont want to lower themselves, they have little value and are a drain, they have no value – said the ethecist
welfare recipients dont produce, they are a drain, but are equal and just marginalized and forced into that existence (by cheaters above), and so, its ok, they have value and will show you that once we get rid of the oppressors – said the progressive liberal marxist welfare advocate
Saving your daughter’s life is a fine thing to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the lives of ten strangers. If you were faced with the choice, Singer’s ethics would require you to save the strangers.
this is straight out of the harvard test
http://moral.wjh.harvard.edu/
dont bother to take it, they dont give you the results, and why help such people?
however there is a part of the test that is familiar in what you said, that now is known
Originally posted by triadboy
I didn’t shove the guy in front of the train, but I let the guy on the other track die. My explanation was: In one instance I was killing the guy. In the other instance, the train was.
yes, its the good old morality test in which you can choose to save five people by pushing one onto the tracks, or you can choose not to murder one, and let the five people die – choosing to jump onto the track and sacrifice yourself is not allowed..
interesting that a morality test would be skewed this way… but it was recently discovered that this does not ascertain morality or ethics, but sociopathy… ie. a sociopath would have no trouble killing one to save five others, as guilt would not exist and so would not cause the quandry
so in essence, the people who passed class by having the right answers in this, and other thigns (and you can see it presented in another form in their point), are sociopaths
and like a geico commercial:
1st person: did you know that just 10 minutes can save you money on your care insurance
2nd person: everyone knows that! but did you know that sociopaths make very bad ethicists and morality professors?
ie. where there is no guilt, there is no morality. where there is no guilt, there is nothing unethical.
T Says: Also this same Ezekiel Emmanuel logic should also speak to the elimination of the welfare state which supports those who cannot or will not contribute.
it doesnt, as they are victims of the other cheaters of equlity… they are not on welfare for the reasons the not left says, they are victims of the oppressors the left is fighting, so they get a pass ticket.
The best disinfectant is sunlight.
The bright sun has shown on the Left in the USA for nigh on fifty years now, and in the light the Left has grown dominate.
Publicity made them stronger. And winners.
Dennis Says: The reason Copernicus was able to “prove” that the Earth orbits the Sun is because in science there is a universal standard for truth — nature itself — which is revealed through experimentation
the truth is that he proved no such thing as no such thing is what is happening.. any point in the universe can be made center in terms of orbits or not…
the truth is that heliocentrism makes for easier math… not invalid computation…
you can either have neat circular oval orbits..
or you can have something akin to a spirograph…
BOTH are valid…
After all, the computations for both sides of that view HAVE to be valid…
the sad part is that we teach that easier math is correct, when correct has to do with validity, not ease.. (and the left loves the fantasy pounding of the church in false histories of such, which probably explains more)
the actual fact is that the orbit point is neither the center of the sun, or the center of the earth!!!
so technically BOTH were wrong, and one had easier wrong math than the other. 🙂
they both orbit a spot that is an artificial node of the gravitational center… the sun being so large this point is inside the sun… the earth being so small, this point is inside the sun…
but technically you could be lunar centric..
which really makes for some spirographic orbits!!!
i got in so much trouble as a kid with this one. to the point a teacher said, show us… (great teacher).. and so i explained the differences… and that NEITHER was invalid…
just one was better than the other, which is a totally different measure than validity.
neo-neocon Says: Actually, Judaism came up with something similar some time before Christianity.
it was monotheism that made the changes that was spoken of… judaism was monotheistic, as is its derivative child, christianity… (which would have many brethren of the lubavich view was normed – a savior for every generation.. though we may not be aware of such)
this has had many many papers written on it over the ages, but it boils down to the premises each system creates and so how they flower.
the left wants that same thing… to create a premise, like equality, and have it all blossom forth as logical conclusions the way that the morals, ethics, hard work, etc, blossoms forth from christianity
once the christian part is gone, they will bring up the same things, but then claim they are not from christian thought but from the ideas of man.
they also dont get that each of us have in us a universe… save a person save a universe… and so, when we evoke a deity, we kind of innoculate our internal reality with such thigns…
this is the metaphsical the left cant fathom, the mystical in the real.. which is not in reality, its in our inner worlds and so, we believe reality has it within it as our views do.
its funny, but there was a recent documentary on tv that went over lying and cheating… and what was interesting was how what was presented changed the rates of cheating… the final part of the show was the conclusion reached by the researchers upon the test with swearing on the bible… in all other tests people cheated to greater or lesser degrees… in the test with the bible, no one cheated, not even the athiests!!!
we color our world, then wonder why
the better suited the coloring is, the more effective we are in reality, the less suited to reality it is, or concordance with it, the less effective.
which was why women are often seen as less capable… they are more likely to entertain bs as real, and not have it measured by reality killing them… so guys tend to do that stuff less…
want a clear example… ask a guy what he thinks of steam cleaning his penis… he would say your nuts, and almost all if not all will say the same. ask women, and some will say, this famous actress suggests it, so it must be good!!!
see Steam-Cleaning My Vagina
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dani-alpert/steam-cleaning-my-vagina_b_6609368.html
Gwyneth Paltrow has something else for us ladies to do so as to give our vaginas that youthful glow. Steam clean it baby! Shit, I just got through steam cleaning my area rugs.
this is why advertisers like women more than men, you can suggest crazy to women, and they wont think its crazy… they will even defend it!!!
their whole lives is nothing but a series of punctuated fads… lamaz, natural birth, steam cleaned pudendas, rubbing with fruit to be young forever (which i guess is better than bathing in servants blood like another famous woman did), and on and on… including women being able to pass the rangers test in the army..
a whole deluded group that would argue otherwise…. (not to say all are, they all arent, but even those that arent, tend to practice some of the wacko stuff to some degree. but at least what they are practicing has measurable benefit… not so much with steam cleaning your vagina over summers eve, which isnt that good for you either)
Dennis:
Science does not have a universal standard for truth. Science’s legitimacy and value is derived from the scientific method that constrains it as a frame-based philosophy. Unfortunately, with liberal assumptions of continuity and uniformity, substitution of inference for deduction, and elevating the significance of correlation, science has failed to contain secular excess as it was designed.
There are four logical domains: science (i.e. frame-based philosophy), philosophy, faith, and fantasy. A theory is only scientific if there is a probable path where the scientific method can be applied. Within the scientific domain, accuracy is inversely proportionate to the product of time (or motion) and space offsets from an established frame of reference. The need to formerly constrain speculation in time and space is established by the evolutionary (i.e. chaotic) character of the space we inhabit.
Back when the MSM was the only media information source, the progressive left established a Gramscian march to control the means of communication. Sunlight was never really permitted to shine on the moldering progressive ideology.
Even today, with the internet, how many MSM reports have we seen about Hillary Clinton sitting on the board of Wal Mart? How many MSM reports have we seen about the Democrat governor Fritz Hollings raising the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina Capitol in 1961? Answer: None!
So, “No,” sunlight has not shown on the left for nigh-on fifty years and even today, with the internet, it only shows on the left intermittently.
That’s still decidedly better than not disinfecting at all.
Many important points made by Neo and in comments, I just wonder where medicine would be today if we discarded infants and elderly in Singer’s world? Why bother discovering cures when we already have one?
we dont get
progressive
PROmote reGRESSIVE
or communitarian
COMMUNIst totaliTARIAN
so we dont understand that ruling the few is easier, and a disabled person has a vote…
Science does not have a universal standard for truth. Science’s legitimacy and value is derived from the scientific method that constrains it as a frame-based philosophy.
it does.
its called EMPIRICISM
the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume
ack… forgot to add.
which is why science is not a tool for the rest of reality, which the left denies existence for they are MATERIALISTS
Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness, are the result of material interactions
they follow this as a religion..
even to the end of religions that compete.
materialism today means i buy stuff…
ie. i want material…
Hypocrite!
“He also advocates euthanizing victims of dementia, since their care requires resources better used for more worthy purposes”perhaps honoraria for speakers at a conference on euthanasia. But when Singer’s own mother was stricken with Alzheimer’s, he claimed her situation was “different”: “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult.” ”
I would strongly recommend this article: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/06/the-dangerous-mind-of-peter-singer
The best disinfectant is sunlight
which is why there is no bacteria on Mercury
but then again… there is no bacteria or life on pluto or neptune…
and i will venture that there will not be any in any Rogue planet that belongs to no solar system…
A rogue planet, also known as an interstellar planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet or orphan planet, is a planetary-mass object that orbits the galaxy directly. They have either been ejected from the planetary system in which they formed or have never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf. There may be billions of rogue planets in the Milky Way.
given our chicken little nature, i am very surprised that there has been earth X, and meteors and such that would destroy earth.. even rocks tossed from klandathu the bug planet of heinlien…
but no one has made the space horror story of a rogue planet passing through the solar system..
want to talk about a ELE way beyond what we contemplate.. or can you imagine something the size of jupiter barreling through!!!
How big is jupiter? 317 times the mass of Earth
How big is ‘Super Jupiter’? 13 times more massive than Jupiter or 4121 times the size of earth
1,300,000 Earths should fit inside the Sun
If anyone imagines that the left is ever embarrassed by an incoherence problem, by a prospect of self-refutation, by some potentially negative redounding effects of their own principles or practices, then, they do not understand how the minds of the people we describe as leftists work or process the worldview which generally informs and shape them.
A leftist, for example, makes a categorical assertion:
“No men have everlasting souls.”
You politely point out that if this is the case and if they are themselves a member of the class of men, then it obviously follows that …
1. They themselves have no souls and
2, nothing that was previously held to follow from having an everlasting soul can now be said to apply to them from these particular discredited premiss.
3. If they wish to salvage the consoling conclusion that they have objective value and some objective claim to interpersonal consideration and respect, they will have to develop other premisses.
4. They will still then have to argue the soundness of these premisses if they wish to preserve the old conclusion that they have human value in some sense other than mere “utility” to others.
The typical liberal reaction to all this is to first take offense, to next shrug and move on, and then to continue to act as if nothing had ever been said about it in the first place.
Occasionally, and atypically, they will first admit to values nihilism and then move on about the business of willing themselves to power and rhetorically “bringing about the world they dream” without any further bother of justifying as a conclusion what their own assumptions clearly imply cannot be ultimately justified; i.e., that is to say, to be deduced logically.
So: We do all understand don’t we, that their belief (no matter how vague or imprecisely understood) in the so-called fact/value dichotomy, in the mere instrumentality of the faculty of reason, in the existential primacy of will, and in the magical “creative” social power of the spoken word in achieving the only things that matter to them in the final reduction, i.e., the emotional rewards of inclusion, affirmation, ego satisfaction and distracting pleasure, is all that ultimately matters?
To tell Singer that the very principles he announces make him eminently “slay-worthy” is to tell him nothing surprising or new. His aim is not really to argue about these big propositions, but to socially maneuver his preferences into an unchallengeable position.
Art, are you under some kind of impression that other people, like me, have a deficiency or an inferiority status, to which you can look down upon us for not learning certain things, upon the presumption that you have already learned it?
Because if that is the case, I have to tell you something. You don’t actually know what you think you know.
Artfldgr Says:
June 23rd, 2015 at 11:02 am
“Dennis Says: The reason Copernicus was able to “prove” that the Earth orbits the Sun is because in science there is a universal standard for truth — nature itself — which is revealed through experimentation
the truth is that he proved no such thing as no such thing is what is happening.. any point in the universe can be made center in terms of orbits or not…”
I agree that there is a functional model of the solar system which is geocentric. It is called the Ptolemaic System. If that floats your boat – have at it.
Incidentally, I’m sorry I’m not very good at editing before I post things. I hope people can understand what I was trying to say.
n.n Says:
June 23rd, 2015 at 11:45 am
“Dennis:
Science does not have a universal standard for truth. Science’s legitimacy and value is derived from the scientific method that constrains it as a frame-based philosophy.”
I was thinking of the material world itself as the standard of truth. Our interpretations might change, but the underlying reality of the physical universe does not. Of course some folks interpret quantum physics to mean that when a conscious observer observes nature they thereby change it – but the assumption that it takes a conscious observer to collapse a quantum state is probably not accurate.
Artfldgr Says:
June 23rd, 2015 at 1:04 pm
“Science does not have a universal standard for truth. Science’s legitimacy and value is derived from the scientific method that constrains it as a frame-based philosophy.
it does.
its called EMPIRICISM
the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience.”
Good point. If one believes as I do that scientific truth is the behavior of the universe itself, then obviously Empiricism is the closest thing a scientist has to universal truth. The rub is that e people people like John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume etc. were so impressed by science that they attempted to universalize science to encompass all human knowledge. As Artfldgr correctly points out that position is an intellectual trap.
Dennis:
It has little to do with models, and estimates, including quantum physics. The recognition that observation alters a state is related to dependence or connectivity, not to the nature of our system per se. The scientific method was introduced to constrain secular excess following an implicit acknowledgement that the system is incompletely and insufficiently characterized, and unwieldy, and therefore liberal assumptions of continuity and uniformity, misconceptions of correlation as causation, and substitution of inference (i.e. created knowledge) for deduction, cannot be justified and are, in fact, antithetical to science.
The point is that science is established as a logical domain separate from philosophy through a methodical constraint of its frame of reference in both time and space. The accuracy of human perception, both natural and enhanced, is inversely proportionate to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame of reference. That was the impetus for introduction of the scientific method. To constrain secular excess and speculation.
For example, the “Theory of Evolution” is an anthropomorphic overlay and smoothing of an evolutionary process, a physical process, which has a chaotic character. This doesn’t mean that the theory is wrong, but that there is no probable path that would permit application of the scientific method. Instead, it is defended with arguments that rely on liberal assumptions of continuity and uniformity, correlation, and inference from circumstantial evidence outside of a constrained frame of reference.
Ironically, human evolution from conception is one of the few observations that occur in the scientific domain, and more so is self-evident knowledge. That is to say, it is improbable that human life is the product of spontaneous conception or an evolutionary process without a fitness function. Yet in progressive science, as in progressive morality, a human life lacks intrinsic value and is the product of spontaneous conception. Human life acquires value through the leverage it exerts or enjoys at an arbitrary time in its evolution, which remains negotiable throughout its lifetime.
To simply science in my way, the individual scientists that innovated and pushed the boundaries, were considered nuts by their peers.
Current modern day example would be the EM propulsion unit or theory. Which is no longer a theory since experimentation has demonstrated that it works, or at least the conclusions work. Like Newton’s gravity laws. The conclusion is correct, with some exceptions. The people that thought it didn’t work, like Hawking did about Boson Higgs theory, are the retards and the ignorant savages that only think they know what’s going on in this reality. It is far inferior to proof, to experiments that work.
So they were considered nuts, but when their work actually worked in reality, as demonstrated by nature or human experimentation, then it became profitable and society began to acclaim it as a “social feat” demonstrating our vibrancy or technological savvy or something. Wright Brothers were included.
As for quantum mechanics, observers causing causality information to be exchanged is just one way to interpret “magical relationships”. Because other than the immediate transfer of causality from one particle to another via some special method we don’t know about, it’s difficult to grasp quantum entanglement or other quantum mechanics. If causality is not information which can be transferred via a stimulus, then what is behind the “spooky action” of two particles quantum entangled, that is far away from each other, yet which responds at FTL speeds to one particle’s change?
That’s what experimentation is for. For evolution to be more than a theory, some scientist must break the bounds of common sense and mainstream beliefs, to evolve an organism. To Evolve an Organism, in reality, not on a computer screen. The people that can get the job done, are the only ones that can say that they know how it is done. The other Retards around can only copy the work and mouth off.
The Leftists like to use the mystique and authority of science to prop up their political totalitarianism. That’s not the first time people have used that.
As for Singer, to prove his theories right, he would have to experiment. Which is the problem, you see. Because Mengeles was also good at experimentation. The question in ethics is, why would all experiments be a good thing? Should we also make a black hole in the Earth’s crust to see if atomic weapons will be able to close it? What good does it do humanity?
JuliB,
Singer has attempted to escape the hypocrite label over his treatment of his mother by saying he’d taken his sister’s preferences into account and might have done differently had it been only his decision.
So I guess we can add “weasel” to his list of virtues.
Singer is a descendant of Margaret Sanger, so to speak. Far worse than a hypocrite. His priority listing is thus comparable.
I’m amazed at Singer’s insightfulness. The old ethics just aren’t right for our modern age. Yup. Totally a break from the past.
Now if only someone would invent time travel I’ll head back and tell the Spartans they don’t have keep infants who won’t grow up to be good warriors alive. It’s ok to kill them. You have to be a modern bioethicist to come up with that idea