Peter Singer claimed at a Princeton symposium about abortion that public policy might not be able to reflect it, but in his view, children don’t achieve full moral status until after two years, which is how long it takes to develop into full personhood. From my transcription of Panel II on 10/15/10 (press “Event Videos,” 20101015-panel two, to link to access streamed session) :
Q (beginning at 1:25:22): When discussing at which point after birth we would give full moral status, you gave…a legal or public policy point about practicality… Forgetting the practical or public policy questions, if a person is a self aware individual and self awareness isn’t conferred by birth, and we use mirror tests to determine self awarness…at what point do you think an infant would pass the mirror test and therefore be self aware and be considered a person.
Singer (beginning at 1:27:18): … My understanding is that it is not until after the first birthday, so somewhere between the first and second, I think, that they typically recognize the image in the mirror as themselves…Really, I think this is a gradual matter. If you are not talking about public policy or the law, but you are talking about when you really have the same moral status, I think that does develop gradually. There are various things that you could say that are sufficient to give some moral status after a few months, maybe six months or something like that, and you get perhaps to full moral status, really, only after two years. But I don’t think that should be the public policy criteria.
But our policies follow our values. If Singer’s views ever prevail, it will lead to human inequality and a loss of human rights for the young (and other so-called human “non persons”). More details, Singer quotes, and analysis over at Secondhand Smoke.
November 23rd, 2010 | 5:51 pm
So if we declare that Singer does not have full moral status based on his writings, does that make him a non- or partial- person?
November 23rd, 2010 | 5:59 pm
Peter Singer is a vile person.
November 23rd, 2010 | 6:13 pm
I wish someone in the audience would just stand up, as that brave man did during the McCarthy era, and just say, “Sir, have you no decency?” Really, will “we the sheeple” listen to ANYTHING?
November 23rd, 2010 | 8:09 pm
No one’s self-aware when they’re asleep.
Singer — and the others who argue that humans aren’t people on this ground — is clearly fudging up an ad hoc rule to justify the deaths of those he just wants to kill.
November 24th, 2010 | 1:18 am
The Carthraginians would have agreed with him. Baal, Moloch, Astarte, Ishtar would be pleased with him.
November 24th, 2010 | 6:56 am
Is there any chance that Peter Singer proposes these ridiculous ideas to mirror a culture gone wrong, allowing us to see the road ahead and perhaps change course?
One wonders: Is there anything – anything at all – he could propose which would be rejected by his followers as a step too far? Or would ostracism from his inner circle be too painful to bear?
Or is he toying with them?
November 24th, 2010 | 11:19 am
[...] Singer is at it again, this time arguing that children do not possess full moral status until they are at least two years old. There are various things that you could say that are sufficient to give some moral status after a [...]
November 25th, 2010 | 12:32 am
I suspect eventually the headline will be “Peter Singer determines that only Peter Singer has full moral status.”
November 25th, 2010 | 9:51 am
[...] The Logical Implications of Being Pro-Choice — If life (or, to be more politically correct, “personhood”) does not begin at conception, we are left with the necessity of arbitrarily deciding when it begins. Who gets to decide who is a “real person”? It’s a slippery slope, and as usual, Princeton University’s Peter Singer is leading the descent. Now, apparently, a child has to be able to recognize himself in the mirror (probably at some point between his first and second birthdays) to be granted the moral status of “person”. This shouldn’t be shocking; after all, is there any real moral difference between killing a baby six months before he’s born or killing him a year after he’s born? [...]
November 26th, 2010 | 11:01 am
Am I going too far to think that Singer shows how very difficult it is to be moral without a theological foundation?
Notice the premise: a person is a self-aware individual. The concept of a person really didn’t come clear, I am told, until the 4th century during the controversies over the Incarnation and the Trinity.
It was by reflecting on who Christ was that mankind became aware of who he is as the Image of God – a person, an ineffable mystery, not mere self-awareness.
With the Enlightenment the person as Divine Image was replaced by the individual. So the word person lost its meaning and has been groping for one ever since. Singer tries to invest it with one, but it has to be scientifically derived, so it can’t capture or sustain the unobservable.
Personhood itself seems to be a victim of the slippery meaning of modern words.
There seems to be a historical decline:
Losing the fear of God, we lost our humanity. Losing our humanity we lost our language. Losing our language we lose our freedom.
So many books have been written about whether we can be good without God that it’s a broken drum. But it seems worth asking the question whether there is any such thing as goodness without God.
Peter Singer would indicate their might not be.
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