How Oxford and Peter Singer drove me from atheism to Jesus

[Jim__]

121. First, I wasn't judging Singer's claims, I was addressing an issue about ...

... Irving-Stonebraker's article.

Her point of view deserves to be addressed seriously.

That said, Singer does more than question if all people are equal, he claims they are not. At least according to this '99 Washington Post article by Nat Hentoff - an excerpt:

Singer often claims that his views have been misquoted, so I am quoting directly from his books. From "Practical Ethics": "Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons." But animals are self-aware, and therefore, "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee."

So, I consider him wrong to claim that not all people are equal. Sure, we can claim that Mary is smarter than John, or Lizze can play soccer better than Jane. But to claim that someone is not a person, or that someone is a more of a person than someone else is to make a critical judgement that we - people in general - don't have sufficient information to make. By far, the safer moral call is not to make that judgement.

At least a part of what Singer is talking about is pain. I believe we all have a right to make our own decisions about how much pain we are willing to bear. In the case of infants, parents, under the direction of medical personnel, should be allowed to make that decision for the infant. So, I agree with Singer about that.

You say:

Is it irrational to consider the attributes of a person that will either allow them to become a contributor to the world or only be a consumer of limited resources? If an infant comes into this world with such a devastating attribute as anencephaly such an infant has zero chance of ever contributing to the world. If they survive, they will be consumers of limited resources for their entire existance. They will never be able to contribute to humanity.

It's not irrational; but, in my judgement, undesirable. Something I've been wondering a lot about recently is what most of us - us being the working class - will have to contribute when our jobs are being done by robots. It is at least possible that the billionaire class that owns most of the robots will see the vestiges of the working class as just, in your words, consumers of limited resources for (our) entire existance. We will never be able to contribute to humanity. Hmmmm - what conclusions do you think they'll reach about the fate we deserve? Do you think they're not having much use for us gives them the right to decide our fate?

You say:

With the advent of DNA testing and genome sequencing we can put the end to the myth that we are of different races. That there is one race that is better than another. There is only one race on the Earth. We have some slight variations but we are all one race. Therefore, any arguments based upon attributes such as being of Asian, African, or European origin are not valid. Because we all descend from one race.

Nothing is that simple. Race is a word; and as such, has no fixed meaning. You can claim that genome sequencing has put an end to the myth that we are of different races. The people doing the genome sequencing don't agree. This is an excerpt from a '05 article in MIT Technology Review, Race and Medicine:

The roughly five million Americans who suffer from heart failure, a chronic and deadly disease, could be part of a radical change in the practice of medicine later this year. Cardiologists across the country will likely begin to prescribe a new, and by most accounts highly promising, drug based on an unusual criterion: whether the patient is black or white – or, to be more precise, whether the person identifies him- or herself as an African American.

If some medicines are racially targeted, it is hard to argue that science teaches us that it's a myth that we are of different races.

You say:

I reject the argument that it is too difficult to determine which attributes about a person are reasonable for calling them "un-equal." If a human is born and that human can attain consciousness, can be self-aware, then that human is "equal" to every other human. This definition eliminates all the questions of physical disabilities. Such as blindness, deafness, and others. It is our ability to think that raises us above other animals. That is not to say other animals are not deserving of our respect and care.

Well, Donald Trump mostly agrees with you on that point. He disagrees somewhat about which attributes are determinative for classifying someone "un-equal." But even if it's not Donald Trump wanting to call some people "un-equal," there's always someone. Once we accept "un-equal" as a valid label for people, then we're just arguing about which attributes we can use as the classification. I know, the attributes that you specify sound very good; it's accepting the classification that's the problem.

That is what I took as Irving-Stonebraker's point here:

I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo; I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. But I knew from my own research in the history of European empires and their encounters with indigenous cultures, that societies have always had different conceptions of human worth, or lack thereof. The premise of human equality is not a self-evident truth: it is profoundly historically contingent. ...

You say:

My opinion is that not all animals are equal. Some animals are more equal than others.

Well, Irving-Stonebraker has a doctorate in history - which may be a part of why she disagrees with that.