“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”  - G.K. Chesterton

My aunt sent me this article about a man by the name of Peter Singer, an advocate of infanticide and euthanasia, who is a professor at Princeton:

The baby was born with Down syndrome.

The parents were in their 20s, so they hadn’t bothered with the usual prenatal tests. It wasn’t until after their little girl was born that the doctors realized something was seriously wrong, that an extra chromosome in her DNA would doom her to health problems and mental retardation.

So the parents injected the 3-day-old baby with a lethal cocktail. They were young. Surely a retarded child would be a difficult cross to bear. They could have other kids, kids who shouldn’t be saddled with a special-needs sibling. Might as well kill this one and start over.

Hey, who could blame them?

Not Peter Singer.

In his 1985 book Should the Baby Live? The Problem of Handicapped Infants, the Australian-born philosopher writes that parents should have the right to kill a baby that’s born disabled — and not just have the right to do it, but in some instances that disabled babies literally should be killed.

Let me be clear here. Singer’s talking about killing babies after they’ve been born. He’s written that parents should have the right to kill a child within 28 days of birth.

And if a family is inflicted with a senile relative, well, children ought to be allowed to kill feeble parents, too. Humanely, of course.

It is appalling in part because Singer, now a professor at Princeton University, is such a lucid writer. You could immediately dismiss his ideas as nonsense if some idiot were spouting them on the Internet, but when you read his actual words, they almost start to sound persuasive. It’s only when you step back that you realize you’re a step away from agreeing with Nazism. After all, the Nazis decreed some people “non-persons” for the good of the German state; Singer wants to decree some people “non-persons” to increase society’s overall happiness. Even without the slippery slope, it’s frightening.

The piece goes on, as Singer has been invited to speak at ASU about some trivial topic, and there will be no room for engagement on the part of the audience.

The piece is worth a read, and I’m going to leave it at that. I just can’t help wondering what is going to be left of us in another decade or two if this stuff just keeps going, unchecked.

Filed under: Brave New World