Rugby Australia’s “Own Goal”

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/rugby-australia-israel-folau-firing-free-speech-by-peter-singer-2019-06

The law of the jungle

There's a certain logic to the position of Peter Singer and Democrats who are moving towards his position. If you make the right to life contingent on physical or cognitive development, then that's always a matter of degree rather than kind, so where the line is drawn is arbitrary. It could be drawn sooner or later, higher or lower. 

The trimester distinction in the abortion debate was always arbitrary. Likewise, viability was arbitrary in part because that's variable, depending on the state of medical technology to sustain a premie outside the womb. The threshold changes. In addition, it's an arbitrary to make viability the criterion because many adults require something artificial to sustain life. Medications. Surgical implants. 

A basic problem with a Singer-style argument is that it either proves too little or too much. Since human life and the lifecycle range along a continuum of physical and psychological development, IQ, and health, it becomes a question of who makes the cut. If it's a choice between treating someone with an IQ of 100 and someone with an IQ of 140, do we save the patient with the 140 IQ and euthanize or neglect the patient with the IQ of 100?

What about the disabled? They may be psychologically normal or even be a genius. Do they make the cut?

Peter Singer is now 72. Why should scarce medical resources be squandered on him rather than someone younger? 

It degenerates into the law of the jungle where power is the decisive factor. Those with more power crush those with less. 

Do We Need God to be Good?

https://www.proginosko.com/2018/11/do-we-need-god-to-be-good/

God and good

I watched a recent debate between Peter Singer and Andy Bannister. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiM8ul3oRxE

A few general observations:

1. The debate was somewhat frustrating inasmuch as the underlying issue is the difference between atheism and Christianity. The difference between Christian bioethics and secular bioethics is parasitic on that underlying division. In a way it would be more useful to debate atheism directly. However, exposing the serrated austerity of secular bioethics is useful. When the consequences of atheism are spotlighted, that's a reason to reevaluate atheism itself.

2. Singer has certain cards in his deck. He's an atheist. This life is all you get. Life has no ultimate purpose. Humans monkeys with big brains. (He didn't say that in the debate, but that's his Darwinian viewpoint.) The brain produces the mind. Although human intelligence overtakes animal intelligence, human babies are less intelligent than adult chimpanzees. 

Given the hand he dealt himself, there are only so many ways he can play it. I expect he regards complaints about the harshness of his position as childish and irrelevant. No point complaining about the barbed consequences of his position if that's the reality of the situation. If God doesn't exist, then that takes best options off the table. Raising idealistic objections to his position ignores the bleak, unyielding facts of our evanescent existence in a Godless universe. As with captives in a concentration camp, the razor wire is a fixture of our existence, whether we like it or not. 

3. Up to a point, Singer is right–if atheism is right. But even on his own grounds, Singer's own position is an ad hoc compromise between idealism and nihilism. It's more consistent for an atheist to be a hedonistic nihilist. If there's no God, no afterlife, then it boils down to naked power and ruthless self-interest. 

Singer never provided an adequate explanation for his claim that he's not a naturalist when it comes to ethics. And his philanthropy is a sugar-coated cyanide capsulate to make the toxic philosophy more palatable and go down smoother. 

One can't help noticing that Singer is now an old man. By his own standards, he's siphoning off scarce medical resources that could better be spent on the younger generation who have so much more to live for.

4. Singer repeats the same blunder as Hitchens regarding the atonement. The purpose of the atonement is not to eradicate evil or suffering but to make it possible for God to justly forgive sin. The eradication of evil and suffering awaits the Parousia. 

5. Regarding the Euthyphro dilemma, That's is a challenge to divine command theory. Of course, divine command theorists have responses.

However, a Christian can sidestep that objection by shifting to natural law theory. Human duties are grounded in how God made us. The same rules don't apply to lions, not because the rules are arbitrary, but because lions are different kinds of creatures. 

Human duties correspond to human nature. And a human nature that's designed. The notion that some actions are contrary to how things are supposed to be is a teleological principle. But atheism banishes teleological explanations from nature. The Blind Watchmaker and all that. No ultimate purpose for anything.

If it's good to euthanize a dog, why not humans?

One argument for euthanasia goes like this: why euthanize dogs but not humans? Why is it good to put a dog out of its misery but not a human being?

That's an a fortiori argument: If it's good to be merciful in the lesser case of suffering dogs, is it not good (or better) to be merciful in the greater case of suffering humans?

1. From a Christian standpoint, one reason is that killing a dog isn't murder whereas killing a human being is murder absent overriding considerations. 

Of course, that pushes the question back a step. Are there overriding considerations that sometimes warrant euthanasia? The immediate point, though, is that there's a prima facie presumption against taking human life that's disanalogous to the case of dogs. Take Asian cultures where dogs are a food stuff. 

2. Not all candidates for euthanasia are suffering. Proponents of euthanasia extend mercy-killing to an ever-wider range of individuals who are said to lack the relevant quality of life.

3. Some deontologists are absolutists about suicide and euthanasia. I'm not. I think there are extreme cases in which that may be permissible. But you can't extrapolate from extreme cases to other cases where the same overriding considerations are absent.

4. Caring for people in extremis is good for both the patient and the caregiver. Take a grown child who cares for a bedridden parent who's becoming senile. 

Ideally, that forces the child to prioritize. Be less self-absorbed and focus on the needs of someone else. It requires the child to tap into all their inner resources to meet the challenge as best they can. That's good for character. Good for sanctification. Develop greater patience, sympathy, and sensitivity. 

It's good when things come full circle. The parent who cared for dependent children is now dependent on grown children to care for them. The quality of life includes a moral quality of life. It's easy to be kind when it's easy. The acid test is when it's hard.

Conversely, many patients are acutely sensitive to whether people still care about them now that they can't help out or help themselves. Now that everything must be done for them. That's a test of whether they were ever really loved in the first place. Did people only love them when it was convenient? That's pretty shallow. 

Psychologically, humans live in the past, present, and future. Memory and anticipation as well as present awareness. Animals lack that viewpoint. They live in the moment.  

Of course, humans can suffer from cognitive impairment, sometimes severe. But we can't get inside their minds to know how much they register. What's the effect of holding their hand or stroking their hair? 

IQ, abortion, and euthanasia

Peter Singer's argument for infanticide and euthanizing the senile and developmentally disabled is that IQ ranges along a continuum according to maturity and species. According to him, some higher animals are smarter than newborn babies, the senile, or developmentally disabled. Of course, that's a horrendous justification for infanticide and euthanasia, even if it were true. But in addition, here's a challenge to his operating assumption:

And what is rationality? Let us begin to try to answer this question by considering another question asked by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: "We say that a dog is afraid his master will beat him; but not, he is affraid his master will beat him tomorrow. Why not?" The beginning of the answer to this question is that the idea expressed by the word "tomorrow" is wholly foreign to the mental world of the dog.

This idea…is well expressed by a bit of verse by W. V. Quine:

The unrefined and sluggish mind

Of Homo javanensis

Could only treat of things concrete

And present to the senses.

A rational being is a being that can do the following:

Represent to itself complex states of affairs, including non-actual states of affairs, that are strikingly remote from its present sense-perceptions. For instance…finding new ways to dispose of the refuse that feeds the rats that carry the flees that are infected with the bacterium that cause the plague. It can believe that certain states of affairs are actual and that others are non-actual. It can desire that certain states of affairs be actual and others non-actual…("I am trying to imagine what our life will be like if we really go ahead and have a child")…It can sort states of affairs into the categories of "probable" and "improbable"…It can devise plans of action that draw on its beliefs about which states of affairs are actual and non-actual and probable and improbable…It is capable of recognizing other beings as having all these capacities, and it is capable of communicating to those that do facts and orders and questions related to states of affairs it represents to itself…

Rationality marks a great divide, a discontinuity between humanity and the beasts. It is wrong to suppose that there is something apes and elephants and beavers have a little of, and we have more of, and that as a consequence, we are rational and they are not. 

It is not that we are "more intelligent" than, say, apes, and that that is why we are rational and apes are not–as Alice is able to solve word-analogy problems and spatial-relation problems faster than Alfred because she is more intelligent…We may indeed be more intelligent than apes; indeed I suppose we are. But if so, that is not why we are rational and apes are not. If there is a connection, it goes the other way: we are more intelligent than apes because we are rational and therefore have more use for intelligence-for intelligence, if it is anything, is the ability to manipulate mental representations of states of affairs in various useful ways, and we have a lot more, and a lot more complex, representations to manipulate than apes do….Human beings who are of subnormal intelligence owing to injuries or generic defects do not have minds at all like the minds of apes, any more than apes of subnormal intelligence have minds like the minds of elephants or beavers. Rather, they have human minds that are of diminished capacity in respect of dealing with the demands of life in a human community. P. van Inwagen, Metaphysics (Westview Press, 4th ed., 2015), 184-86.

Singer on Antifa

Hard leftist Peter Singer on Antifa:

https://www.project-syndicate.org/print/antifa-violence-against-racism-by-peter-singer-2017-08

Nonconsensual sex

A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/03/opinion/who-is-the-victim-in-the-anna-stubblefield-case.html

Secular progressives (as well as "progressive Christians") generally treat consent as the sine qua non to distinguish licit sex from illicit sex. They resent it when Christians compare homosexuality to other sexual deviations that lack consent. 

But notice how the argument of secular ethicist Peter Singer and his coauthor nullifies the consent criterion in reference to the developmentally disabled. Moreover, the logic of their position would abolish the age of consent on the grounds that young children lack the concept of consent, and so they can't withhold consent. Their position logically turns the rationale for age of consent laws on their head. Inability to consent becomes  a justification for nonconsensual sex rather than a bar. 

Peter Singer on Christianity and atheism

I was watching Peter Singer's debate with John Lennox:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA7qBtNMayQ

1. In one respect his presentation was what you'd expect from a philosopher. It was well-organized. He gave one positive reason and two negative reasons for not believing in God. He reviewed three traditional theistic proofs. He then gave two arguments against belief in biblical theism. To that extent his presentation was logical and methodical. However, for a philosopher of his prominence and influence, I found his presentation to be frankly incompetent. It is, however, a useful foil. 

Drilling down to the bottom of atheist ethics

http://www.evolutionnews.org/2016/05/in_a_debate_wit102840.html

Dog "raped" and "murdered"

Let's begin with some headlines:

Dog found raped, murdered and left hanging from tree 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/dog-raped-murdered-hanging-tree-5000-reward-us-washington-a6954286.html 

Suspect arrested in rape, murder of Thurston Co. dog 

http://www.kiro7.com/news/suspect-identified-in-rape-murder-of-thurston-co-dog/205174866 

FBI investigating dog rape, murder in Thurston County 

http://www.kiro7.com/news/fbi-investigating-dog-rape-murder-in-thurston-county/178830564 

FBI investigating dog rape, murder in Thurston County 

http://www.nbcrightnow.com/story/31565710/graphic-warning-fbi-investigating-dog-rape-murder-in-thurston-county

So much to discuss:

i) Well, I guess we can be grateful that the FBI is investigating a dog killing rather than harassing conservative high school students:

http://www.dailywire.com/news/4071/fbi-tells-high-schools-watch-out-anti-government-james-barrett

That said, what does it say about current law enforcement priorities that the FBI is now investigating a dog that was killed? 

ii) Notice that the mainstream media now classifies the killing of a dog as "murder". You can "murder" a dog–just like you can murder a human. Indeed, killing a dog is "murder," but killing a baby is reproductive freedom. 

iii) Yet organizations like PAWS and the Humane Society kill animals. They call it "euthanasia". Is that "murder"? Certainly the animal didn't sign a consent form to be euthanized. 

iii) Likewise, the same mainstream media now classifies bestiality as "rape". That's very instructive. Let's pursue that line of though;

iv) I myself think this was a perverted deed. However, I'm a knuckle-dragging fundamentalist who gets his moral code from a Bronze Age book about a glorified storm-god (or so we're told). So let's bracket my retrograde religious beliefs and approach the issue from the standpoint of an enlightened atheist:

v) Peter Singer is the best-known, and perhaps the most influential, secular bioethicist of his generation. Yet he defends bestiality:

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/2001----.htm

So we're going to have a conflict between secular animal rights activists who think bestiality is "rape", and secular proponents of zoophilia, zoosexuality, and/or bestiality. 

vi) Presumably, the media said the dog was "raped" because this was forcible or coercive penetration. Against the animal's will. 

If so, one problem with that rationale is that consent isn't a prerequisite for copulation in the animal kingdom. For instance, ever see ducks at mating season? Not much interest in foreplay. No candlelight dinner. Doesn't look like consensual sex to me. 

vii) Perhaps, though, the argument would be that because the perpetrator was human, different rules apply. But suppose the perpetrator claims to be otherkin? Say he self-identifies as a dog. It that event, is it rape for him to sodomize a dog? Shouldn't we judge him by canine standards rather than our provincial, anthropomorphic standards? 

For that matter, dogs kill other dogs. So if a person who self-identifies as a dog or wild predator (e.g. grizzly bear, Siberian tiger) kills a dog, how is that "murder"? When one animal kills another animal, zoologists don't classify that as murder. To do so would be speciesism. 

viii) If, moreover, otherkin is a valid identity, just like transgenderism, then it isn't murder when a person who self-identifies as a wild predator kills a human. After all, it's only natural for major predators to kill humans. 

Involuntary human experimentation

A chilling example of secular medical ethics. Josef Mengele would be proud: ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- PT: One of the aspects of your philosophy that is most galling to some people is that you don't view human life as sacred. According to you, since a person in a vegetative coma is a being without self-awareness, he or she should be accorded fewer rights than a fully-aware chimpanzee. Needless to say, you've enraged a bunch of religious and disabled folk. PS: But you really have to question human superiority What justifies the things we do to animals? What justifies keeping a person in a vegetative coma alive? There are two basic views that support cruelty to animals: either you accept the Aristotelian view that the universe has a purpose and the less rational are here to serve the more rational, or you believe the Judeo-Christian view that God has given us dominion over the world. But once you get away from those two worldviews, there just isn't a basis for drawing a sharp moral boundary between us and them. PT: But you are still drawing a boundary. Why draw one at all? Aren't you still guilty of human arrogance in saying apes deserve human rights, when other animals don't? Who are we to decide? PS: That's absolutely true, and what we really have is an infinite range of gradations of awareness. But if you are trying to shape policy, you need to draw lines somewhere. PT: Let's take a specific case. Research on chimpanzees led to the hepatitis B vaccine, which has saved many human lives. Let's pretend it's the moment before that research is to begin. Would you stop it? PS: I'm not comfortable with any invasive research on chimps. I would ask, Is there no other way? And I think there are other ways. I would say, What about getting the consent of relatives of people in vegetative states? PT: That would cause a riot! PS: Well, if you could really confidently determine that this person will never recover consciousness, it's a lot better to use them than a chimp. I agree, it doesn't go over well, and people throw up their hands in shock and horror. But I'd like them to explain why it's better to lock a fully-conscious, self-aware chimp in a seven-foot cage in solitary confinement than to experiment with someone lying unconscious in a hospital ward. http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/interviews-debates/1999----02.htm

The Arminian Peter Singer

Turns out Arminian theologian Roger Olson is a utilitarian bioethicist. The Arminian Peter Singer:

Rob • 2 days ago

This is a major issue in contemporary ethics. I think that most people make the moral judgment that there is some sort of distinction between doing and allowing although it is difficult to pin down. However, I do not think it has anything to do with greater evil. The right thing to do might be to allow the greater evil to occur rather than doing an evil oneself.

The go-to example would be of a surgeon about to operate on a relatively healthy patient whom the surgeon discovers is a perfect match for four patients in the hospital running out of time for live-saving transplants (of different organs) and finds himself faced with a decision: do I kill the one relatively healthy patient and make it look like a surgical complication and save four lives? Or do I treat and release him and allow the other four patients to (probably) die? Most people think it would be wrong to kill the healthy patient, but not because of any greater goods or evils at issue--obviously four deaths are worse than one.

 

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  Roger Olson Mod  Rob • a day ago

  
  

  We disagree. See my essay (a lecture given at Baylor and posted here) "Sin Boldy: Christian Ethics for a Broken World." Some acts are necessary even though wrong (sinful). My argument is that God automatically forgives necessary acts such as taking life to save innocent life.

  
  

  
  

   

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    Rob  Roger Olson • 19 hours ago

    
    

    So you think the surgeon should kill the one relatively healthy patient?

    
    

    
    

     

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      Roger Olson Mod  Rob • 4 hours ago

      
      

      You are asking me to engage in casuistry. I can only say what I think I would probably do--when talking about "limit cases." And in this case I don't know. But I doubt I would condemn the surgeon in your hypothetical scenario. Have you seen "Sophie's Choice?"

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2015/01/is-there-a-difference-between-permitting-evil-and-doing-evil/