This weekend, the Guardian published this op-ed by philosopher Peter Singer that takes George W. Bush to task over the president’s pro-life views. Singer attempts to show that Bush is not worthy of being called pro-life, writing,
Last month, the military forces that this same president commands aimed a missile at a house in Damadola, a Pakistani village near the Afghan border. Eighteen people were killed, including five children. The target of the attack, al-Qaeda’s No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was not among the dead, although lesser figures in the terrorist organisation reportedly were. Bush did not apologise for the attack, nor did he reprimand those who ordered it. Apparently, he believes that the chance of killing an important terrorist leader is sufficient justification for firing a missile that will almost certainly kill innocent human beings.
Frankly, though, if I have to choose between the ethics of Peter Singer and that of George W. Bush I’ll take Bush in a landslide any day. Bush, whether directly or indirectly, supported the attack on this village that ended up killing 18 people and did not get its main target. Were 18 lives worth the chance of getting Al-Zawahiri?
I don’t know. But certainly that is a much better tradeoff than Singer offers when in 2001, for example, Singer said it was okay to kill babies simply because they might be wheelchair bound.
First, Singer established that he had changed his views slightly since saying in 1995 that infants under 28 days old were not really self-aware persons and could be killed,
Frolke: Most proponents of the right to die would agree with your ideas about euthanasia. But you lose them when you suggest that it’s OK to kill a baby before it’s 28 days old, because until that time, it is not self-aware and “doesn’t have the same right to life as others.”
Singer: I wrote that in 1995. I have changed my position. Now I believe you should look at every individual case.
Then Singer gives an example criteria of a case where it might be better to kill new
[Viktor] Frolke: Maybe you’re not saying that the lives of disabled people are not worth living, but on a scale they’re closer to that point than you are.
Singer: There are so many more factors important to the quality of life. Maybe the life of a disabled person is much more worth living than mine. All I’m saying is that at birth you can’t tell that. It’s reasonable to say that a life with a serious disability has the expectation of turning out less well than a life without disabilities. And I’m not talking about intellectual disabilities. I can imagine that parents of a newborn that is paralyzed, that’s always going to be in a wheelchair, might decide that they don’t want that child and that they are going to have another one. That’s a decision I can understand.
Singer is one ethicist who has no business lecturing anybody about respect for human life.
Source:
Not terribly pro-life, is it Mr President?. Peter Singer, The Guardian, February 18, 2006.
