Peter Singer on the Dignity of Human Life
Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, has once again made clear his standings on the concept of human dignity. On Friday, 1/26/07, in a piece in the NY Times, while discussing the case of Ashley, a severely disable girl, he stated the following:
Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?
In his book, Practical Ethics, he opines:
The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings… This conclusion is not limited to infants who, because of irreversible intellectual disabilities, will never be rational, self-conscious beings.
Singer’s views are considered radical by many and illicit outrage by some. I, of course, am among those who consider his viewpoint outrageous. However, I at least give him credit for being consistent with the argument supporting abortion.
In contrast to the view of Singer is the Christian view of human dignity. In the words of Al Mohler, whose blog alerted me to Singer’s comments:
Christians believe that every single human being possesses full human dignity because every human being is made in the image of God. A worldview that denies the existence of God and thus denies the reality of the image of God has to come up with some other explanation for human dignity — one that lacks essential dignity. Thus, in this worldview, the humans that are thought to deserve dignity are recognized as having it, while others are denied the same.