"In Singer’s philosophy, there is a crucial distinction between persons and nonpersons. Only persons have the right to live. Nonpersons can be killed without significant moral concern on the basis that their lives are "interchangeable" and "replaceable."
As one of his chief arguing points, Singer has rationalized the killing of human babies. In Practical Ethics, he supports the killing of newborns with hemophilia. As he writes: "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would . . . be right to kill him."
Singer reiterated the point, using a different example, in Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics: "To have a child with Down’s syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. . . . We may not want a child to start on life’s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage of the voyage we may be able to make a fresh start. . . . Instead of going forward and putting all our efforts into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning."
His use of passive language does not blunt his meaning: Singer is advocating infanticide as a parental prerogative. In the most extreme form of his argument, he has even suggested that parents have 28 days in which to decide whether to keep or kill their infants.
When Singer gives examples of babies who are appropriate to kill, he usually writes or speaks, as above, of children born with disabilities. But it is important to note that under his thesis, disability has little actual relevance. Utilitarian considerations of maximizing happiness and reducing suffering are what count to Singer. Thus, if a parent is unhappy with the birth of a child, if that child’s death will cause them more happiness than keeping it, or if keeping the child will make life less happy for potential future children, then infanticide is an acceptable alternative. (Perhaps Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg, who recently pled guilty to manslaughter after they wrapped their newborn baby in plastic and then tossed him into a waste receptacle, should have called Singer as a defense witness instead of copping a plea. After all, they were simply maximizing their happiness and ending the life of a replaceable being.)
Singer’s attitudes about cognitively disabled people are equally abhorrent. He argues that cognitively disabled people who are incapable of "choosing" to live or die can be killed. This applies to people diagnosed as permanently unconscious (a notoriously misdiagnosed condition) and those who are conscious but not "rational or autonomous." In other words, brain-damaged people, those with significant mental retardation, and/or some forms of psychosis, are not persons and do not have a right to life. Singer writes in Practical Ethics that, "it is difficult to see the point of keeping such human beings alive, if their life, on the whole, is miserable."
".......Singer is invited to speak at seminars, symposia, and philosophy association conventions, throughout the world. His 1979 book, Practical Ethics, which unabashedly advocates infanticide, euthanasia, and decries "discrimination" based on species (a bizarre notion Singer labels "speciesism"), has become a standard text in many college philosophy departments. Singer is now so mainstream that he even wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica."
".....Those who are fighting a rear-guard action to protect the human rights of weak and medically vulnerable people in universities and in debates over public policy in the United States have benefited from the fact that Singer has spoken from the hinterlands-Monash University in Australia. But now, even that cold comfort is gone. Next year, Singer will become a permanent member of the Princeton University faculty, where he will be the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, a prestigious, tenured academic chair, at the university’s Center for Human Values."
It is amazing the Nazi-like mentality of some of our "compassionate" people who want everyone to be "happy" (everyone they don't kill, that is).
There is no foundation for ethics once a purely hedonistic standard ("happiness") is used. Any system based on hedonism is a reductio absurdium that will fail. Life is struggle. Life can still have meaning, whether circumstances are happy or not. These glib fools who talk about maximizing the happiness of the lucky few by killing many people judged to be "inferior" in some way (they are of the wrong class, or are physically unfit, or they think differently, or they don't belong to some "Master Race") -- these fools seem to think that they will live forever if only they can kill enough of the "inferior" people who are in their way.
It is instructive to see how many of the hedonistic philosophers immediately seek to maximize "happiness" by killing ever-increasing categories of "those people" (whoever "those people" happen to be at the moment). A system is truly bankrupt when its primary ethical question is not, "How must I live?" but is instead, "Who must I kill?"