From Secondhand Smoke:
...at a Princeton conference around the abortion question, in which (Mr Singer) claims that human beings don’t possess full moral status until after the age of two. :
Q (beginning at 1:25:22): When discussing at which point after birth we would give full moral status, you gave…a legal or public policy point about practicality… Forgetting the practical or public policy questions, if a person is a self aware individual and self awareness isn’t conferred by birth, and we use mirror tests to determine self awarness…at what point do you think an infant would pass the mirror test and therefore be self aware and be considered a person......The position that allows abortion also allows infanticide under some circumstances…If we accept abortion, we do need to rethink some of those more fundamental attitudes about human life....
Singer (beginning at 1:27:18: … My understanding is that it is not until after the first birthday, so somewhere between the first and second, I think, that they typically recognize the image in the mirror as themselves…Really, I think this is a gradual matter. If you are not talking about public policy or the law, but you are talking about when you really have the same moral status, I think that does develop gradually. There are various things that you could say that are sufficient to give some moral status after a few months, maybe six months or something like that, and you get perhaps to full moral status, really, only after two years. But I don’t think that should be the public policy criteria.
More here...
2 comments:
I'm wondering if Mr. Singer has reached full moral status yet...
Maybe he would consider infanticide acceptable as long as the child was under 2 ?!!
That is certainly one implication...
Later on in the transcript (I've added the blurb) he begins to expound on other, equally chilling, implications.
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