Is Speciesism Wrong by Definition? Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics. Oscar Horta has argued that speciesism is wrong by definition. In his view, there can be no more substantive debate about the justification of speciesism than there can be about the legality of … Expand. Racism and Its Presuppositions: Towards a Pragmatic Ethics of Social Change Racism has been described as a litmus test or a barium meal which reveals other disorders and injustices within the body … Expand.
Highly Influenced. View 5 excerpts, cites background. Legal Theory. ABSTRACT Despite the attention equality before the law has received, both laudatory and critical, peculiarly little has been done to precisely define it. The first ambition of this paper is to remedy … Expand. Racism and Rationality. This is a fair point — it would be nonsensical to give animals a right to work, vote and marry.
These are human capabilities and mean nothing to animals. This is not the case — rights are something that are created by humans and then given to everyone who can accept them.
Non-human animals, on the other hand, cannot accept rights because they are irrational and cannot conceive what a right means. This is not saying that we should also have a right to hunt babies, but that we should care about the interests of non-human animals as much as we care about the interests of humans. Race is a superficial and arbitrary difference amongst human beings and it has no bearing on the abilities of human beings — saying that an African-Caribbean is inferior to a white European is simply ignorant.
Lower forms of animals, by contrast, have less intelligence to humans and, therefore, cannot be viewed as equal to us in that regard. By this line of reasoning, speciesism is not like racism. Singer rebuts this, however, and underscores that a society that mistreats humans based on their low IQ would be a very immoral society and not one we desire. This very valid rebuttal means that speciesism could still be put on par with racism. Furthermore, just because non-human animals cannot enjoy higher pleasures like humans, this does not justify discrimination against them.
You could apply this to equal opportunity for the ugly in dating too. Economist Economist e0de. Economist d. Department of Justice Emory University. Is racial discrimination arbitrary? There are too many variables.
We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. Presumably, if so, the presence or absence of happiness is not a germane question—which would seem to undermine his effort to advance his argument by positing their unhappiness.
We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete or basketball or tennis player. Although it would be wise not to expect such interests and activities of every child with Down syndrome or, for that matter, every child of any kind , this type of framing leaves no room for the very real possibility of children with Down syndrome who do have the type of interests and engage successfully in the type of activities that Singer would have us think are beyond their ability.
It also sends a disheartening message to parents and prospective parents and overlooks the role that expectations may play in well-being. In , Nikic, by then 21, completed an Ironman Triathlon a Timothy Shriver artfully captures in Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most , the life lessons imparted by individuals with intellectual disabilities, some quite severe, and of those who love and care for them, have been and can be a source of enormous inspiration.
In considering poverty alleviation, Singer repeatedly implores readers to be unconstrained by convention and treat national borders as impediments that can and should be disregarded in the service of doing the most good we can. But the social model, embodied in the Americans with Disabilities Act of , has been gaining currency, as exemplified by its centrality to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, now ratified by more than nations albeit not the United States.
This assertion takes the simple truth that social conditions make the lives of the disabled much more difficult than they need be, and twists it into a sweeping falsehood. It is not surprising, therefore, that he misses the broadly encompassing ways in which not only the physical, but also the legal and cultural, construction of society shape what it means to be disabled, as Martha Minow demonstrates so well in Making All the Difference.
Just as he urges that those with wealth not treat their fortuity as signifying their singular merit, so, too, it would seem that he should not treat the fortuity of having a severe cognitive disability as signifying a life less worth living.
Where resources are scarce, there must be some limit. At the end of the day, Singer once again falls short when it comes to discrimination regarding disability. Singer fails to provide a convincing explanation of why the taking of the lives of infants with haemophilia or Down syndrome should not be seen as having an effect on the lives of persons with those conditions or even be threatening to other persons with a disability. There is no reason to assume that the general public would be aware of this caveat.
And, presumably, if older adults were concerned enough about the prospect of such suffering that they wished not to experience it, they could agree to voluntary euthanasia through a living will.
Singer would have us start with the obverse—namely, that everyone should potentially be subject to nonvoluntary euthanasia, unless they object to it in writing. There is no doubt that Singer has influenced how leading thinkers see and seek to explain the world. He would validate those prejudices with the life-and-death power of the law. It is important to note that Singer is not shy about wanting to have a broad impact. Over decades, through books written for a mass audience, op-eds, TED talks, founding an important NGO, and much more, Singer has worked hard to be a public intellectual having an impact on policy.
As Eva Feder Kittay has powerfully argued, philosophers—and especially ethicists—have a responsibility to be attentive to the impact of their work, especially with respect to its consequences for subjects of their inquiry, and perhaps particularly when those subjects have been the focus of much discrimination.
Singer is right to remind readers of how much less governments in the affluent world have done for development than is generally assumed. I share his commitment to doing more. I maintain, though, that addressing challenges of poverty that we face at home would make efforts at addressing challenges abroad more palatable both here and there, and potentially more effective. An authoritative joint study by the World Health Organization and the World Bank concluded in that, conservatively speaking, at least fifteen percent of the human race—equaling more than one billion people—have a disability, and that the situation of persons with a disability is especially acute in developing nations.
Margaret Chan and then-World Bank President Robert Zoellick, Across the world, people with disabilities have poorer health outcomes, lower education achievements, less economic participation and higher rates of poverty than people without disabilities.
This is partly because people with disabilities experience barriers in accessing services that many of us have long taken for granted, including health, education, employment, and transport as well as information. These difficulties are exacerbated in less advantaged communities.
To achieve the long-lasting, vastly better development prospects that lie at the heart of the Millennium Development Goals and beyond, we must empower people living with disabilities and remove the barriers which prevent them participating in their communities; getting a quality education, finding decent work, and having their voices heard.
There is not enough research on this topic, with the result that it is difficult to describe causal mechanisms with absolute assurance, but the most credible work concludes that disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty in developing nations and that individuals with disabilities are among the most marginalized worldwide.
The literature on Singer is immense. P eter S inger , P ractical E thics 3rd ed. A ffs. In T he M ost G ood Y ou C an D o , Singer recounts that, having started decades ago giving away at least a tenth of his salary, he has since steadily increased his donations.
To the extent that he is correct in his characterizations of these societies, it is not clear why their example regarding infanticide should be compelling for behavior today.
After all, as he notes in Should the Baby Live where he cites anthropological accounts of some of these societies , we do not feel bound by the practices of ancient Greece with respect to slavery. Nor does his motivation address the impact that many persons with disabilities believe his views to have on their lives—which I discuss further in this article.
See infra text accompanying notes — To be sure, in Should the Baby Live and Rethinking Life and Death , Singer does explore several end-of-life scenarios, but in a manner that leaves unresolved the definitional tensions discussed in this paragraph. See Harry J. T imes M ag.
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