Rethinking Peter Singer: The Absolute Uniqueness of the Human

For the purposes of this paper I will focus on Singer's thoughts about person as they are expressed in two of his works: Practical Ethics, Second edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993) and Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).

He suggests that it should be possible to terminate the life of a child up to the age of one month. See Practical Ethics, 169–174, esp. 172.

See Rethinking Life and Death, 181–183, 187-190.

These are not the Ten Commandments of Judeo-Christian tradition, though they do stem from them. The five “old” commandments are: Treat all human life as of equal worth; never intentionally take innocent human life; never take your own life, and always try to prevent others taking theirs; be fruitful and multiply; and treat all human life as always more precious than any nonhuman life. He suggests replacing these with five “new” ones: recognize that the worth of human life varies; take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions; respect a person's desire to live or die; bring children into the world only if they are wanted; and do not discriminate on the basis of species (189-206).

See 202-206.

Rethinking Life and Death, 205–206.

See Practical Ethics, 105–107. A little later, regarding the matter of exchanging our life as a human for the life of an animal, Singer writes that such a life is one “with which most modern readers would be quite comfortable”! See 108.

With all due respect to the Almighty, I spell this word with a lower case “g” because that is how Singer spells it. See Practical Ethics, 331.

See Practical Ethics, 331.

Practical Ethics, 331, italics mine.

Practical Ethics, 331.

See Practical Ethics, 88–89. See, also 102, where he writes that when we die “we cease to exist.”

See Practical Ethics, 72 and Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of our Traditional Ethics, 169-172, 202. I wish merely to note that evolution, as Darwinism proposes it, is a theory. I will discuss this further in my critique of Singer.

Rethinking Life and Death, 171. As a response to this, see Mortimer J. Adler's The Difference of Man, The Difference it Makes (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston: 1967), esp. 19-35.

Rethinking Life and Death, 202, italics mine.

Rethinking Life and Death, 172.

331.

I wonder if only human persons are likely to be misled, or whether apes, whales and pigs would also be misled.

See Practical Ethics Rethinking Life and Death, 180–183.

See Rethinking Life and Death, 182

Accurate in that our word “person” most resembles the Latin persona, but inaccurate in that the term traces its origins back to the Etruscan period and the word phersu. See Kenneth Schmitz's “Geography of the Human Person,” Communio 13 (1986): 27–48.

Rethinking Life and Death, 180.

Rethinking Life and Death, 180–181.

Essay Concerning Human Understanding, bk I, chap. 9, par. 29, as quoted in Practical Ethics, 87.

See Practical Ethics, 87, and Rethinking Life and Death, 180.

See Tooley's Abortion and Infanticide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) and “Abortion and Infanticide,” Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 2 (1972): 37-65.

Practical Ethics, 96.

Tooley's thoughts underwent a series of changes on this. For a great evaluation of this, and of the corners Tooley kept finding himself backed into, see Patrick Lee's Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), esp. 11-45.

Practical Ethics, 96.

Practical Ethics, 97.

See Practical Ethics, 97, where Singer discusses Tooley's thought on this.

See Practical Ethics, 97. In a statement revealing his dualism, Singer shows that he is in accord with this line of reasoning (or lack thereof!) when he says that it is true that he can say it is now in his own interests that his parents met, “because if they had never met, they could not have created the embryo from which I developed” (italics mine). But this is not the same as saying it was in his interests then. See 98.

Practical Ethics, 98–99.

See Practical Ethics, 99. He goes on to add, however, that not all ethicists respect the characteristic of autonomy, since some may consider that the desire of one to continue living may either be outweighed by other more important desires, or the one with the desire to go on living may be mistaken in his expectation of a happy life.

See Practical Ethics, 101–105, and Rethinking Life and Death, 190-192.

See Practical Ethics, 101–102. With great compassion (!), Singer writes that it seems terribly unfair, especially given how we humanely seek to kill animals when necessary, that we do not also seek to reduce the pain of the fetus in the womb in abortion, especially in the later months when the ability to experience pain is clearly present. See Practical Ethics, 164.

Rethinking Life and Death, 190–191.

Rethinking Life and Death, esp. 181-182.

Practical Ethics, 136–137.

Practical Ethics, 138.

Practical Ethics, 138–143.

Practical Ethics, 143–149.

See Thompson Judith Jarvis “In Defense of Abortion,” Philosophy and Public Affairs (1970).

Practical Ethics, 149.

See Rethinking Life and Death, 187–189.

Practical Ethics, 150.

Practical Ethics, 150.

Practical Ethics, 150, italics mine.

Practical Ethics, 150.

Practical Ethics, 153.

Practical Ethics, 153–155.

Practical Ethics, 156.

Practical Ethics, 156.

Practical Ethics, 157.

Practical Ethics, 158–159.

For more on this, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, “On the Concept of Person,” Communio 13 (1986): 18–26; W. Norris Clarke, “Person, Being, and St. Thomas,” 19 (1992): 601-618; ibid., “Response to David Schindler's Comments,” Communio 20 (1993): 593-598; Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's “Retrieving the Tradition: Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Communio 17 (1990): 439-454; David Schindler, “Norris Clarke on Person, Being, and St. Thomas,” Communio 20 (1993): 580-592; Kenneth Schmitz, “The Geography of the Human Person,” J. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993).

Ratzinger Joseph Cardinal Introduction to Christianity, trans. J.R. Foster (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 130.

Introduction to Christianity, 131–132, italics mine.

Martin Francis The Feminist Question. Feminist Theology in the Light of Christian Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 324–325.

Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law, ed. Gormally Luke (London: The Linacre Center, 1994), 41.

Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law, 41

Unless, of course, something happens that prevents or impairs that development. Nonetheless, the point remains.

Lee Patrick Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 10–11.

And Singer clearly ascribes to dualism. See again the comment about his indebtedness to his parents having met and created the embryo from which he developed.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 5–6, 58-62.

See Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law, 29.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 10–11.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 16–18, 29.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 30–31.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 34.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 34–6.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 37.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 37.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 37.

See Tooley Michael Abortion and Infanticide, 150.

See Abortion and Infanticide, 150

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 23.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 23.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 26.

This is so because “an active potentiality indicates that the entity which possesses it is the same entity that will later exercise that active potentiality. With a passive potentiality that is not so; that is, the actualization of a passive potentiality often produces a completely different thing or substance”(27).

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 27.

As quoted in Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 24.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 24.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 25.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 61.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 60.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 61. Again recall that Singer had written if his parents had never met “they could not have created the embryo from which I developed” (italics mine).

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 61.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 61.

Practical Ethics, 156–158.

This is how William May summarizes those who hold this view. He then goes on to critique the view, drawing heavily upon Lee's analysis. See Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 2000), 169.

See, for example, Ashley Benedict , and Moraczewski Albert , “Is the Biological Subject of Human Rights Present from Conception?” in The Fetal Tissue Issue: Medical and Ethical Aspects, ed. Cataldo Peter , and Moraczewski Albert (Braintree: Pope John Center, 1994); Germain Grisez, “When Do People Begin?” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 63 (1990): 27-47; William E. May, 167-170; Antoine Suarez, “Hydatidiform Moles and Teratomas Confirm the Human Identity of the Preimplantation Embryo,” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15 (1990): 627-35.

See 90–102.

Lee refers to Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part 1, question 27, article 1.

See Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 91.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 91. In answering the second objection, Lee notes that just as a flatworm, if cut in the right place, will not die but become two flatworms (not at all proving in the process that prior to the cutting the flatworm was a mere “aggregate of cells”), so the division at the early stages of the human embryo in no way indicates that “prior to such an extrinsic division the embryo is an aggregate rather than a single, multicellular organism” (93).

See Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life, 169–170.

Abortion and Unborn Human Life, 102.

See John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, (The Gospel of Life) (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1995), 21–22.

See, for example, the reference to Jesus in Rethinking Life and Death, 166.

Except for the tangible witness of millions of men's and women's lives through the centuries who have given evidence of the reality of God and His saving action in their lives.

See Charles Colson's How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton: Tyndale, 1999), esp. Chapter 9, “Darwin in the Dock”, 81-90, and Chapter 10, “Darwin's Dangerous Idea”, 91-100. It is essential to distinguish between evolution, which can certainly be maintained by a Catholic, and Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection, which cannot. This is because the latter is riddled with a materialistic conception of reality. See Pope John Paul II's Address to the Pontifical Academy of Science, October 23, 1996.

See, for example, Michael J. Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Touchstone, 1996), Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial (Downer's Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1993) and Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds (Downer's Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1997)

For more on this see Francis Martin's The Feminist Question, 196–197.

See Schmitz Kenneth “Created Receptivity and the Philosophy of the Concrete,” The Thomist 61, no. 3 (1997): 339–371.

Practical Ethics, 265–268, and Rethinking Life and Death, 165-166.

For three interesting essays on the task of man's stewardship, as well as a biblical explanation of the command to sacrifice and eat animals as a way of reminding man of his uniqueness, see Environmental Stewardship in the Judeo-Christian Tradition: Jewish, Catholic and Protestant Wisdom on the Environment (Grand Rapids: Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, 2000).

The Pastoral Constitution on the Relationship Between the Church and the Modern World, Gaudium et Spes, 24, in Vatican II, The Conciliar and PostConciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery O.P. (Northport: Costello Publishing CO., 1974).

Gaudium et Spes, 19.

John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis (The Redeemer of Man) (Milano: Scuole Grafiche Pavoniane, 1979), 10.