(Wesley J. Smith / The Corner) – In his apologetics for infanticide, Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has used a baby with Down syndrome as an example of a killable infant based on utilitarian measurements. (He actually supports infanticide because babies–whether disabled or not–are, in his view, not “persons.”)
To Singer, moral value primary comes from intellectual capacities, and that means that developmentally and cognitively disabled human beings (also, the unborn and infants) have less value than other human beings, and indeed, a lower worth than some animals.
Were society to ever adopt Singer’s bigoted anti-human exceptionalism views, it would mark the end of universal human rights, opening the door to tyrannical pogroms against the most weak and vulnerable–you know, the kind of people that the Singers of the world deem resource wasters. CONTINUE