First, a thought for American Thanksgiving Week which I'm reminded of by the man I'm criticizing, Peter Singer.
What do they know-all these scholars, all these philosophers, all the leaders of the world - about such as you? They have convinced themselves that man, the worst transgressor of all the species, is the crown of creation. All other creatures were created merely to provide him with food, pelts, to be tormented, exterminated. In relation to them, all people are Nazis; for the animals it is an eternal Treblinka.
Isaac Bashevis Singer. The Letter Writer
Note: This isn't another post primarily about Darwinism, it's about the
materialist-atheist replacement for morality, utilitarianism and its most famous proponent right now.
WHEN I WAS WRITING for a blog that got a lot more readers I often set off storms of controversy, some of those topics have become major focuses of what I concentrate on, the reasons the American and other "lefts" have been so remarkably unsuccessful in politics. One of the things that got People riled up didn't start in a piece I wrote for one of the blogs I was invited to write for, it was a comment made on one of the Science Blogs in which I stated the obvious truth, the theory of natural selection was the origin of eugenics including the German strain of that that found its fullest implementation in the Holocaust and other genocidal murder regimes of the Nazis. The reaction that my presentation of long passages from Darwin and Darwinists in support of my claims got led to the first of the scores of posts on Darwinism that were written after that one incident.
In one of the earliest pieces I wrote about I dealt with the monumentally hypocritical statement of Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man in which he compared human beings to animals in a farm operation, which inevitably is a judgement of human beings' economic utility. In short, he was abstractly assigning a financial value to human beings in order to determine which ones of them having children would be profitable for the country or, in his claims "the human species" in which they lived and which of them would be less profitable or, as in the nightmare of the Pharaoh in the last tales of Genesis, which would actually be a net loss. Darwin's presentation of those he deemed dangerous their danger was for the quality of ALL future human beings. He built on Malthus and presented entire groups of human beings as more than merely unprofitable, but a clear danger to humanity. Including entire races and other groups.
As Darwin was hypocritical in his call for the culling of the disabled, the ill those of lesser intelligence, and those whose only known disability was their ability to get money in Victorian Britain, in other 19th century gangster ruled lands and the huge populations who were under the colonial rule of Western Europeans, he couched his would-be science among some pathetically weak calls for providing sustenance for the very people he was telling his readers were a danger to the future of the human species and a drag on its improvement.
I was able in that, my first series of posts on Darwinism to point out that a few pages after scientifically encouraging the culling of those he deemed unprofitable he brushed aside the "worthless drones" who the powerful, ruling aristocracy produced, the Prince Andrews, Edward VII's and others like him as having, on balance, no real danger of the kind he held poor peoples' children to be. In my critical reading of Darwin's books and letters I came across that kind of hypocrisy many times. He pooh-poohed Darwinian valuation as applied to the aristocracy. I noted in that early piece that though he listed vaccinations as one of the catastrophe producing produces of civilization, along with medical care and merely feeding the hungry, none of the Darwins in his direct control seems to have contracted small pox, not his eugenicist son Leonard who unsuccessfully ran for Parliament on an anti-vaxx platform, he was the RJK jr. of his day. I suspect that none of Darwin's children went without small pox vaccination. Darwin, himself, who was a famous valetudinarian and likely a hypochondriac, as well, who may well have passed on his own maladies to the future through his many children, did nothing to limit his own reproduction. Ironically, most of his eugenicist sons don't seem to have had children of their own. George, one of the earliest proponents of Darwinist law in which the state could involuntarily divorce couples if one of them was judged to have a mental illness, did have a particularly hard case of a scientist son who was proposing eugenics even after the crimes of the Nazis were exposed to the world.
But this started in me thinking of how to answer a complaint I got when I dissed utilitarianism, recently. Darwinism certainly exists within a scheme of utility, from On the Origin of Species, especially in The Descent of Man and right down to the most recent academic writing. It also pervades much if not almost all English language intellectualism so I could hardly avoid commenting on it. And going into its most notable implementations in eugenics and genocide.
In reviewing a criticism of my criticism of the Australian utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer I came across an interview with Daniel A. Gross, for the New Yorker and I found that Singer, as well, was guilty of arguing out of both sides of his mouth on a number of the issues I've dealt with in my study of how the left has failed so continually since about 1968. I think any thinker and writer who prescribes things for other people is rightly held up to criticism for how well their own choices in life match what they want others to do and have done to them.
What is so interesting to me is that Singer and I have come to some similar though, as well, quite different conclusions about a few things. I can claim that I became a vegetarian about ten years younger than he did and for much the same reason, I was appalled by the practices of the meat industry, both its cruelty and the fact that to eat meat is to murder obviously sentient creatures who are capable of pain and fear and love. I grew up on a farm, I saw animals slaughtered I knew the conditions that was done under and how they were kept before they were killed.
I will credit Singer in the article for the quote from Issac Bashevis Singer, from a story which I read decades ago, it seems worth noting in this week of American Thanksgiving which I abhor because it is a holiday that has come to mean eating animals and watching American blood sports, American football. I also came to an early view that large-scale animal husbandry, factory farming was a danger from those being a breeding ground for human pandemic diseases. I don't remember when I first read about the relationship of massive concentration camps for ducks being related to the variably fatal annual influenza pandemics but it must have been at least in the early 1970s, that's when I remember first realizing it. I think it was after that that I read about the pandemic after WWI originating in concentration camps for pigs.
It's worth it to go through the whole interview because Daniel Gross asked some very astute and cutting questions and he made some very good observations. In doing that I think he showed he is a deeper thinker than the guy who is world famous in the business of thinking. The interview exposes a lot of what's wrong with modern academia, the stupidity of extending scientific abstraction into real life and real lives too complex and unknowable to make even very plausible, critique resistant pseudo-science of. I also think that some of the stands that Singer philosophized himself into is a great demonstration of the problem with a would-be materialist-atheist-scientistic attempt at replacing revealed morality with something more congenial to that ideological framing. How he could see the free promotion of ideas as more important than the persons targeted by those ideas, the basis of American and so much other secular libertarianism. Privileging ideas targeting them for death and oppression over their safety. I will definitely go into the attempt to reduce that to "being offended," one of the typical dishonest dodges and smokescreens of such discourse. I will be going over it this week, a series I'll probably have a lot easier time finishing because it doesn't require me to do much transcribing. I will not be taking things up in the order of the interview, you might want to read that yourself.
I will say that I think a lot of the "ethics" of Peter Singer ends up being pretty depraved just as much science does, especially the more inexact sciences such as evolutionary biology.* I'll start with one of those applications, the one that is probably the most controversial of Peter Singer's stuff in which he advocates murder.
Note: the interviewer's text is in bold, Singers' answers are in bold italics, my interjections are in unbolded, plain text.
-----------------------
I wanted to ask you about your work on disability, and your views on what is permissible for a parent to do if their child is born with a disability. This is a set of ideas that has made you very controversial, and in some circles very unpopular. And I wonder whether you’ve ever regretted wading into that arena, because it might make people less likely to come to your other ideas.
Yes. I’ve wondered whether the effects were good or bad. The first public protests against my views on disability were in Germany, starting in 1989. After all the attention that I got because of the protests—mostly very critical media; you know, a terrible double-page in Der Spiegel with photos of the trucks that took Jews to prison camps—the sales multiplied ten times. My views in Germany became far better known. As you say, I became very unpopular in some circles, and some of my talks got cancelled. It’s unfortunate that I get associated with these so-called “ableist” views—and, of course, in Germany there was this horrendous link with the Nazi so-called euthanasia program. It’s not that I haven’t ever regretted it. I have. But, other times, when I reflect on the over-all impact, I’m not sure that it’s been bad. I do get letters, both from people with disabilities and parents of people with disabilities, who support my views.
Would you mind summarizing what your view was then, and whether it’s changed at all?
My view then was that parents of children born with serious disabilities ought to have the option of ending the life of their child, immediately after birth or as soon as the diagnosis has been properly established. It’s not true to say that I support euthanasia for disabled infants. It’s not true that I think that disabled infants ought to be killed. I think the parents ought to have that option.
Let me say a couple of things in relation to that. First, parents do have that option, right now, in every country that allows abortion when a prenatal diagnosis has shown that there’s a disability. I don’t draw a big distinction between abortion and infanticide. Those who think that it’s O.K. for women to have an abortion need to show why there’s such an important difference between the fetus before birth and the newborn infant after birth. Second, parents, right now, have the option of withdrawing life support for an infant with a serious disability. I think that both of these cases convey exactly the same attitude to disability that I’m defending. You can say that is ableist. But some have said that I’m simply representative of the ableist society as a whole, which supports both of these things. And I think that’s true.
I'll break in to point out that there is a huge difference between killing a born person and the choice of a Woman to determine the state of her own body in the matter of abortion. That is a crucial and complete difference between the two. That Singer obviously can't see the Woman and her position while concentrating on a fetus, is a pretty big lapse. That he considers parents have a rightful role in determining to kill a child and doesn't consider the right of a Woman to her bodily autonomy as the decisive difference is a pretty huge gap in his understanding of an issue he's supposedly thought through to the level attributed to him.
I think it’s wrong to discriminate against disabled people in employment or housing or other areas where their disability is not relevant to their ability to perform the job. I fully support rights for disabled people in those respects, and for them to be in normal schools. I think it’s a complete mistake to think that I’m opposed to people with disabilities in some way. This is specifically something about euthanasia for newborn infants, who are not able to have any kind of input into what they want their lives to be like, or whether they want to live it.
I have to say that comparing abortion at six months to infanticide is the sort of argument that one’s political opponents could use against you—the sort of argument that, as we were talking about a minute ago, might not be worth making because of the potential backlash.
Absolutely, and I’m glad Joe Biden didn’t make it before the last election! I’m not advocating that any political party with a serious chance should make this policy, although in some parts of the world, this is not so crazy. It actually is public policy in the Netherlands.
Harriet McBryde Johnson, the disability-rights lawyer who debated you and wrote about it in a remarkable piece for the Times Magazine, in 2003, had a lot of criticisms, but one that stayed with me is the idea that you might not be in a position to evaluate whether her life involves more suffering than yours, or whether she is worse off than you are—that there might be an element of subjectivity inherent in any calculation of suffering.
I totally agree with that. And, of course, I fully supported Harriet’s right to continue to live and to have the best possible life she could. And her death was a sad loss. [Johnson, whose piece for the Times Magazine began “He insists he doesn’t want to kill me,” died in 2008, in her sleep, at the age of fifty.]
However, Singer would not have supported her right to continue to live as an infant. You have to wonder how he'd explain where a right that wasn't there then came to be there later and how such a deliniated "right" could ever be secure in the judgement of someone else. I suppose he tries to do that in his next statement.
But that doesn’t really help the parent trying to make a decision for their newborn infant, because their newborn infant doesn’t have the subjectivity to express a view on it. They have to make the decision. . .
I have absolutely no confidence in the idea that a "right to live" is based in possessing "the subjectivity to express a view of it." I especially reject the idea that some allegedly superior thinker, be it a philosophy prof, a scientist, a lawyer or judge has a reliably superior ability to identify what "the subjectivity to express a view of it" that is superior to someone they'd rule lacked it. If that's the case with disabled infants, why not healthy infants? Why not infants the parents think is ugly or they decide they don't want, after all? The Darwinian literature is full of proposals for killing infants and praising the practice of, especially, the Spartans for deciding to leave such infants to die of exposure in the typical Mediterranean way that was ubiquitous among many different civilizations, the Jews and, later, Christians a marked exception to that. If I were critically ill, a utilitarian philosopher is someone I'd want kept as far away from me as possible. Especially one who deemed himself capable of declaring me to lack such "subjectivity." I think the word "subjectivity" as used by Singer here is especially problematic on even a definitional level.
I'll come out and say it, his use of the attainment of "subjectivity" is a smokescreen to cover what this really is, a division of People into objects of utility and judging them on the basis of their economic value. Whether that's by him or someone else or the parents he gives such godlike powers to.
. . . You asked me before whether my position has changed. It hasn’t fundamentally changed, but I do accept exactly this point that Harriet and others have made to me—that it’s not good enough for the parents considering this decision to talk to their doctors. They ought to talk to people with a disability that their child has, or, if that’s not possible, because the child has an intellectual disability, then the parents of children with that disability. I accept that our society does have this bias—thinking, Oh, I wouldn’t like to live that life. And you don’t really know what that life is like nearly as well as people who are living it or the parents of people who are living it. That applies to abortion as well, by the way.
The bias that you described—the assumption that a person with a disability is worse off—is that something that you recognized in yourself as these conversations were happening?
To some extent, yeah, I think so. I thought Harriet was a very good example of somebody who lived a rich and fulfilling life despite a severe disability. No intellectual disability in her case, of course. She was very sharp.
Did she change your mind in some way?
Maybe a bit. Maybe a bit.
I would hope that if I held Singer's opinions and done his thinking about this that encountering Harriet McBryde Johnson making the point that someone else cannot decide if someones' life is not worth living would have been a decisive refutation of it. That's one of the secondary problems with the calculations of utilitarianism, of "utility," that it's impossible to decide, ultimately, the desideratum of utilitarianism, the most happiness, or benefit or, in Singer's brand of it, "preference" resulting in an action of that kind is impossible to calculate. It's impossible to calculate if someone's living, someone having children and leading to a line of descendants will make life in the world better or worse. One of the most absurd assumptions of that utilitarian, Malthusian, Darwinist programs is that ALL OF US HAD TO HAVE HAD ANCESTORS WHO SOME UTILITARIAN OR DARWINIST WOULD HAVE LIKED TO REMOVE FROM THE HUMAN SPECIES. OR SUCH ENABLED, INFANTICIDAL PARENTS.
I've mentioned one of my great-great-great grandmothers who was incarcerated in the British death camps, those work houses that Darwin feared wouldn't kill off enough of the poor of Britain to prevent them from leaving issue and infecting the future of the world with in that post linked to above. While it would certainly have offended the tender sensibilities of the Darwin-Wedgwoods, or their cousins the Galtons or his proto-Nazi disciple in German, Haeckel, it is mathematically impossible for any living human being for it not to have been the case considering how many direct ancestors we have, all of whom contributed to the fact of our being alive right now.
The Germans who murdered most of Singers' grandparents were directly in the business of deciding that. They'd already had children, two of whom were able to escape to Australia which inevitably demands asking of how many of the young people, children, babies, murdered in the Nazi's calculations of human utility and worth and cost-benefit analysis would have produced children who would have given far more to the world than they ever "cost" it. And every, single one of those Nazis had people in their own line who they would have killed, believing on the basis of their "applied biology, Nazism" as much in the virtue of their act as any that any utilitarian can imagine as "ethical." Including the willful idiot, Peter Singer. They clearly judged his entire family as being expendable on their own utilitarian valuation. Those who came to such decisions often had superb training in science and medicine and philosophy. Though they left the actual murdering mostly to those they considered the underclass, though superiors of their victims, not a few of them as educated as the Nazi elite, great scholars, scientists, artists, philosophers. . . I am especially dubious about those with academic and professional credentials when they start drawing up lists of who it's OK to kill.
I think you have to be a particularly stupid philosopher to not have understood that to be a fatal flaw of every form of utilitarianism. You have to have made a major investment in your professional training and getting published and promoted in the "enlightenment" era university racket to not have understood or ignored the things that Singer and his allies have to have to arrive at their position. The Nazi genocides started with what, I'm sure, they calculated would be the most widely accepted of genocides, that against the disabled which they started as soon as Hitler made war in Poland and the industrial murder of the disabled began. The excuse was that soldiers would be in need of the resources that went to care for the ones being murdered, the propaganda campaign against those calculated to be "useless eaters" in starvation and depression wracked Germany had been ongoing for years, by then. It was a trial run for the enormously larger scale concentration camp murders, exactly what Donald Trump and his Trumpzies are putting into the public discourse in the United States this month. The various stink-tanks, lawyers groups, other dainty, even university aligned sources of the Republican-fascist plans for how to destroy democracy had their exact counterparts in Nazi planning, that effort preceded the establishment of the Nazi party.
That Peter Singer has changed his mind no more than "maybe a bit" that "You asked me before whether my position has changed. It hasn’t fundamentally changed," is proof of the character of materialism, of scientism and the depravity of the modern university system is not capable of overturning philosophical and ideological positions that, despite being held by would-be liberals and libertarians, lead to things not different in kind but only in listing who to kill, than were on display in the American, Canadian and other eugenics programs and the most successful attempt to exclude millions of people from the future which found inspiration from that, the one the Nazis put into effect. The Holocaust IS the most successful eugenic program, it is the one that did what all such murderous meliorizing philosophers theorize.
I wonder if someone ever asked Peter Singer why ideas as well as People can't be culled from the human future, even on the basis of their failure at producing "optimal happiness, optimal benefit" even, as he might put it, "optimal preference." That he rejects the idea that some ideas have such obviously malignant intentions and such a malignant history of effectively destroying lives, of leading to oppression and enslavement and using up those people in a different program of utilitarian use, is also clear from the interview and his professional activities. In the discussion of his "Journal of Controversial Ideas" Gross put the question to him in a more journalistically acceptable way:
No, I think offering a platform for reasoned argument is not participating in oppression. I think it’s trying to get to the truth.
If, through truth-seeking, you conclude that the person’s argument has an oppressive effect, what comes next? If it turns out that an argument published in the Journal of Controversial Ideas causes more harm than good, what comes next?
That is quite possible—that an individual argument might cause more harm than good. What I and my co-editors believe is that promoting freedom of thought and discussion, on the whole, will do more good than harm, even if occasionally an individual article does cause more harm than good.
What do you think is the role of accountability in this enterprise?
The way to hold academics accountable is to expose the flaws in their argument.
This is one of the best demonstrations of the sheer stupidity of his position, IT ELEVATES IDEAS ABOVE THE PEOPLE THOSE IDEAS ADVOCATE HARMING, OPPRESSING AND EVEN MURDERING! It's as stupid as the "more speech" slogan of the American "civil liberties industry with a little gloss of "ethics" attached.
Does he think no one pointed out the flaws in the arguments of the eugenicists? The Buck v. Bell decision? The Nazis? The ones who were made accountable for those weren't the proponents, they were their stated victims. Many of them "academics" with university positions higher than he's ever attained. He might consider the success of his critiques of the meat industries and other cruelties in making changes in the world. That's what his kind of free discourse and pathetically impotent critique leads to.
I will, in light of what "free speech-press" absolutism and the lies and promotion of depravity permitted under it has brought the United States to, soon go into this section more.
* As the careers of Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould showed, there is a valid critique of that kind to be made in even genuine biological science. Lewontin, in his essay-review "Billions of Demons" noted that the rejection of evolution by American fundamentalists is inevitably tied to class, regional and economic snobbery and insults. He also noted that in the early 20th century it was just those areas which later became rigidly ruled by such fundamentalism where the greatest support for the Socialist Party were to be found. I'd love to go into that more, sometime, and how Socialism lost its progress when the academics and journalistic scribblers took it over, insisted on fitting it into Marxism and made it abhorrent to those who should have been its chief proponents. I don't think any socialism anywhere has much of a chance as a result, which is too bad. Singer has, unsurprisingly, got good things to say about the billionaires and capitalism, if he didn't he'd probably not get on the chat shows and to speak nearly as often. Like so many academics, I think he's pretty much a publicity whore. Since he's mentioned in the interview, I can't think of Stephen Pinker without thinking of Gilderoy Lockhart after reading Harry Potter And The Chamber of Secrets.
