Infanticide advocate Peter Singer now championing ‘open discussion’ on bestiality

Nov 14, 2023 by Jill

by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead:

Whenever a truly reprehensible idea that manages to offend even the dulled moral sensibilities of the Western public is advocated, it is nearly always an ethicist doing it. To those unfamiliar with the academic field of ethics, this might seem counterintuitive. When most people hear the term “ethical,” they think of striving to do the morally right thing, of scrupulosity and honesty. Some of our most prominent ethicists, however, use “ethics” as a way of breaking down moral norms and advocating practices that are overtly evil and not infrequently vile.

For example, as I noted in a lengthy essay earlier this year, the decades-long campaign by some ethicists to advocate for the moral permissibility of infanticide is beginning to pay off. Infanticide advocacy is not the purview of obscure crackpots. Dr. Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago has stated that, as Christianity fades, the “euthanasia of newborns” will be permitted; MIT psychologist Steven Pinker believes that laws against infanticide are difficult to defend; philosopher Michael Tooley stated that infanticide “should be legal up to the time an organism [baby] learned how to use certain expression.” And, of course, Princeton bio-ethicist Peter Singer famously argued in Practical Ethics that killing “a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.”

These campaigns have borne fruit. Dr. Louis Roy of the Quebec College of Physicians recently advocated for the legalization of euthanizing some infants; the Netherlands permits infanticide under the 2004 Groningen Protocol; one study indicates that 93.6 percent of medical professionals in Belgium believe that infanticide is permissible, and nearly 90 percent think that it should be legal in some circumstances. The ideas advocated by ethicists bleed into the culture.

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