Singer's Syllogisms and the Undeniable Humanity of Harriet McBryde Johnson (original) (raw)
Unspeakable Conversations, an essay written by the late Harriet McBryde Johnson, contains Johnson's extremely personal and candid reflections on her interactions with Peter Singer, an Australian moral philosopher and Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. She disagrees strongly with Peter Singer's views on selective infanticide of disabled infants, though she struggles to defend her own view because as an atheist she can see that Singer's views are reasonable. In this essay, I defend Johnson's view against that of Singer by showing how Singer is able to be both reasonable and wrong at the same time.
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Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2016
In her account of a debate held at Princeton University between herself and Peter Singer, the lawyer and disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson criticizes the " terrible purity of Singer's vision. " Although she certainly disagrees with the substance of Singer's arguments concerning disability and infanticide, this remark is best understood as a critique of their form. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this critique. I argue that Singer's characteristic mode of argument, with its appeal to a universal, neutral point of view, makes it impossible for McBryde Johnson to give voice to her particular experience and thus obscures her humanity. In order to clarify the positive contribution that an appeal to particular experience may make to moral reasoning, I draw a parallel with the transformative effects of the experience of beauty, arguing that McBryde Johnson's writing ought to be regarded as both morally and philosophically instructive.
In January 2003 at The Society of Christian Ethics meeting, a panel reviewed the sociologist John H. Evans recent book, based on his doctoral dissertation. While the focus of Evans' book is the debate over genetic engineering, the book is also a commentary on the evolution of different conceptions of moral discourse in the public realm in the latter part of the 20th century. Since Evans discusses the possibility of theological voices participating in public debates, and specifically looks at this possibility in the context o American bioethical commissions, the four panelists were chosen because of their prominence on these debates - Hauerwas and Stout in terms of the place of theology in public discourse; Meilaender and Childress since both have been members of US Presidential bioethics commissions.
A Cool Hand on My Feverish Forehead: An Even Better Samaritan and the Ethics of Abortion
Philosophy Study, 2012
The debate concerning abortion abounds in miraculous narratives. Judith Jarvis Thomson has contrived the most celebrated set among related ones to wit the “violinist analogy,” the “Good Samaritan” narrative, and the “Henry Fonda” allegory, by virtue of which, she intends, on the one hand, to argue that women’s right to autonomy outweighs the alleged fetus’s right to life, and on the other, to prove that no positive moral duties can be derived towards other persons alone from the fact that a moral agent is ascribed certain rights. What this short paper endeavors to prove is that Thomson’s argumentation by analogy is a weak one, since neither the number nor the relevance of similarities invoked is adequate or satisfactory, while crucial parameters concerning the morality of abortion are being totally overlooked.
Human lives: Critical essays on consequentialist …, 1996
This offers a broader critique of the failure of consequentialism to cope with notions of innocence and justice. A critic of utilitarianism, Laing argues that Singer cannot without contradicting himself reject baby farming (a thought experiment that involves mass-producing deliberately brain damaged children for live birth for the greater good of organ harvesting) and at the same time hold on to his “personism” a term coined by Jenny Teichman to describe his theory of fluctuating (and Laing says, discriminatory) human moral value. His explanation that baby farming undermines attitudes of care and concern for the very young, can be applied to babies and the unborn (non-persons on his view) and contradicts positions that he adopts elsewhere in his work.
The Difference that Difference Makes: Bioethics and the Challenge ofDisability
The Journal of medicine and philosophy, 2004
Two rival paradigms permeate bioethics. One generally favors eugenics, euthanasia, assisted suicide and other methods for those with severely restricting physical and cognitive attributes. The other typically opposes these and favors instead ample support for "persons of difference" and their caring families or loved ones. In an attempt to understand the relation between these two paradigms, this article analyzes a publicly reported debate between proponents of both paradigms, bioethicist Peter Singer and lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson. At issue, the article concludes, are two distinct axiomatic sets of values resulting in not simply different styles of rhetoric but different vocabularies, in effect two different languages of ethics.
Children, Fetuses, and the Non-Existent: Moral Obligations and the Beginning of Life
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy , 2021
The morality of abortion is a longstanding controversy. One may wonder whether it is even possible to make significant progress on an issue over which so much ink has already been spilled and there is such polarizing disagreement (Boyle, 1994, The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 19:183-200). The papers in this issue show that this progress is possible-there is more to be said about abortion and other crucial beginning-of-life issues. They do so largely by applying contemporary philosophical tools to moral questions involving life's beginning. The first two papers defend the pro-life view from recent objections involving miscarriage and abortion doctors. The third shows how the social model of disability and the concept of transformative experience apply to classic debates like abortion and euthanasia. The final two papers address how rights and harms apply to children and to beings that do not yet exist. All five papers make a noteworthy contribution to the moral issues that arise at the beginning of life.
Studia Nauk Teologicznych PAN, 2023
The question of the human person is very important for moral theology because of the possibility of responsible human action. Nevertheless, the old utilitarianism that already comes from the empiricist position of Hume reduces the calculation of costs and benefits to an evaluation of the pleasant/unpleasant of the individual subject. The new utilitarianism takes its inspiration from Bentham and Mill and can be summarized in a threefold injunction: maximizing pleasure, minimizing pain, and expanding the sphere of personal freedom for the greatest number of persons. One of the popular promoters of preference utilitarianism in modern times is the Australian ethicist Peter Singer, whose controversial views attracted much attention not only from the scientific community in the late 1970s. In this paper we will try to show a critique of this position in several figures of philosophical and theological ethics as well as a defence of the importance of the notion of the human person and human dignity for the integral protection of human life from conception to natural death and of anthropocentrism as such in respect for all creation and all of nature.
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