Listen, 28 min
Stephen Drake of “Not Dead Yet”
Grassroots disability organizations are demanding the resignation of Peter Singer, a tenured bio-ethics professor at Princeton, after he advocated the killing of disabled infants for economic reasons on a radio talk show
Their on-line petition garnered over 500 signatures in four days, many from people who live with major disabilities. The petition cites Singer’s long history of dismissing the lives of disabled people as well as his recent remarks.
Singer … is advocating that both government run healthcare and private insurance can and should deny care to some people based on real or alleged cognitive and/or physical disabilities for economic reasons.
The petition includes a transcription of much of the radio dialog. You can read it and consider adding your name HERE.
Peter Singer’ 1975 book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, is widely considered to be the founding philosophical statement of the animal liberation movement and his writing is popular among other environmentalists. His thinking is based on the philosophy of Utilitarianism.
Martha Nussbaum, author of Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006), says the Capability Approach provides a more adequate foundation for justice than Utilitarianism can supply. Utilitarianism, Nussbaum argues, ignores adaptive preferences, elides the separateness of distinct persons, misidentifies valuable human/non-human emotions such as grief, and calculates according to “sum-rankings” rather than inviolable protection of intrinsic entitlements.
Eddie Ytuarte talks to Steven Drake of Not Dead Yet about Peter Singer’s latest dangerous statements.
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