Wednesday, March 4, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Jeff Jacoby: Intelligence no guarantee of goodness - '...In 2005, Foreign Policy marked its 35th anniversary by asking several thinkers to speculate on what ideas or values taken for granted today will vanish in the next 35 years. "The sanctity of life," answered Peter Singer, looking forward to the day when "only a rump of hard-core, know-nothing religious fundamentalists will defend the view that every human life, from conception to death, is sacrosanct." A year earlier, pronouncing "the whole edifice of Judeo-Christian morality . . . terminally ill," Singer had elaborated on his notorious view that it ought to be lawful to kill severely disabled infants. "All I am saying," he told The Independent, "is, why limit the killing to the womb? . . . Of course infanticide needs to be strictly legally controlled and rare - but it should not be ruled out, any more than abortion."...'
In Singer's case, Jacoby has it backwards. Goodness is no guarantee of intelligence. Singer in fact begins in a fundamentally humane place, that ethics needs to heed suffering. The first set of conclusions that come from this are noble ones, that animals have a right to better care than they generally receive, for example.
But, having build a career on this idea, he doesn't know how to moderate it and see it as part of a spectrum of ethical premises. His humane instincts are not supported by an intelligence capable of reasoning out their application, and he is led into obvious nonsense.