التهافت الاخلاقي لبعض الملحدين او الماديين

Who Is Professor Singer and why Should we care؟


The story goes that after a semester or so away in college, the young woman wrote home to her father. She explained to him that he should not worry. She had pretty much recovered from the accident and her limp was hardly noticeable. Besides the Iranian orderly who changed her bedding in the hospital was really nice, and it wasn’t really his fault he was being deported. The drugs were his roommate’s. But he was able to get her a ticket back to Teheran, where they could be married. “But most important”, she told her father, “none of this is true. The truth is I’m getting a D in English and going on academic probation. I just wanted to put the grades into perspective.” A clever trick—to show how bad things could be—so that her father would not be upset with how things are. And this brings us to Professor Singer.
Peter Singer is an Australian and Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. He is a talented writer and very knowledgeable. He has promoted the idea that newborn babies ought not to be considered human until they are about a month old. Until that time, their parents should have the right to terminate their lives. If the baby is in any way defective — or even if the infant is fine — the parents will have the power to get rid of it. Almost everyone, even staunch advocates of legalized abortion, is horrified by this proposal. Only a handful of people take it seriously. We can safely say that just about every responsible public figure or spokesman in this country would flatly reject Professor Singer’s idea. So why should we care what he says؟ Singer is an intelligent man. His radical proposal is based on some very well thought-out ideas — ideas that most of his fellow scholars and opinion-makers also accept. Human beings, according to most contemporary biological theorists, are simply the most complex, well-developed fruit of evolution. Matter has interacted and complexified. Molecules have interacted to form living material and that material has developed and evolved over millions of years. Quite by chance (and with some help from natural selection) the human brain evolved. This development has put humans at the top of the animal hierarchy in terms of power and ability to dominate the rest of the world. On the other hand, man is not too different from those animals. (In fact, we share over 99% of our genetic material with chimpanzees.) So what is it that makes humans so special؟ According to Singer, it is only our ability to be aware of ourselves and concerned for our own lives that makes us at all ‘special’. It follows, then, that if any other animal has such self-awareness, its life should be respected; it has a right to life. But conversely, any human being who lacks self awareness has no more right to life than a dog or a pig. Peter Singer believes that there is nothing special about human beings — no soul, no immortality, no intrinsic value. All we are is a chance result of molecular collisions and combinations. He is a materialist. Materialism is the fundamental presupposition accepted by most of the scientific community today, and it has an important consequence for morality: Things are important only if we make them important to us. Only matter is objectively real. Morality is relative. Human dignity is relative. Because of this, babies, whether unborn or born, have no worth. Neither do the severely retarded, the seriously ill, or the dying.

This is why Singer is important. He is simply drawing the conclusions that any materialist must draw. If we are nothing but the happy outcome of blind chance and natural selection — if human beings are nothing but the result of evolution — then there is no reason why any inconvenient, painful, or awkward life cannot be ended. Most materialists do not want to accept these conclusions. They think we can be decent and moral without recognizing inherent human dignity. Singer simply proves that the slope is slippery. Unfortunately very few people recognize this. Instead, Peter Singer plays a role like the young woman’s story. She tried to distract her father from her academic failings by showing him how much worse things could be. The point of the joke is that the D in English is a problem, but a much smaller problem than running off to a hostile foreign country with a drug dealer. With the likes of Professor Singer around, other pro-abortion thinkers can say, “Well, we’re certainly not THAT radical.” His proposal is not yet respectable. Respectable advocates of legalized abortion don’t want to admit that they are simply following the same ideas as Singer. However, Peter Singer is becoming respectable. He is a professor of ethics (the study of right and wrong) at a prestigious university. AND he has the courage of his convictions, the nerve to shock his fellow materialists by advocating the unthinkable and to challenge them to live up to these convictions.

http://www3.nd.edu/~areimers/Singer.htm
.Adrian J. Reimer