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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

There, this is one of the great philosophers of our time. He is an advocate of abortion and against cruelty to animals. He is in no way a hypocrite but instead follows the beliefs of utilitarianism. Please read his beliefs on abortion and let's have a discussion.


Singer argues that a fetus is both alive and human. From the utilitarian mindset he believes in bringing happiness to the most people possible. As such he argues that a child whose brain has yet to develop has no thoughts in which to counter those of the woman who wishes to get an abortion. These arguments coincide with his belief that although eating meat is not a bad thing, the way we treat animals in most situations are inhumane and so he recommends a vegetarian lifestyle until we figure out how to properly treat animals.

Singer's ideas on how to make the most people/animals happy at one time are interesting but far too idealistic and completely ignore potentiality. In one article by Singer he claims:

Other opponents say the fetus has the potential to become a person, that is, a thinking, rational being, like ourselves, and the dog or chimpanzee do not have that potential. But why should mere potential give a being a right to life?

and:

Scientists have shown, in many different species, including monkeys, that it is possible to clone an animal by taking the nucleus of an ordinary cell, and implanting it in an egg from which the nucleus has been removed.

There is no biological reason to suppose that this would not work for human beings. This means that billions of our cells have the potential to become an actual person.

Yet no one thinks that we have an obligation to "save" all these cells and turn them into people.

To which I responded:

Of course it is ridiculous to save each cell and create life with it, but the cells that form the fetus are already in the process of creating life. By aborting the fetus you are cutting off a process that has already begun.

If you're going to continue comparing humans to animals then you might want to consider the fact that any human being has more potential than an animal. The most intelligent ape can only barely reach the intellectual capacity of the least intelligent human. Even if that ape is smarter, he can not be called our equal simply because he does not have the same potential that we do. So that is what differentiates us from animals, sheer potential.

Why should potential give a right to life? On what basis do you have to take away that life in the first place? A being with the potential to be equal to or greater than you intellectually has just as much right to survive as you do if not for the sole fact that he already exists as a being who could affect the world positively. Again, this fetus exists as more than a single cell at this point and therefore it is currently on the road to having its potential met far more than a cell found in my arm.

Why not, by your arguments, kill people who are mentally or physically handicapped? Morally, one might argue that it's because they feel pain. However, animals feel pain, and we must differentiate ourselves from them or we are getting into an entirely different moral issue here that leads to veganism. They are our equivalents in potential. We consider them people too, because they are just as likely as we are to attain knowledge and be great. If there is a sliding scale of human potential, it is separate from the sliding scale of ape potential, and though there are people at the bottom, who have not attained the most a human can have, it's the very fact that they are on the same scale as us and have the potential to be at the upper end just as much as anyone else that makes it immoral to take their life away.

Of course, I thought he was just a reporter when I'd responded or I would have cited my sources for my arguments... since they are based on theories by philosophers far more famous than him. razz

Better not be pro-choice. I ******** don't want ma baby-daddy trying to push me down no stairs. Not that he doesn't try now, but if I was pregnant I mean.

mad

I thought you meant for a second that he was pro-choice, then I thought he was pro-life, then I knew he was pro-choice, confused me at first xD

Anyways, I've been seeing more of this "Save the Animals, Kill the Fetus" movement coming along.

And, that cell thing, very irrational, if every cell in our body became a person, we would no longer exist as one central human being, and there'd be massive population increases, and... we'd be like... like devolving, each one of us a bacteria... I'm not sure if they proved that it would develop as a fetus would yet x.X