>So if torturing one person were somehow the only way you could save 10,000
>innocent lives would it be wrong to do so?
Arguments based upon extreme cases make for bad laws, I think. Anyhow, actually existing torturers almost always use your argument to justify torture. For instance, the Israeli have often justified the torture of Palestinian political prisoners on the ground that information extracted through torture would prevent future terrorism and thus save lives.
>> Peter Singer also says: "Why do we lock up
>> chimpanzees in appalling primate research centres and use them in
>> experiments that range from the uncomfortable to the agonising and lethal,
>> yet would never think of doing the same to a retarded human being at a much
>> lower mental level? The only possible answer is that the chimpanzee, no
>> matter how bright, is not human, while the retarded human, no matter how
>> dull, is." Apparently, Singer thinks that it is arbitrary and
>> unjustifiable to make a distinction between bright chimpanzees and mentally
>> retarded humans and to privilege the latter over the former. Singer's
>> thinking betrays the problem of simple-minded theory of "social
>> construction." Singer suggests that the category of "humanity" is "socialy
>> constructed" and _therefore_ it is insignificant, merely a matter of
>> prejudice. I disagree. _All_ categories are historically constructed, but
>> it doesn't mean that all categories are equally bunk. Essentialist
>> humanism may be subject to critique, but not in Peter Singer's terms.
>>
>
>But Singer is just asking for some justification for the fact that the
>mentally
>defiicient person's being human somehow justifies the differential treatment.
>That does not seem to be unreasonable. Why should just belonging to one
>species
>rather than another lead to such differential ethical evaluation? That's all
>Singer is asking.
In a society in which mentally retarded individuals are not oppressed on the basis of their mental disability, it wouldn't occur to people to ask for a justification for including them into humanity while excluding "bright" chimpanzees. Singer's question makes it clear that while his own humanity is not in question, mentally retarded individuals' is. Singer assumes that he, because he is supposedly "bright," would not serve as a rhetorical wedge for "deconstructing" the category of humanity; however, in the mind of Singer (and in the minds of those who accept his question), mentally retarded humans, because of their low degree of so-called "intelligence," serve very well as a rhetorical wedge, a boundary case comparable to -- well, in fact, implicitly inferior to -- "bright" chimpanzees, in the scale of social worth. In other words, Singer is ranking the worth of human beings according to their degrees of mental capacity. For him, it makes sense to substitute mentally retarded individuals for "bright" chimpanzees as subjects in agonizing and lethal experiments, if chimps are "brighter" than mentally retarded human beings and if doing so would increase the total sum of pleasures for the organicist abstraction called "society." Singer creates two categories of human beings: "bright" ones (like Singer and his readers) who are not comparable to "bright" chimps; and mentally retarded ones who are not only inferior to "bright" humans but also comparable to "bright" chimps. It is Singer, not those who object to "animal rights," that privileges "intelligence" as a marker of social worth.
Yoshie