Yoshie,
You said this brilliantly. I am in awe.
Marta
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> 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