>As indeed is Singer, since I think his views on who you can kill are far
>narrower than Marta seems to think. The comment about hemophiliacs, for
>example: S thinks that if you have a baby that is a hemophiliac and it is
>under a month, you can kill it--just like you can kill any other baby under
>a month. Its being hemophiliac is not relevant, except insofar as its having
>a less happy life and being more of a bother to its parents is relevant to
>how much happiness there would be if you did. I find this way of talking
>horrible, but the point is not that it is open season on hemophiliacs, but
>open season on less-than-one-month old babies. For Singer, anyway.
In general, yes, all infants less than one month old are not "persons" according to Singer; four grounds (the classical utilitarian claim that since self-conscious beings are capable of fearing their own death, killing them has worse effects on others; the preference utilitarian calculation that counts the thwarting of the victim's desire to go on living; a theory of rights according to which to have a right to life one must be able to desire one's own continued existence; and respect for the autonomous decisions of a rational agent) against killing "persons" do not apply to any newborn infant. However, the *crucial distinction* is that, in Singer's view, the disabled infant poses "a threat to the happiness of the parents, and any other children they may have":
***** The difference between killing disabled and normal infants lies not in any supposed right to life that the latter has and the former lacks, but in other considerations about killing. Most obviously there is the difference that often exists in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the parents....So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents....
It's different when the infant is born with a serious disability....Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against killing it.... (_Practical Ethics_ 183) *****
So, Singer's utilitarian purpose is to help the unhappy parents of an unexpectedly disabled infant to gain a philosophical justification for killing him or her and replacing him or her with another baby. The reason why "normal" babies are not in the same danger from Singer's view of moral "nonpersonhood" of newborns is that their parents usually love them and do not want to kill them. It's not the same with disabled babies; if Singer's assumptions are correct, their parents may very well feel the burden of caring for the disabled infants to be a major threat to their happpiness, so much so that, should Singer's bioethic ever get adopted by any government and turned into a law, some of them may feel relieved to have their disabled babies euthanized by doctors. Singer argues: "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed" (186). The total view, remember, treats infants as "replaceable, in much the same way as it treats non-self-conscious animals" (186). Singer explains that, through prenatal diagnosis and selective abortions, some parents are already acting upon the principle of replaceability. Since for Singer there is no distinction between fetus and baby, he of course thinks that it is only rational that parents' happiness should be increased by the logical extension of an already existing practice to newborns. You are correct to say that Singer does not advocate a genocide of disabled infants & mentally retarded adults, much less simply physically disabled adults: "the position taken here does not imply that it would be better that no people with severe disabilities should survive" (189). However, given his views that disabled people's lives are "less worth living" than the lives of people who are not disabled (188-9) and that it is not "mere prejudice or bias that leads us to choose to have a child without a disability" (54), Singer is practically arguing that parents of the disabled newborn are not only morally justified in killing him/her but also it is in the best interest of all those affected, including the infant in question, to end his/her life before s/he gains "personhood." So Singer's argument is for a form of eugenics through selective infanticide. Parents' desire for a non-disabled baby, for him, has more moral weight than the life of a disabled newborn, since parents are "persons" and a newborn a "nonperson."
Yoshie