Singer protest

Micheal Ellis onyxmirr at earthlink.net
Wed Jun 5 18:29:33 PDT 2002



>>>On Wed, 5 Jun 2002 09:10:08 -0700 Marta Russell <ap888 at lafn.org> writes:
>>>
>>> > Statement of the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
>>>> (DREDF)
>>>>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> According to Singer, to be ethical, we must treat all "persons"
>>>> according to moral guidelines. But not all humans are "persons" in
>>>> his view. Singer claims that in order to be "persons" and to deserve
>>>> moral consideration, beings must be self-aware, and capable of
>>>> perceiving themselves as individuals through time.
>>>
>>>Does anyone here have any objections to Singer's thesis concerning
>>>persons?

about deserving moral consideration? or about being a "person" or not? about "moral consideration", trees deserve "moral consideration". the only question is how much....as for the rest of it, and i'm just going by the paraphrase above, the question over what's a person is fairly irrelevant if i'm not mistaken chimps are "self aware" aren't they? the only mental difference is the capacity for language right? i don't really see any distinct seperation for persons other than like specie criteria or whatever. one can't go around making language evaluations because one can be sentient and be deficient with language...because there's a certain window (i think it's like 3 to 7 years old) where if humans aren't introduced to language, mostly happening with isolated deaf people, that capacity becomes very limited.

~M.E.



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