next they'll say they don't feel any pain either...
Posted on 05/07/2012 4:51:54 PM PDT by wagglebee
In February of 2012, a pair of left-wing “philosophers” wrote a paper that claimed that babies aren’t human until they can become cognizant of themselves, aware that if they were to be “aborted” or killed they’d be losing something valuable, their lives.
This, they claimed, justified abortion as well as post birth infanticide. Naturally they had elaborate justifications for their stance and what they wrote is chilling indeed, for it essentially states that only people that think like them are really worth the status of “human,” worth having their lives considered sacrosanct.
The pair, Alberto Giubilini of Milan, Italy, and Francesca Minerva of Australia, held as a central thesis that since abortion is so commonly accepted there had to be a more expansive use for it. That use, the pair decided, should be to cover killing babies born with developmental problems. After all, they said, neither fetuses or newborns “have the same moral status as actual persons,” so this certainly must mean that newborns with catastrophic birth defects could be killed without any moral reservations.
Here is how they justified the non-human status of both a fetus and a born baby.
The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life to an individual.
Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and potential persons, but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject of a moral right to life’. We take ‘person’ to mean an individual who is capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her. This means that many non-human animals and mentally retarded human individuals are persons, but that all the individuals who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing someone a right to life. Indeed, many humans are not considered subjects of a right to life: spare embryos where research on embryo stem cells is permitted, fetuses where abortion is permitted, criminals where capital punishment is legal.
This is chilling for its cold approach to life, but worse for its vagueness.
Let’s examine the main point of what makes someone a worthy human in these liberal’s minds. They feel that unless someone can understand the “basic value” of their own life, then they don’t count for personhood.
This is so entirely ague that anyone can qualify for elimination in a large number of situations.
The pair mentions that mentally retarded people can qualify for elimination, that they aren’t cognizant of the value of their own lives. But are you aware of yourself when you are in a coma from an accident? Are you any longer aware of yourself if you have Alzheimer’s? How about if you have devolved to infantile status at the end of your life? Should your children have the right to just kill you instead of keeping you alive in that case?
How far does this “thought” criteria go? Can these “philosophers” decide that if you are happy drinking beer, working as a car mechanic, and watching reality TV that this isn’t enough cognition to qualify to be self-aware? Could they decide that unless you think exactly like them, why, you aren’t properly a human? Of course they could because they would be in charge of deciding what “thought” qualifies as enough to make you a real person.
Imagine what this means? It means that the left is leaving behind its reliance on “science” and alighting on “thought” to serve as a basis to assess who is worth what. No longer is mere biology something worth considering. That long-held justification for abortion using the unviable cells argument is now out. Instead we will henceforth set out to determine if people are thinking properly to ascertain if they are worth keeping alive.
Chilling, no?
Worse, imagine how much more dangerous these ideas will become when governments decide to use them as a basis for policy! We will have governments determining who is “worth” being called a human based on how the person being judged thinks.
Extremely chilling, indeed.
LifeNews.com Note: Warner Todd Huston is an editorial columnist whose work is featured on numerous web sites. He has also written for several history magazines, and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture.”
Substitute the word fetus for black, or woman or jewish or gypsy or slav or non-believer and you redefine the value of human life. You make it three fifth or three quarters or any ratio you like. It worked in the time of slavery, the twenties with eugenics and nazism and now with islamism. It is the excuse they are looking for. Codify into law and presto a human life is worthless. Scary indeed.
Next semester the subject will be:
Infanticide...Euthinasia’s misunderstood sibling
Could someone please verify that Professors don’t know they are being killed if their skulls are caved in from behind with a Louisville Slugger!
Get back to me will ya?
By that logic, if we snuck up behind the perfessers and blew their heads off with 12-guage shotguns before they knew what was happening, it would be OK.
That is the point-—they are godless Marxists.. redundant, I know-—but their worldview is a “Big Lie”-—the idea that there is no Objective Truth.
It is why they were never allowed to take the oath of citizenship—their ideology is incompatible with a Constitution which believes in Natural Rights from God which is the basis of reason and logic.
We have ignored our Constitution-—since Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr—and thrown out logic and reason-—the foundation of Just Law.
Now—the irrational Postmodern German Philosophy rules in Western Civ....and is destroying freedom and all Natural Rights and is destroying The Rule of Law and replacing it with Stalin’s Separation of Church and State.
We are based on jurisprudence which believes in Supra Positive Law-—higher law than man-made up stuff like “abortion” and things which deny natural rights to all.
Laws of Nature and God’s Laws are the standard that our legal system should be forced to follow-—it is the Supreme Law of America-—or used to be until the Marxists infiltrated our legal system—with Socialist judges and the Communist ACLU and unconstitutional laws.
How very sad. But according to their definition wouldn’t a new born or a one or two month old also not be aware enough so in their mind could still be legally and morally killed?
You're onto them.
Peter Singer and others think that babies can be killed after birth if they don’t “measure up” in some way.
next they'll say they don't feel any pain either...
This is leading up to killing the mentally retarded.
Not as a necessary logical consequence (it’s not really), but as a deliberate tactic for getting people used to the idea.
By this logic then it's OK to shoot someone in the head while they're sleeping...or heavily medicated....or....
Don't tell me the in utero baby does not know he (or she) is being assaulted.
The nation has become undone.
Oh no, not if you start with the ‘professors’. Fear of the Lord is the BEGINNING of wisdom. These ‘professors’ will never make it.
The world has never had a shortage of idiots.
The frightening fact here is that their ideas are being given a stage for serious consideration.
This rot is the ultimate endpoint for the standard way of thinking among secular Western “intellectuals” all of whom suffer from the delusion that a person is his or her (conscious) thoughts. (That delusion is shared by many who are still identifiably Christians, but it invariably leads to spiritual delusion of the sort we Orthodox call “prelest”.)
They don’t know they are about to be killed, but we know it and that’s what matters. If you walk up to someone sleeping and shoot them in the back of their heads, they won’t know it either.
LMAO!!!
Nope, cuz scumbags having a date with Ol Sparky must understand that they committed the crime for which they are be kilt; otherwise, execution is delayed until such time as they do. Go figger!!
These people are such moral hypocrites who place no value on other human lives. To demonstrate, just ask one of them if there should be a penalty for destroying spotted owl eggs or whooping crane eggs or sea turtle eggs. They are so protective of “potential” animal life but want to default to destruction of “potential” human life.
Just try to convince me that these people don’t listen to the voice of Satan.
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