Sir: Peter Singer's article on the ethics of infanticide and
abortion is flawed both in its overall approach and in detail.
Firstly, the approach: the article focuses on the most difficult, borderline cases — eg. anencephalic babies; are they dead? are they alive? — and draws from them its dubious conclusions, then applying these to the rest of the subject. Just as difficult cases do not make good law, neither do they make for generally applicable ethics. The starting point should be to consider what ethics apply to the 95 per cent or more healthy babies of .whom there is no doubt that they are alive and normal.
Perhaps the most outrageous non sequitur in the article is the suggestion that a foetus or small baby can be killed because it is not conscious or self-aware. In fact it is as certain that a foetus will become con- scious, or that a baby will become self- aware, as it is that a sleeping adult will wake up. The sleeping adult is neither con- scious nor self-aware, yet we do not regard it as acceptable to kill those who slumber.
The rest of the argument slithers and searches for all its footholds and justifica- tions in the murk of consensus — 'We are following all those societies, from ancient Greece' . . . 'The moral order that the Pope defends is an empty shell, founded on a set of beliefs that most people have laid aside' and so on. Unlike Professor Singer, the Pope knows precisely where to find the bedrock of moral authority: which is why so many people listen to what he says.
Dry Sandford, Abingdon, Oxfordshire
Previous page
