Tuesday 31 March 2009

Self-Conscious, Indeed

Do you know of any other philosopher - at least who has never been one of his doctoral candidates or his underlings, and really at all - who would agree with Peter Singer that, for example, a one-year-old pig takes precedence over a newborn baby because of the pig's greater "self-consciousness"?

Yet Singer is the author of the very long Encyclopedia Britannica article on ethics, basically a plug for his book, which is subtitled The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics. And he enjoys endless media exposure for his theory of "speciesism" as if it were the consensus, or at the very least a widely held, opinion.

How does he get away with it? Seriously, how?

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