Peter Singer, writing in the New York Times: “Is a world with people in it better than one without? Put aside what we do to other species — that’s a different issue. Let’s assume that the choice is between a world like ours and one with no sentient beings in it at all….No one’s rights will be violated — at least, not the rights of any existing people. Can non-existent people have a right to come into existence?”
Jim Jones, speaking in Jonestown, Guyana: “It’s been done by every tribe in history, every tribe facing annihilation. All the Indians in the Amazon are doing it right now. They refuse to bring any babies into the world. They kill every child that comes into the world, because they don’t want to live in this kind of a world.”
Peter Singer: “Few of us would think it right to inflict severe suffering on an innocent child, even if that were the only way in which we could bring many other children into the world. Yet everyone will suffer to some extent, and if our species continues to reproduce, we can be sure that some future children will suffer severely.”
Jim Jones: “I don’t think it is what we want to do with our babies. I don’t think that’s what we had in mind to do with our babies. It was said by the greatest of prophets, from time immemorial, ‘No man takes my life from me, I lay my life down.'”
Peter Singer: “Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off…”
Jim Jones: “So my opinion is that we (must) be kind to children and be kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to in ancient Greece, and step over quietly because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act…”
Peter Singer: “Is life worth living? Are the interests of a future child a reason for bringing that child into existence? And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent future human beings?”
Jim Jones: “There’s no use, Christine, it’s just not worth living like this … not worth living like this…We had, we had some value…but now we don’t have any value…I’m tired of being tormented to hell, that’s what I’m tired of…”
I am pretty sure Jimby Jones is dead and I can only hope the Peter Singer loon is dead too.
This world is no place for people like them.
Also, if I may, those are exactly the sort of thoughts that propel the leftist mind.
That is why they must never again be allowed to govern. They are truly mentally and emotionally defective. You can see it all in Obama.
When I read some of Ayn Rand’s novels when I was young, I thought they were entertaining but implausible, and I thought her philosophy to be unworkable.
Well I still think “objectivism” is unworkable, but her plots seem to be coming alive in front of me, particularly her contention that certain political attitudes are fundamentally suicidal.
I think what Peter Singer probably means is the planet would be a much nicer place if YOU weren’t in it. I am pretty sure that he doesn’t plan on leaving the world. He is the ONE who needs to be around to make sure that YOU kill your children properly.
Well all i can say is if you want to not have kids or kill your own kids while i think your a scumbag …if it means preventing yuor type of lunacy in the future then you go ahead and don’t have kids or kill your kids or what ever and i will have my 6 kids plus one (from a previous relationship) and i will also try to adopt and produce freedom loveing fair honest and just people to enter the world to constantly build and better the earth .
Paul in calgary.
Its high time we got down to the real issue. It’s not about global warming, it never has been. It’s about population control, all apsects.
Humans have to eat and reproduce like any other living creature.
They possess a great mind true enough, but have trouble reconciling the instincs packaged with it.
And that makes life hard for those who wish to dwell on it, and other things the CREATOR designed.
The rest of us grow up, try to raise successfull ofspring, last as long as we can, and stink when we die. Like every other animal.
Pretty simple if you don’t let the socialists sidetrack you into inane pointless debates.
We are not superior, as living beings go. We just allow our egos free reign and think we are.
Eastern Paul muses “We are not superior, as living beings go. We just allow our egos free reign and think we are.
Sorry chap,as a human we are superior to all others.And I know you won’t like this,most are superior to you.
Time to read Tom Clancy’s “Rainbow Six” again. Incidentally, my mother thought she was bringing me into a world of deprivation and defeat during the blackest period of WWII. She persisted with me and I am still here having had a successful career, a nice family and a fulfilling retirement volunteering. Don’t listen to the doomsayers – let them wander in the streets with their sandwich board proclaiming the end of humanity! Oh, and laugh at them for their sick proclamations.
That comment was unworthy of you, wallyj.
Peter Singer thought it was perfectly acceptable to debate with his medical students the merits of keeping alive an ill infant in front of the parents. Apparently, people with sick or premature children don’t have enough to worry about.
The man is an SOB. If he spent more time doing research and less time listing the ways in which life could suck, he might have accomplished something the whole human race could use.
I guess I’m being too optimistic about someone like Peter Singer.
the biggest problem with these wackjobs is that they’ll try and force their will, their ideas, and their plans on the rest of society first.
Ah, the secular humanist dream where 10 million brilliant descendants of “la creme de la creme” of our world will spend their time worshiping Gaia and casually overseeing an army of robots engaged in all the donkey work that sees to their comfort. There may be a few hiccups along the way when impatience to reach the goal leads to mountains of formerly living bodies who didn’t quite understand their place in the grand plan. But all in all…………..
Is life worth living?
Not for you Peter Singer.
Prince Charles in his speech on Islam and the Environment took on the problem of a world population that is unsustainable.
In his view, the Earth could not “sustain us all”, particularly if a “vast proportion” is consuming natural resources at “Western levels”.
Who decides then who lives or dies, and who procreates and who doesn’t? Or maybe we have to wait for a world leader to answer that for us.
I can’t recall seeing such a devastating juxtaposition. Nice work, EBD!
Almost everyone who lived before 1900 lived comparatively short, brutal lives with few comforts, few real medicines, and few painkillers. Yet most of them didn’t question the value of life — they lived courageous, active lives building the future for future generations.
Now the irony. We who benefit from millennia of their effort, question whether we should kill ourselves off! Just when the going gets good!
Sure, we have serious problems. But not so serious compared to those who went before.
Who knows whether Singer is sincere, trolling, or engaged in some sort of cruel experiment on the general public. But this sort of thought is characteristic of a civilization in decline. Should humanity survive, it won’t be consist of anyone who thinks like that.
EBD,I respectfully beg to differ. There is only one species that goes out of it’s way to help other species survive. That would be ours. Altruism is very much confined to the humam species. There may be rare exceptions in the animal world. Eastern Paul comes across a fragrant earth-child that wants to be one with nature. That notion plays well in poetry and children’s books,but not in reality.
What an asshole… Singer should make the decision his parents should have made.
First off, this article isn’t Singer on a soap box; he’s actually discussing David Benatar’s 2006 book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence. Singer most likely addresses Benatar’s writings now since Benatar’s earlier book, Life Death & Meaning has recently gone to a second edition.
It’s actually a good piece, but you have to read the whole thing. Benatar looks at the situation with nothing more than cold logic, effectively denying that which makes us human. Singer rebuts this in the final paragraph with two important words, ‘optimist’ and ‘believe’. He then puts the original questions to the reader again.
This sort of knee jerk rejection of Singer because he starts a discussion of the topic does no one any favours. The flaws in David Benatar’s ideas can not be exposed if we don’t allow someone to start the ball rolling.
The reason that questions such as this can be asked is that we are roughly in the position of the UFO expert.
A UFO expert is said to know everything there is to know about UFOs except where they’re from, what they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re here.
I must also protest against the definition of life we are offered. It is restricted to the idea of life as a biological organism. After relentless study for many years, I am convinced that biological life is one phase, but there are phases of life that transcend existence in a sensory based existence with a primitive central nervous system.
These are not new questions. Christianity designates the beginning of life as we understand it by the Biblical “fall”. A Semitic way of thinking about a fall into an existence primarily constrained by material characteristics and sensory apprehension.
The idea of the “fall” is echoed in comparative religions with the idea of the descent into the kali yuga. In the East there is a gigantic cosmological scheme that corresponds roughly with the Greek Golden Age, Silver Age, etc..
The kali yuga is said to be the yuga of darkness, when materialism has managed to obscure higher ideals, values, and direct apprehension of the spiritual order.
So religions in the East and West have been wrestling with the ideas for a long time.
So basically I do not accept the premises on which the questions are asked. I don’t believe life is restricted to existence in material form, and I believe these questions would disappear in light of knowledge of who we are, what we are, what we’re doing here, and why.
On the other hand, the quick answer is that if you feel the way this article suggests, don’t get married, don’t have kids.. and as long as there are motel rooms and hard liquor, we can be assured that things will continue on irrespective of the speculations of philosophers.
Wally, I was talking about the last sentence in your 10:11 post. I doubt that if you were having a sociable with eastern paul – say you’d just met him – that you would say that to him.
Yes, his proffered opinion wasn’t yours, but it’s a reasonable view. He just pointed out that we live and die like every other animal, and aren’t special in that regard, and that our heads get so big – like Singer – that we forget that. I don’t think he was saying we’re not smarter than a porcupine, for example.
I don’t think it’s right to tell someone you don’t even know that most people in the world are better than him, simply because you disagree with one statement, or word, in his post. I never saw you do that before, so…
JCP, read Peter Singer’s articles. He really is an SOB. Any reaction to his cold, hard cynicism is hardly knee-jerk.
JCP (10:41) I disagree with your interpretation of Singer’s position. Yes, in an after-the fact and all but obligatory partial-disavowal suggesting, tonal evidence to the contrary, that HE doesn’t necessarily share all the ideas in Benatar’s book, Singer used the words “optimistic” and “believe,” but to read Singer’s piece and come away thinking that he wasn’t thoroughly and comprehensively entertaining the merit of the ideas in Benatar’s “fine book” would be a bit tone-deaf.
After his cursory one-time mild disavowal Singer concludes by stating that the act of “justifying” our “choice” to survive –
“…forces us to reconsider the deep issues with which I began. Is life worth living?…And is the continuance of our species justifiable in the face of our knowledge that it will certainly bring suffering to innocent human beings?”
That’s Singer’s conclusion, not Benatar’s.
If, upon reading Mein Kampf, I state that the “fine book” gets us thinking about some important questions, it wouldn’t really do to say once, in passing, “needless to say, *I* am more optimistic that the solution won’t necessarily require…”
Read the comments attached to the article. If I was an advertiser in the NYT I wouldn’t be any more. Its readership is a bunch of loons.
Months ago, I entered a long post here which said that the Left, whether they knew it or not, were the party of death, I was disappointed that it was ignored. I repeat the basics here:
The more you follow the logic of the left (an oxymoron, to be sure), the more you find it leads inexorably to death. Death by abortion, death by euthanasia, death by poverty, death by planned parenthood. Death is the ultimate end point of leftist politics; after you’ve stripped all the productive people of what they can give, you can only strip the remaining carcasses for so long.
This thesis is proved by an extremely simple experiment: when has any *actual* capitalist economy, promoting individuality and right to property, ever experienced a long term reduction in population growth (ex war)? When has a population promoting the socialist ideals seen native population decline? See: Italy, Greece, France, Holland, and of course, Quebec.
I have two magnificent, beautiful, intelligent daughters. I want them to grow, to find what it is that excites and enthuses them, and for them to follow those goals. I hope, that somewhere along the way, children will be one of their goals. But if people like Pete Singer and Will Smith are dictating the social compact, I despair that they ever will.
KevinB, you say it well. Pol Pot’s executioners whispered to the victims as they slitting their throats that “it was for the good of the people”. This comment was from an article in Reader’s Digest some years ago.
Dianne Francis of the National Post, in an article last fall, suggested that there were 6 billion too many people on earth. She seems to agree with Pete Singer.
Look on the bright side. If liberals follow their own views on procreation there soon will be no liberals left. But somehow I do not think that this is their plan. I suspect that their plan is along the lines of the plans that Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and Mau Tse Tung had.
I hadn’t read any of Singer’s other work until this evening, and had mistakenly thought he was just another Times columnist. Point readily conceded.
“Is a world with people in it better than one without?”
It is for us, stupid.
Are you sure you want to concede a point, JCP? It’s up to you, but you should know that you’ll be breaking our commenters’ collective years-long undefeated streak…
/:>)>
Peter Singer is famous for this kind of drivel. This is fairly tame, most of his crap is much worse. Liberalism is a death cult and he’s a priest of it.
Singer’s the kind of guy Sam Colt was thinking about when Sam invented the revolver. All due respect to Sam’s memory, I say we go up and nuke ’em from orbit.
Its the only way to be sure.
Is a world with people in it better than one without? – I don’t geddit; what “world” would there be “without”?
Singer will defend infanticide, but considers the eating of shrimp morally indefensible. There’s other fun stuff, like necrophilia and bestiality… do look him up, if you haven’t. His agenda is to degrade humanity. He’s a highly educated and intelligent ghoul, and I can never look at him or read him without getting the sense that someone disturbed a crypt in Transylvania and shipped the contents to Princeton.
Oh, and his theories about how we should go about helping the third world are, to put it elegantly, stoopid.
Funny how the most densely populated areas (New York City’s Park Avenue and Greenwich Village, Vancouver’s West End, London’s Belgravia and Knightsbridge) have the highest property prices. You would think people would pay less to live in overcrowded areas. Do the math. If you divided the world’s human population into nice suburban families of four, gave each a quarter acre (a BIG suburban lot these days) the whole population would not fill Quebec, Labrador and Newfoundland (about 322,000 sq km to spare). Overpopulation? Not enough of me, way too much of you.
Gord Tulk @11:21 – yeah, the comments on that NYT article are something else. Maybe the approaching demise of the Grey Lady will occur even sooner than it was going to anyway when the remaining readership commit mass suicide.
I’m with wallyj, not so much on his intemperate statement, but on his reaction of revulsion that anyone would even consider such a concept. It shows a total lack of faith, hope, and charity.
C.S. Lewis and the Green Book.
“… The Green Book. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves.”
…-
“THE ABOLITION OF MAN”
“MEN WITHOUT CHESTS
So he sent the word to slay
And slew the little childer.
—TRADITIONAL CAROL
I doubt whether we are sufficiently attentive to the importance of elementary text books. That is why I have chosen as the starting-point for these lectures a little book on English intended for ‘boys and girls in the upper forms of schools’. I do not think the authors of this book (there were two of them) intended any harm, and I owe them, or their publisher, good language for sending me a complimentary copy. At the same time I shall have nothing good to say of them. Here is a pretty predicament. I do not want to pillory two modest practising schoolmasters who were doing the best they knew: but I cannot be silent about what I think the actual tendency of their work. I therefore propose to conceal their names. I shall refer to these gentlemen as Gaius and Titius and to their book as The Green Book. But I promise you there is such a book and I have it on my shelves.”
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/lewis/abolition1.htm
“Its high time we got down to the real issue. It’s not about global warming, it never has been. It’s about population control, all apsects.”
Eric-vancouver
I’m not sure if you snarling at what they think or it is your own view/prescription but here are a few facts for you:
-The world’s population explosion is slowing down. Drastically. Japan, followed by Russia and it’s neighboring eastern block countries are in population decline. Europe is static or in decline depending where you look. Similar scenario in North America. China and India, once the leaders in human growth have slowed down a lot in the past 20 years.
The middle east is a net provider of immigrants and have currently the highest ratio of nativity. Not necessarely in the ME but wherever they reside in the world(It’s part of their Jihad).
If the trend continues and it will, the world’s new births will be in sharp decline by 2030.
Humans are also living longer and by 2050, 30% of the world will be over 45 years old.
EBD – The tipping point was Singer’s stated position on zoophilia. I think I would prefer that he not attempt to bugger the family cat.
In the late sixties a high school teacher gave us some sage advice. He said never march with the PEACE sign. He told us the peace movement had good beginnings and was basically high jacked; the new leadership rolled the symbol around. It used to represent the tree of life and now a missile. Peace movement, overpopulation and global warming fears all seem to be related in this deception. “While people are saying “Peace and safety,” destruction will come on them suddenly…So then, let us not be like the others, who are asleep, but let us be alert and self controlled.”
Seems that poor peter is having issues finding the bright side of life.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlBiLNN1NhQ&feature=related
Stalin, Mao, and Stalin were not eugenicists or concerned with a population bomb notion.
They found themselves ruling their respective countries, based on their foolish notions of socio-economics and when they were confronted with failure to serve and provide for the masses they adopted the solution of reducing the population to the means of supply.
Right Honourable Terry Tory
Yes we are part of nature and naturally adopt our numbers. The ME and Africa are like rabbit’s having their numbers controlled by disease and famine.
A classic example is the experience of Kenya. The aboriginal population was Masai and Kikuyu. Genetically more or less similar there was a prey preditor relationship. Masai raided Kikuyu for food cattle and wives….and controlled the prolific Kikuyu population while maintaining a low replacement rate themselves.
The colonial Brits, in a fit of benevolence intervened and forced the Masai to raise cattle and cease raiding. Free of Masai raiding the Kikuyu population exploded and the cattle numbers as well. A periodic drought magnified the ecological damage and predators such as lions and hyenas population exploded with the abundance of dead and dying cattle and wild life.
The result a plague of lions, hyenas and war (Mau Mau emergency).
This begs the question—are these periodic genocides by such as Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot a natural control?
A disturbing question to be sure……
Singer’s what we call an “anti-human death-freak” where I come from.
Rosie D – My understanding was that the international (so-called) peace sign was introduced by Sir Bertram Russell, and that it was an inverted cross, symbol of Christianity, as Russell, besides being just plain weird, was an atheist (And a brilliant mathematician; before Vίtruvius comes storming to his defense.)
In addition to my rejection of Singer’s contentions because I regard his premises as short-sighted with assumptions that have by no means been proved, I also have another bone to pick with him.
Singer informs us that Schopenhauer pointed out that the satisfactions of life are often transitory. Sure, you buy a new car and some years down the road it no longer satisfies you and you want to buy another.
However, Schopenhauer’s great work, The World as Will and Representation, was essentially a restatement of the Upanishads.
And as a consequence, Schopenhauer’s contention was never that it was impossible to find ultimate happiness in existence. It was just impossible to find happiness in transitory phenomena. And of course purchases are not transformational.
However, the entire contention of the Upanishads is that there is an ultimate happiness to be discovered in existence whether one is in the corporeal world or outside of it. And in fact that the discovery of this ultimate happiness is the whole raison d’etre of this crazy world in the first place.
This would be the equivalent of some preacher pointing out that your can try to find happiness in sex, becoming a big shot, dressing to the nines in designer labels, but happiness will never be yours until you accept Jesus Christ inasmuch as in his will is our true peace.
So not only do I reject Singer’s arguments on the basis of his premises seen above, I find he is completely flawed in his reference to Schopenhauer for the idea that happiness cannot be found in the midst of existence.
Singer is either dishonest or naive.
Hey larben,
Here’s a little Bertrand Russell for you and everyone else. Singer and Benatar are nothing new in relation to progressive thought.
“I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing… War… has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full… The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s… There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority…”
– Bertrand Russell, THE IMPACT OF SCIENCE ON SOCIETY 1953
Malcolm Muggeridge understood the progressive mind as this essay from the 70s reveals. It’s titled “The Great Liberal Death Wish.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/articles/MuggeridgeLiberal.shtml
Eastern Paul,EBD,my apologies,I was too quick to quick to judge, I will try to avoid that in the future.
If I understand the idea presented by Benatar as interpreted by Singer it goes something like this: Do we have a right to bring a being in the world who has potential to suffer when, if this being doesn’t come into existence, it will never know whether it is suffering or happy–it simply won’t exist at all.
To turn the argument around: do we have a right to deny a being the possibility of happiness, achievement, and love, even though it may be remote, in order to guarantee that it will not suffer?
To make this the “last generation” would leave the Earth to itself I suppose. It would continue to be a planet supporting various forms of life. But don’t you think we have as much right to exist as a reptile or a butterfly? Would the earth be any better off if it grew only trees, grass and bovines? What then would be the point?
If we weren’t here, none of this would matter. True. But, since we ARE here (perhaps I’m assuming but let’s just pretend) why would we consider eliminating ourselves from this planet? What benefit would we confer on the universe that anyone (thing, being, whatever) would care about or appreciate? Isn’t it rather cowardly–albeit on behalf of the unborn who could care less right now–to assume they can’t handle life? Why should future generations be any less successful at realizing their lives than we–however imperfectly? Doesn’t each one of us remember at least one moment of pure transcendent joy? That moment that you wouldn’t have missed for the world? Or many lesser joys. Would you give those up in order to not have suffered? Why would we deny that potential to our descendents in the deluded belief that it would protect them from feeling bad occasionally?
RickC- Thanks for that, loved St. Muggs. Once read an essay by Russell where he attempts to explain his disbelief by telling of the story in the NT where Jesus is said to have reached up while sitting under a fig tree or some such, and finding no fruit, curses the tree so that it shrivels up and dies. Now even a youngster would see this as a parable or similitude on the importance of bearing fruit as we make our way through life. Not Sir Bertram though, he said he couldn’t worship or respect anyone who would do this violence to a tree.
I’m presently reading Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and it is of similar depth.
I see very similar thinking in my depressed patients — one patient of mine was ready to kill himself because he realized his cat would enentually die, he’d be alone and thought he’d be better off dead. The problem here is that the emotional response to the obvious fact is defective: animals will die before their owners in the vast majority of cases and the properly functioning brain enjoys their company while they’re alive.
Transitoriness of pleasures is hard wired into the brain and is likely a solution to the problem of wetware getting stuck in a deep rut which would be the case if pleasurable events were equally pleasurable all of the time.
I’ve been called overoptimistic and overconfident in the ability of science and technology to provide solutions to major world problems. Thus far I’ve been proven right far more often than I’ve been proven wrong in this regard.
Benetar’s views strike me as psychopathologic and, while I haven’t read any of his work aside from what was quoted in the NYT article, I see no reason to as I get my share of depressives on a daily basis as it is. Perhaps he should have another stab at writing after a course of ECT as his brain is clearly in need of a reboot. Maybe I should have starting reading the article from the end and stopped where it is noted that Singer is a bioethicist; I have yet to find a medical ethicist or bioethicist whose views I don’t disagree with most of the time.
Loki, I was struck by how sensible your response was. When I read the article (and I haven’t read anything else by either writer) I wondered just how “young” are they. In the wine fuddled moments of my 20’s, after one of those rambling discussions about the meaning of life, there was occasionally a sort of glamour about the notion of suicide. There was no serious intent–just a kind of delicious melancholy about it. Grieving friends and relatives saying nice things about you, and kicking themselves because they really hadn’t appreciated your stellar qualities. There would be no pain involved, just a delicious surrender. The article and the book it’s based on seems to think the surrender would be pain free, and prevent all sorts of further pain. To participate in a dying species in order not to inflict further pain on the yet to be does seem immature as well as depressed.
Pete Seeger. Sigh.
If I had a hammer.