Commentary > Preference Utilitarianism and Killing Babies
< Justice: Was Jammie Thomas-Rasset's Copyright Fine Just? | Commentary | What Makes Us Human: Ignoring the Elephant >

Preference Utilitarianism and Killing Babies

By Robyn Broyles, July 01, 2009 07:00



This is What Happens When...

At a recent women's Bible study, we were asked, "What happens when you do not have a Christ-centered worldview?"  I said, in effect, that you run the risk of serious moral error, even taking it to irrational conclusions.  You see this with ethicists and philosophers with a secular or materialistic worldview.

And I gave an example.  It is an example so extraordinarily obscene, and so contrary to even the unformed conscience, that I am not sure that my friends believed me.  It did not help that I couldn't remember the name of the person in the example.

Here it is, this time with details and references.  The person's name is Peter Singer, and he is an ethics professor at the University of Melbourne in his home country, Australia, as well as at Princeton University.  His philosophy is called "preference utilitarianism."

Utilitarianism, in general, is an approach founded on the idea that the end, and only the end, justifies the means.  It seeks to maximize the good and minimize the bad in the final outcome of a situation.  The means used to reach this outcome are ethically unimportant; the only thing that matters is the end result.

Preference utilitarianism is a variation that defines "good" as something that satisfies a person's preferences or desires, and "bad" as something that frustrates those desires.  Therefore, it is not only acceptable, but desirable for a person to strive to satisfy their wants at all costs.  Preference utilitarianism does not even say a person should seek out what will make them happy in the future—only what will satisfy their desires right now, as long as it does not frustrate the desires of another person.

Peter Singer is the main proponent of preference utilitarianism, and he has some outrageous things to say about applied ethics—that is, how to use these beliefs in real-life situations.  He has no problem with abortion, of course; to him, the unborn child, lacking "characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness," is not a person.  Therefore, killing such a being is not wrong.

You can probably see where this argument is going.  If a fetus lacks "rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness," so does a newborn.

For Singer, the only reason why it is usually "terrible" to kill an infant is because it will upset the parents.  The infant herself does not merit an opinion because she is not self-aware. And therefore, if an infant is so severely disabled as to be unwanted by her parents and by adoptive couples, infanticide is perfectly acceptable.  Apparently the only reason Singer thinks it is wrong to kill healthy but unwanted infants (I assume he does, since he only talks about disabled infants) is because it would frustrate the desires of potential adoptive parents.

To anyone with moral common sense—not just Christians—this conclusion is monstrous.  But it's more than that; it's absurd.  It reminds me of working a story problem in math and concluding that train A was moving at 2 miles an hour and train B was moving at 80,000 miles an hour.  You see the result, and you know you have to have made a mistake in your logic somewhere.  Singer does not seem to see the many mistakes in his logic, so he accepts his absurd conclusion and calls it reasonable.

While atheists and other secularists can certainly reach valid moral conclusions, nevertheless, this is what can happen when you do not have a Christ-centered worldview—when, in St. Paul's words, you live "according to the flesh."  You can suffer a moral implosion.

Links:

Permalink

Tags: philosophy, ethics, abortion, secularism, life and death, philosophers, boneheads

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Comments on “Preference Utilitarianism and Killing Babies”

You must be registered and logged in to post comments. Log in here.
Not registered? Register now!