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REJECTING THE CRITERIA OF RATIONALITY IS BENEFICIAL
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- RATIONALITY IS BEST STANDARD
REJECTING THE CRITERIA OF RATIONALITY IS BENEFICIAL1. EUTHENASIA ALLOWS GREATER HAPPINESS FOR ALL Jeff Sharlet, WHY ARE WE AFRAID OF PETER SINGER?, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 10 March 2000. Critics often accuse Mr. Singer of being cold-hearted, a man who measures happiness in numbers and considers love a replaceable resource. But to him the symbol of the "tragic farce" brought on by an inhumane adherence to the sanctity-of-life principle is "Rudy Linares, a twenty-three-year-old Chicago housepainter, standing in a hospital ward, keeping nurses at bay with a gun while he disconnects the respirator that for eight months has kept his comatose infant son Samuel alive. When Samuel is free of the respirator at last, Linares cradles him in his arms until, half an hour later, the child dies. Then Linares puts down the gun and, weeping, gives himself up." That was April 26, 1989. Cook County charged Mr. Linares with first-degree murder, but the criminal case was over by May, when a grand jury refused to indict him.
Robert C. Solomon, Quincy Lee Centennial and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, SINGER AND HIS CRITICS, 1999, p.73. It is not necessarily thinking or negotiating that are essential here. Successful traders and businessmen often claim (truthfully) that they don’t “think” about what they are doing. They “just know” what to do. So, too, animals display a remarkable array of strategic behaviors- mother birds pretending to have broken wings to lead predators away from the nest, monkeys fooling one another by uttering a misleading cry to distract the others- without any need on our part to postulate Pentagon-like tactical mentality behind their behavior. In such cases, even Darwin himself seems to have erred in giving too much credit here to the role of “reason” and not enough to heredity, but to attribute strategic skill to heredity is not to relegate it to merely automatic behavior. Good game players usually describe their own skill in non-intellectual terms. A good billiards or pool player simply “sees” the shot, she doesn’t calculate it. A good poker player doesn’t sit skimming a mathematical odds book on the one hand and a psychology of facial expressions text on the other. Of course, one must (to some extent) acquire such skills but it doesn’t follow that such skills are not also (or may not alternatively be) genetically engineered or that the general capacity for strategic behavior- the tit-for-tat attitude as such- must not be so engineered.
Michael Specter, writer, The New Yorker, THE DANGEROUS PHILOSOPHER, September 6, 1999, p. np. When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him. Few people will ever consider infants replaceable in the way that they consider free-range chickens replaceable, and Singer knows that. Yet many of those who would never act on his conclusions still agree that if an infant really had no hope of happiness, death would be more merciful than a life governed by misery. RATIONALITY IS BEST STANDARD1. RATIONALITY IS THE HUMAN NORM AND ALLOWS FOR EXCEPTIONS Stanley Benn, Senior Fellow in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences in Australia, NOMOS IX: EQUALITY, 1967, p. 62ff. We respect the interests of men and give them priority over dogs not insofar as they are rational, but because rationality is the human norm. We say it is unfair to exploit the deficiencies of the imbecile who falls short of the norm, just as it would be unfair, and not just ordinarily dishonest, to steal from a blind man. If we do not think in this way about dogs, it is because we do not see the irrationality of the dog as a deficiency or a handicap, but as normal for the species. The characteristics, therefore, that distinguish the normal man from the normal dog make it intelligible for us to talk of other man having interests and capacities, and therefore claims, of precisely the same kind as we make on our own behalf. But although these characteristics may provide the point of the distinction between men and other species, they are not in fact the qualifying conditions for membership, or the distinguishing criteria of the class of morally considerable persons; and this is precisely because a man does not become a member of a different species, with its own standards of normality, by reason of not possessing these characteristics. 2. RATIONALITY DISTINGUISHES SPECIES AND IS ACCEPTED STANDARD Stanley Benn, Senior Fellow in Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences in Australia, NOMOS IX: EQUALITY, 1967, p. 62ff. Not to possess human shape is a disqualifying condition. However faithful or intelligent a dog maybe, it would be a monstrous sentimentality to attribute to him interests that could be weighed in an equal balance with those of human beings...if, for instance, one had to decide between feeding a hungry baby or a hungy dog, anyone who chose the dog would generally be reckoned morally defective, unable to recognize a fundamental inequality of claims. This is what distinguishes our attitude to animals from our attitude to imbeciles. It would be odd to say that we ought to respect equally the dignity or personality of the imbecile and of the rational man...but there is nothing odd about saying that we should respect their interests equally, that is, that we should give to the interests of each the same serious consideration as claims to considerations necessary for some standard of well-being that we can recognize and endorse. 3. RATIONALITY DEFINES A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HUMANITY AND ANIMALS Robert C. Solomon, Quincy Lee Centennial and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin, SINGER AND HIS CRITICS, 1999, p. 69. As intelligent and sensitive human beings, we can acknowledge the harshness of the world, and yet not accept it at all. We are not merely at the top of the food chain. We are, in an important sense, above the food chain. We, as opposed to all the other creatures in nature, are rational. We have what is uncritically called “free will.” We are able to reflect and choose our food, our habits, our breeding patterns. As for the saccharine quality of those Christmas greetings and that biblical fantasy, we can understand that, too, as an expression of a certain sentimentality as well as a Christian allegory. Our strange compassion for other species is a “natural” projection of our more immediate concerns but something learned and cultivated, part of culture rather than nature, the result of so many cuddly teddy bears and puppies when we were children, ad aggressive campaigns on the behalf of sensitivity when we become adults. But compassion, too, involves a certain distance. It too, one could argue, is not opposed to but a consequence of reason.
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