Livre d'Or

The problem for me as a liberal is atheists arguing, in entirely formal register and using academic-sounding language, that the scientifically correct thing to do is to kill disabled children (Singer) or that it's desirable to destroy Muslim countries with nuclear bombs (Harris). Atheists have to be held to the same standards that they hold religious people: their beliefs have consequences.

When we're talking medical ethics, the field in which Singer has argued for the implementation of eugenics, and attempted to paint disabled people as the aggressors against him (I sense a pattern), the point from which they propose these arguments is very much that their beliefs can be argued without consequences.

A few years ago now there was a paper published in the medical ethics equivalent of the BMJ, it was written by two medical ethicists working out of an Australian university, at least one was actually Italian. The paper argued for the application of 'retroactive abortion' on disabled infants (yes, it actually called it that). The ethicists were allegedly surprised when there was a huge outcry. The journal responded by publishing an editorial by the editor, who was both a professor emeritus and a right reverend if memory serves, claiming that all those who opposed the paper were 'terrorists'.

The right-to-lifers were involved, so there may well have been threats, but disabled people were also protesting and being tarred with the same brush. I spent a couple of months on the journal's forums, trying to get them to actually address the points disabled people were making. I got nowhere.

They insisted their proposals had no practical impact, that they were merely a thought experiment - patently not true, they were being reprinted in the tabloids, and the aggressive disablists were taking the argument as justification. Attempts to get them to examine the underlying assumptions of their thought experiment - that someone with a disability is less fit to live, got nowhere. Even the respected forum regulars had a tendency to treat us as a source of humour for our quaint views and to poke fun at our requests for them to try and see our point. At one point the Right Revd Professor proposed that if we thought we had a point then clearly we would be able to write it up as an ethics paper and submit it to the journal for peer review - ah, that would be a no.

That was the nearest we got to them understanding that if they were constructing scenarios for doing away with us, then they should probably allow us a right to reply. But they never made the leap to actually accepting its legitimacy, they just gently derided it as some quaint folk belief current among the unlettered masses.

The one thing it helped me understand is why Singer is not mnore controversial within his field - most of them agree with him.