Are you outraged by the fact that British nanny Louise Woodward has been freed by Judge Zobel after a jury convicted her of murder in the death of eight-month-old Matthew Eappen?
Since the DO is part of the progressive intellectual vanguard, we know that it doesn't make much difference whether Woodward really killed that baby or not. As Steven Pinker and Michael Tooley have explained to us, killing babies is really no big deal.
This DO is NOT about abortion -- one way or the other. (And please spare us your diatribes on abortion, regardless of your point of view.) Today's DO is about killing babies who have very much been born. Babies like Matthew Eappen.
On Sunday, November 2, the New York Times, America's newspaper of record, carried an article by Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at the august Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Pinker argues as follows: Killing a newborn infant should not be penalized as harshly as killing an older child. "To a biologist, birth is as arbitrary a milestone as any other," Pinker says. Pinker says babies aren't real people because they don't have "an ability to reflect upon (themselves) as a continuous locus of consciousness, to form and savor plans for the future, to dread death and to express the choice not to die. And there's the rub: Our immature neonates don't possess these traits any more than mice do."
According to Pinker, "Several moral philosophers have concluded that neonates (infants) are not persons, and thus neonaticide (killing an infant) should not be classified as murder."
Pinker favors a system where "A new mother will first coolly assess the infant and her [sic] situation" and then decide whether to keep the baby or kill it.
Pinker is not the only academic arguing for infanticide. Michael Tooley, a philosophy professor at the University of Colorado, makes the SAME argument. Tooley has argued that there should be "some period of time, such as a week after birth, as the interval during which infanticide will be permitted." Other "philosophers" have argued that parents should be able to kill their children "up to the time the (baby) learns how to use certain expressions."
Tooley believes that parents would like to kill infants "suffering from severe physical, emotional, or intellectual handicaps;" in other words, children that would be a burden to their parents or to society. However, Tooley does not indicate how you determine that a one-week-old suffers from "emotional or intellectual handicaps."
Furthermore, he believes that if moral objections to infanticide were removed "the happiness of society could be significantly and justifiably increased." Interesting argument. We imagine the same argument could be used to justify the killing of the mentally ill, the retarded, the severely handicapped, the clinically depressed, and street people. Do you find arguments in favor of infanticide outrageous? Think about this -- if you're an American taxpayer, you help subsidize such thinking. Both MIT and the University of Colorado, like most every other bastion of "higher education" in the United States, are subsidized with tax monies.
We're hoping that Louise Woodward's next position is as nanny to either Steven Pinker or Michael Tooley.
(Source: Washington Post.)
READ MORE ABOUT IT
Read more about Louise Woodward and Matthew Eappen in the CNN Story
