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2009-07-16 Home Front: Politix

Peter Singer: Rationing Medical Care is Good for You, Really!

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Posted by Cornsilk Blondie 2009-07-16 07:36|| || Front Page|| [8 views ] Top

#1 Remember the small print.

Bureaucrats and members of the governing elite and their family members exempted.

Posted by Procopius2k 2009-07-16 08:58|| 2009-07-16 08:58|| Front Page Top

#2 There is a serious underlying problem here, the breakdown of medical ethics, or what can be called The Frankenstein Syndrome.

That is, in his time, the character of Dr. Frankenstein was an outcast because he terribly violated medical ethics. But today, Frankenstein would be a medical hero. That his monster was a soulless, murderous and insane thing would be unimportant.

In fact, the concern of scientists and doctors today is not, "Will this violate ethical standards?", but "Is there standards I can break?", the active pursuit of ethical violation.

Far worse is that this is not just at the experimental level, with GM, animal experiments and theory, but the desire to immediately apply it to human beings.

Some charming individual even went so far as to speculate that "near-humans" could be bred that would be genetically just far enough away from humans so that they could be experimented on like lab animals, with no consideration other than what lab animals are given.

His consideration was not that they would be intelligent, but that they look different enough from humans so that most people would assume that they are animals.

Such inhumanity finds rationing health care easy. Gods and unethical scientists and physicians are indifferent to the suffering of mere mortals.

Posted by Anonymoose 2009-07-16 10:37|| 2009-07-16 10:37|| Front Page Top

#3 the same "ethicist" who thinks that parents "should be allowed to kill a disabled child up to the age of one year, because IHHO their lives aren't worth living."

-sounds like Pete's parents didn't heed their own son's advice.

Posted by Broadhead6 2009-07-16 10:37|| 2009-07-16 10:37|| Front Page Top

#4 Singer is free to say whatever the hell he wants, but the fact that he draws a cheque for this service is evidence of a moral breakdown somewhere in the academic system. He *should* be scrounging through dumpsters behind fast food joints for his daily bread.

Posted by Mitch H.">Mitch H. 2009-07-16 11:16|| http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/]">[http://blogfonte.blogspot.com/] 2009-07-16 11:16|| Front Page Top

#5 From Wikipedia bio of Singer:

Published in 1975, (Singers) Animal Liberation[15] has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement.

"killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."

Singer stated that "mutually satisfying activities" of a sexual nature may sometimes occur between humans and animals

Yeah, I definitely want this guy making decisions about my health care.

Posted by DMFD 2009-07-16 15:26|| 2009-07-16 15:26|| Front Page Top

#6 In a recent New York Times Magazine essay, he argued that the affluent in developed countries are killing people by not giving away to the poor all of their wealth in excess of their needs. How did he come to this conclusion? "Ifallowing someone to die is not intrinsically different from killing someone, it would seem that we are all murderers," he explains in Practical Ethics. He calculates that the average American household needs $30,000 per year; to avoid murder, anything over that should be given away to the poor. "So a household making $100,000 could cut a yearly check for $70,000," he wrote in the Times.

Rigorous adherence to a single principle has a way of hoisting one by one's own petard. Singer's mother suffers from severe Alzheimer's disease, and so she no longer qualifies as a person by his own standards, yet he spends considerable sums on her care. This apparent contradiction of his principles has not gone unnoticed by the media. When I asked him about it during our interview at his Manhattan apartment in late July, he sighed and explained that he is not the only person who is involved in making decisions about his mother (he has a sister). He did say that if he were solely responsible, his mother might not be alive today.

Singer's proclamation about income has also come back to haunt him. To all appearances, he lives on far more than $30,000 a year. Aside from the Manhattan apartment-he asked me not to give the address or describe it as a condition of granting an interview-he and his wife Renata, to whom he has been married for some three decades, have a house in Princeton. The average salary of a full professor at Princeton runs around $100,000 per year; Singer also draws income from a trust fund that his father set up and from the sales of his books. He says he gives away 20 percent of his income to famine relief organizations, but he is certainly living on a sum far beyond $30,000. When asked about this, he forthrightly admitted that he was not living up to his own standards. He insisted that he was doing far more than most and hinted that he would increase his giving when everybody else started contributing similar amounts of their incomes.

There is some question as to how seriously one should take the dictates of a person who himself cannot live up to them. If he finds it impossible to follow his own rules, perhaps that means that he should reconsider his conclusions. Singer would no doubt respond that his personal failings hardly invalidate his ideas.

http://www.reason.com/news/show/27886.html

Posted by tu3031 2009-07-16 15:52|| 2009-07-16 15:52|| Front Page Top

#7 Singer would no doubt respond that his personal failings hardly invalidate his ideas. Such a clever rhetorician should be able to talk his way out of his own grave. After he does that, I'll give him more attention.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2009-07-16 21:55|| 2009-07-16 21:55|| Front Page Top

#8 I have found that one should always respect their elders. It is tragic when they are struck with senility or dementia. I would suggest that one should humor him and allow him to bla, bla, bla till the pills take effect. Besides at his age the new health care will be of little value as he will be too old to be covered (a reduction in medical costs). I believe 50 would be about right.

Posted by Dale 2009-07-16 22:23|| 2009-07-16 22:23|| Front Page Top

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