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**karaburatoreror** · 10-21-2006, 04:17 AM

Has anyone ever come across an Australian (I believe) bioethicist/philosopher called Peter Singer?

He says a lots things, but the thing that springs to mind is that our identity as people is defined by certain attributes and abilities that we have, such as communication and thinking. So he says that a chimp could be more of a person than a new born baby, so killing the chimp would be morally worse than the new born and there's little difference in aborting a foetus (at any time during the pregnancy) and aborting a young baby for the first few months of it's life. (It's a bit more complicated than that, it's based around a pretty extreme consequentialism, but that's the gist of it and the effects) If you ever get the chance to read anything by him, it's really quite shocking sometimes.

I believe he was also behind (if not, he was included in it) the effort to pass the Great Apes Convention at the UN, giving Great Apes legal rights similar to humans.

I pretty sure the DNA in common between humans and chimps is quite a bit less then 99.9%, but even so, it doesn't necessarily mean that much, it would depend what parts of the DNA was in common, and how it relates to other parts.

10-21-2006, 04:17 AM	#5
karaburatoreror Join Date Oct 2005 Posts 407 Senior Member	Has anyone ever come across an Australian (I believe) bioethicist/philosopher called Peter Singer? He says a lots things, but the thing that springs to mind is that our identity as people is defined by certain attributes and abilities that we have, such as communication and thinking. So he says that a chimp could be more of a person than a new born baby, so killing the chimp would be morally worse than the new born and there's little difference in aborting a foetus (at any time during the pregnancy) and aborting a young baby for the first few months of it's life. (It's a bit more complicated than that, it's based around a pretty extreme consequentialism, but that's the gist of it and the effects) If you ever get the chance to read anything by him, it's really quite shocking sometimes. I believe he was also behind (if not, he was included in it) the effort to pass the Great Apes Convention at the UN, giving Great Apes legal rights similar to humans. I pretty sure the DNA in common between humans and chimps is quite a bit less then 99.9%, but even so, it doesn't necessarily mean that much, it would depend what parts of the DNA was in common, and how it relates to other parts.
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