My further pondering about personhood and human rights

I think I have disclosed before on the pages of this here blog, that I have some masochistic tendencies that manifest themselves in various ways, as in using an epilator that yanks unwanted hair out by the root as well as reading the comment section of disability-related articles, even though I’m fully aware what kind of bigoted comments I have to wade through. After the Amelia Rivera transplant controversy set off an Internet wildfire, it made it onto the pages of Huffpost where it inspired a vast amount of comments - and of course I couldn’t resist peeking at them. I had been able to stomach only so many comments before I got the urge to pack Izzy up and move into the woods or some other uninhabited location, far away from any human settlement.

As I have read many comment sections after many disability-related articles, I am fairly familiar with the recurring themes and arguments; therefore, while the prejudice-laden comments disturb me, they don’t surprise me anymore. I don’t get shocked at the openly hostile comments, nor am I astonished at the ones that fancy themselves compassionate and claim that if a parent truly loved his or her disabled child, then s/he would not “make” that poor little angel suffer, but rather let the poor little angel die. (These closet involuntary euthanasia advocates never elaborate on how exactly they would stop this nonstop suffering of our special little angles; hence, I don’t know if they suggest we put a pillow over the special little angels’ heads or just drop them off on the highway.)


This time around, however, I did stumble upon a comment that startled me, though not because it contained a new sentiment or idea that I hadn’t encountered before. While arguing against the transplantation, a commenter brought up the question of ‘personhood’ and Mary Anne Warren’s oft-quoted criteria for qualifying for it, namely sentience, emotionality, reason, capacity to communicate, self-awareness, and moral agency. Warren’s 5-point measure of personhood was constructed in support of her pro-abortionist argument that a fetus has fewer rights than a fully developed human. While the question of personhood has come up in debates before concerning profound disability (see growth-attenuation, involuntary euthanasia and infanticide) and Warren’s criteria have been cited by those who argued that profoundly disabled individuals should not have the same fundamental rights as other human beings, I was startled by the comment because of its context and the disability level of Amelia Rivera.


When I wrote this post and this post a couple years ago, and I named Peter Singer one of the most dangerous men on my dangerous-man-list (a close second to Gargamel), I did not expect to encounter his utilitarian ideas regurgitated among the misspelled, punctuationless comments at Huffpost, in connection to a young child whose disability is not profound. Bioethicist Peter Singer believes that parents of disabled infants should be able to kill their disabled child if it gives way to another, nondisabled, happier baby and thus increases the total happiness of the parents and all the parties involved. At the same time, he argues that various animals are rational, self-conscious beings and it is morally wrong for humans to put themselves above sentient animals. Singer regards the notion of the “sanctity of human life” as a vestige of the outdated Judeo-Christian tradition and calls it “speciesism. In other words, Singer contends that human beings who are incapable of self-awareness, remembering and reasoning, such as newborns, babies, Alzheimer and dementia patients, and people with profound intellectual disabilities are not persons, while sentient animals like dogs, cats, pigs and dolphins are.


But even Peter Singer, who believes that it is not intrinsically wrong to kill an infant and it is morally less condemnable to kill a dog than a disabled baby, believes that infanticide may be wrong if it has a negative affect on the parties involved and that it should be the parents who decides whether they want to kill their child. A third party making decisions that violates the so-called “nonperson’s” rights against the parent’s will directly contradicts Singer’s utilitarian philosophy, since it would clearly decrease the amount of the total happiness of the interested party. I also would like to quietly mention, that Peter Singer’s philosophy is not only flawed and contains inconsistencies (like the question remains why he would only restrict infanticide to severely disabled infants when he sees abortion and infanticide oncologically the same and he doesn’t restrict abortion to severally disabled fetuses), his actions are inconsistent with his own views when it comes to his mother who is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease and according to Singer’s criteria, doesn’t qualify as a person.

If we believe that personhood is not inseparable from our humanity and we set up a list of criteria one needs to meet to qualify as a person, we end up on a dangerous slippery slope. As the Huffpost commenter demonstrates, the criteria originally created by Warren to prove that fetuses are entitled to fewer rights than their mothers can be expanded to limit the fundamental rights of profoundly disabled individuals and then further expanded to discriminate against higher functioning disabled children against their parents’ will.


Throughout history, people experienced unjust and unequal treatment due to their ethnicity, race, religious background, sex, age, and various other characteristics that the majority group arbitrarily considered inferior. Societies that considered themselves too cultured and too civilized to operate by the laws of the wild and the animal kingdom (where the strong rules and the weak is eaten) felt the moral need to philosophically justify the unequal or cruel treatment of an oppressed group.

For instance, Aristotle made an attempt to justify slavery by claiming that some people were born natural slaves because they lacked certain qualities, such as the ability to think properly, and thus needed someone to rule them and tell them what to do. Aristotle likened these “natural slaves” to domestic animals and he claimed they were only fit for physical labor. Southern philosophers argued that the transatlantic slave trade was morally acceptable since slavery was part of the natural world order and slaves were inferior beings who had no legal standing as a person. Social Darwinism was used as the intellectual justification for oppressing black people and women, who were regarded as biologically inferior.


If we believe that someone’s right to life and equal treatment depends on their intellectual ability, than how does our thinking differ from those who endorse slavery or oppress women or treat a people group unjustly because they consider them inferior? If we dismiss the sanctity of human life and deny that people have inherent value then what basis do we have to advocate for the kind, just and moral treatment of a human being, or sentient animal in that matter, if you are Peter Singer.