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From The New Yorker:
Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive;
he is certainly among the most influential. And this month, as
he begins a new job as Princeton University's first professor
of bioethics, his unorthodox views will be debated in America
more passionately than ever before. For nearly thirty years, Singer
has written with great severity on subjects ranging from what
people should put on their dinner plates each night to how they
should spend their money or assess the value of human life. He
is always relevant, but what he has to say often seems outrageous:
Singer believes, for example, that a human's life is not necessarily
more sacred than a dog's, and that it might be more compassionate
to carry out medical experiments on hopelessly disabled, unconscious orphans than on perfectly healthy rats. Yet his books are far more popular than those of any other modern philosopher. "Animal Liberation," which was first published in 1975, has sold
half a million copies and is widely regarded as the touchstone
of the animal-rights movement. In 1979, he brought out "Practical
Ethics," which has sold more than a hundred and twenty thousand
copies, making it the most successful philosophy text ever published
by Cambridge University Press.

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Dude, you're full of it!

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Originally posted by GK Paul

Coulter states on page 269 that upon first reading "The Origin of Species" Darwin's mentor from Cambridge, Adam Sedgwick, wrote a letter warning Darwin that he was "deep in the mire of folly" if he was trying to remove the idea of morality from nature. If such a seperation between the physical and the moral were ever to occur, Sedgwick said, it would "sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.

Sedgwick, Darwin's mentor, must have been a genius because he predicted Singer, Hitler, and the Nazi scientists to a tee.

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Originally posted by HalfMooner

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Originally posted by moakley

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Originally posted by R.Wreck

When it comes to morality, your god is about as useful as tits on a bull.

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That's interesting. In Indiana they were considered less useful when found "on a board." This provides an option I hadn't cosidered.

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The Southern version I heard was, "tits on a boar hog."

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Originally posted by pleco

It used to be funny how the subject would get changed once the lie was exposed.

Now it is boring.

GK Paul, just stop it. Or is it your intention to continue to throw out quotes from the book ad infinitum without ever backing anything up?

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Indeed, perhaps he's trying to break the "Surface of the Sun" thread record!

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Originally posted by GK Paul
Sedgwick, Darwin's mentor, must have been a genius because he predicted Singer, Hitler, and the Nazi scientists to a tee.

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Sedgwick's own geological views were generally catastrophic -- he believed that the history of the Earth had been marked by a series of cataclysmic events which had destroyed much of the Earth's life. In this belief he followed Cuvier, and he was opposed to Charles Lyell's models of slow, gradual geological change and a more or less steady-state Earth. However, Sedgwick was interested in the possibility that at least some of the "catastrophic" changes implied by the rock record might be shown to be gradual. He originally followed his colleague William Buckland in believing that the uppermost Pleistocene deposits had been laid down by the Biblical Flood, but retracted this belief after many of these deposits turned out to have been formed by glaciers, not floods. Sedgwick also did not object to evolution, or "development" as such theories were called then, in the broad sense -- to the fact that the life on Earth had changed over time. Nor was he a young-Earth creationist; he believed that the Earth must be extremely old. As Darwin wrote of Sedgwick's lectures, "What a capital hand is Sedgewick [sic] for drawing large cheques upon the Bank of Time!"

However, Sedgwick believed in the Divine creation of life over long periods of time, by "a power I cannot imitate or comprehend -- but in which I believe, by a legitimate conclusion of sound reason drawn from the laws of harmonies of nature." What Sedgwick objected to was the apparent amoral and materialist nature of Darwin's proposed mechanism, natural selection, which he thought degrading to humanity's spiritual aspirations.

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"This view of nature you have stated admirably; tho' admitted by all naturalists & denied by no one of common sense. We all admit development as a fact of history; but how came it about? Here, in language, & still more in logic, we are point blank at issue-- There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire of folly. Tis the crown & glory of organic science that it does thro' final cause, link material to moral. . . You have ignored this link; &, if I do not mistake your meaning, you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which thank God it is not) to break it, humanity in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it--& sink the human race into a lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history."

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Indeed, perhaps he's trying to break the "Surface of the
Sun" thread record!

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