Religion

... Irving-Stonebraker's article.

Her point of view deserves to be addressed seriously.

That said, Singer does more than question if all people are equal, he claims they are not. At least according to this '99 Washington Post article by Nat Hentoff - an excerpt:

So, I consider him wrong to claim that not all people are equal. Sure, we can claim that Mary is smarter than John, or Lizze can play soccer better than Jane. But to claim that someone is not a person, or that someone is a more of a person than someone else is to make a critical judgement that we - people in general - don't have sufficient information to make. By far, the safer moral call is not to make that judgement.

At least a part of what Singer is talking about is pain. I believe we all have a right to make our own decisions about how much pain we are willing to bear. In the case of infants, parents, under the direction of medical personnel, should be allowed to make that decision for the infant. So, I agree with Singer about that.

You say:



It's not irrational; but, in my judgement, undesirable. Something I've been wondering a lot about recently is what most of us - us being the working class - will have to contribute when our jobs are being done by robots. It is at least possible that the billionaire class that owns most of the robots will see the vestiges of the working class as just, in your words, consumers of limited resources for (our) entire existance. We will never be able to contribute to humanity. Hmmmm - what conclusions do you think they'll reach about the fate we deserve? Do you think they're not having much use for us gives them the right to decide our fate?

You say:



Nothing is that simple. Race is a word; and as such, has no fixed meaning. You can claim that genome sequencing has put an end to the myth that we are of different races. The people doing the genome sequencing don't agree. This is an excerpt from a '05 article in MIT Technology Review, Race and Medicine:



If some medicines are racially targeted, it is hard to argue that science teaches us that it's a myth that we are of different races.

You say:



Well, Donald Trump mostly agrees with you on that point. He disagrees somewhat about which attributes are determinative for classifying someone "un-equal." But even if it's not Donald Trump wanting to call some people "un-equal," there's always someone. Once we accept "un-equal" as a valid label for people, then we're just arguing about which attributes we can use as the classification. I know, the attributes that you specify sound very good; it's accepting the classification that's the problem.

That is what I took as Irving-Stonebraker's point here:



You say:



Well, Irving-Stonebraker has a doctorate in history - which may be a part of why she disagrees with that.