Peter Singer

Peter Singer is a controversial philosopher probably because, as he admits himself, he doesn’t have much truck with the doctrine of the sanctity of human life. That is, why should humans single themselves out for special treatment.  He is pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia but offers clear rationale for these stances.

Singer rails against what he calls the great discrimination of our time - speciesism.Speciesism is where man treats fellow animals for its own pleasure and satisfaction, for example, food and medical research. Because non-human animals are sentient beings with the capacity to suffer they are entitled to equality of consideration and treatment in the same way our fellow human beings are. By dint of the prevailing treatment of animals today, man’s behaviour is profoundly immoral.  Singer posits that it is more moral to use a human being in a vegetative state for medical research than it is to use a sentient non-human animal.

Singer is also big on the Western world’s neglect of the world’s poor and malnourished and criticises the comfortably off’s seeming indifference to the plight of these people. Diseases and maladies that are mere insignificances for us can and often do prove fatal for the people of the Third World. We can do so much more and challenges us and himself as to why we won’t do more. (See the Life You Can Save, above).

Singer gives a half-hour, thought-provoking- interview here.

Arithmetic, Percentages Applied.

The Teenage Years

"I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. 
(William Shakespeare, A Winter's Tale) 

Shakespeare had it right. He wrote these lines five hundred years ago when, essentially he said that teenagers and those around them might be better off if they could sleep out their adolescence, because all they do is steal, scrap and sleep with prostitutes. Teenagers give, gave and will always give their guardians grief. They created a fuss when they came into the world at birth and by God on their way from the  bosom of childhood to the vicissitudes of adulthood their pain and anguish is just as profound. More so. My own adolescence was the equivalent of a motorway pile up. Drinking to excess, anxiety and depression, phobias and more drinking to quash my demons. Drugs were not an option because they were not available. Dreadful fits of impetuosity got me into awful trouble at school and but for the compassion of some decent skins, that same impulsiveness could easily have landed me in prison or worse still an early grave.
As a wise friend counselled me: "You had someone's prayers."
That, and a lot of luck.
So, I lived to tell the tale and I was always curious at the profound change in behaviour that accompanies the onset of the late twenties contrasted with the delinquency of juveniles. And along comes Professor Sarah Jayne Blakemore who as a neuroscientist has concentrated her studies on the labyrinths of the teenage brain. No longer, according to Professor Blakemore, is the young brain a finished product at an early age, but rather a  highly plastic organ with a propensity for great change and development as the human reaches thirty years.