Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T18:13:47.912Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘Terrible Purity’: Peter Singer, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and the Moral Significance of the Particular

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2017

MARK HOPWOOD
MARK HOPWOOD*
Affiliation:
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE [email protected]
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract:

In her account of a debate held at Princeton University between herself and Peter Singer, the lawyer and disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson criticizes the ‘terrible purity of Singer's vision’. Although she certainly disagrees with the substance of Singer's arguments concerning disability and infanticide, this remark is best understood as a critique of their form. In this paper, I attempt to make sense of this critique. I argue that Singer's characteristic mode of argument, with its appeal to a universal, neutral point of view, makes it impossible for McBryde Johnson to give voice to her particular experience and thus obscures her humanity. In order to clarify the positive contribution that an appeal to particular experience may make to moral reasoning, I draw a parallel with the transformative effects of the experience of beauty, arguing that McBryde Johnson's writing ought to be regarded as both morally and philosophically instructive.

Keywords

ethicsmetaphilosophyaestheticsapplied ethics
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of the American Philosophical Association , Volume 2 , Issue 4 , Winter 2016 , pp. 637 - 655
Copyright
Copyright © American Philosophical Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Crary, Alice. (2010) ‘Minding What Already Matters’. Philosophical Topics, 38, 17–49.Google Scholar
Gaita, Raimond. (2002) A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johnson, Harriet McBryde. (2006) Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life. New York: Picador.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. (2007) Critique of Judgement. Edited by Walker, Nicholas. Translated by Creed Meredith, James. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kittay, Eva F. (2009) ‘Rationality, Personhood, and Peter Singer on the Fate of Severely Impaired Infants’. In Miller, Geoffrey (ed.), Pediatric Bioethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 165–72.Google Scholar
Koch, Tom. (2004) ‘The Difference That Difference Makes: Bioethics and the Challenge of “Disability”’. Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 29, 697–716.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lantos, John. (2003) ‘Johnson, Singer, Almodovar, and the Aesthetics of Bioethics’. American Society for Bioethics and Humanities Exchange, 6, 27.Google Scholar
Nehamas, Alexander. (2010) Only a Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Plato. (2002) Five Dialogues. Edited by Cooper, John M.. Translated by Grube, G. M. A.. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett.Google Scholar
Savulescu, Julian. (2013) ‘Abortion, Infanticide and Allowing Babies to Die, 40 Years On’. Journal of Medical Ethics, 39, 257–59.Google Scholar
Singer, Peter. (2011) Practical Ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar