In building his case, Singer makes many assertions...

20th February 2012

In building his case, Singer makes many assertions that he does not support, because they can not be supported.

Singer writes as if impairment itself guarantees that people with disabilities will have fewer opportunities in life. He ignores the fact that many of the barriers people with disabilities face every day are created and sustained by the very society he claims should be allowed to kill them.

He leads readers to believe that if some medical professionals judge the lives of people with disabilities as not worth living, that is indicative of how people with disabilities judge their own lives. In fact, study after study has shown that medical “experts” routinely underestimate the quality of life reported by people with disabilities.

But Singer does not include people with disabilities in the discussion of the quality of their lives. He assumes that non-disabled academics and professionals are better qualified to discuss what it is like to have a disability than disabled people themselves.

Singer suggests that decisions about who is a “person” can be made objectively and with little doubt, by doctors. In fact, doctors routinely underestimate the capacity of people who are judged to be mentally disabled.

In short, a lot of Singer’s “logic” is smoke and mirrors. It has no more basis in fact than the eugenic models of racial superiority and inferiority that were widely held and respected in the first decades of this century.

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Fact Sheet on Peter Singer (via disabilityrightsstuff)

Thank you for writing this! (cpmatters)

Tagged: disability peter singer eugenics