If the proposal
that murdering infants with so-called “after-birth abortion” isn’t enough to ring the alarm bells about the state
of higher learning, perhaps this one is: An alleged philosopher at New York
University wants to combat “climate change” by drugging or genetically
engineering humans.
In the world S. Matthew Liao envisions,
we would be repulsed by eating meat, begat miniature children, and see in the
dark through cat eyes.
The professor’s theory is that by changing human
beings at the genetic level, or giving them drugs, he can alter them to combat
climate change and help the environment. He even believes he can alter a man to
make him more charitable.
Liao’s describes his Brave New World in a paper for Ethics, Policy & Environment,
which he detailed in an interview with The Atlantic,
a leftist magazine.
Meat Is Bad
Meat Is Bad
Eating meat, Liao says, is bad: “There is a widely cited U.N. Food and
Agricultural Organization report that estimates that 18% of the world's
greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 equivalents come from livestock farming, which
is actually a much higher share than from transportation.”
Livestock farming accounts for as much
as 51% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. And then there are estimates
that as much as 9% of human emissions occur as a result of deforestation for
the expansion of pastures for livestock. And that doesn't even to take into
account the emissions that arise from manure, or from the livestock directly.…
Even a minor 21% to 24% reduction in the
consumption of these kinds of meats could result in the same reduction in
emissions as the total localization of food production, which would mean
reducing “food miles” to zero.
Happily, reducing meat consumption, the young
Frankenstein says, might not require a pill. “We have also toyed around with
the idea of a patch that might stimulate the immune system to reject common
bovine proteins, which could lead to a similar kind of lasting aversion to meat
products.”
Liao also explained that it’s time for human beings to get smaller. “For
instance if you reduce the average U.S. height by just 15cm,” he bubbled, “you
could reduce body mass by 21% for men and 25% for women, with a corresponding
reduction in metabolic rates by some 15% to 18%, because less tissue means
lower energy and nutrient needs.”
And how would Liao accomplish this feat?
There are a couple of ways, actually.
You might try to do it through a technique called preimplantation genetic
diagnosis, which is already used in IVF settings in fertility clinics today. In
this scenario you’d be looking to select which embryos to implant based on
height....
In fact hormone treatments are already
used for height reduction in overly tall children. A final way you could do
this is by way of gene imprinting, by influencing the competition between
maternal and paternal genes, where there is a height disparity between the
mother and father. You could have drugs that reduce or increase the expression
of paternal or maternal genes in order to affect birth height.
There goes the NBA.
Meow Mix
And pgymyfying the world isn’t this fellow’s oddest
idea. He wants as well to give human beings feline characteristics. And
he doesn’t mean lapping your milk from a bowl on the kitchen floor.
Rather, Liao has something more bizarre in mind: human
beings with a cat's eyes. Liao lamented that that “the science is not there yet,” but that he
and his philosophizing pals “looked into cat eyes, the technique of giving
humans cat eyes or of making their eyes more catlike.”
The reason is, cat eyes see nearly as
well as human eyes during the day, but much better at night. We figured that if
everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn't need so much lighting, and so you could
reduce global energy usage considerably. Maybe even by a shocking percentage.
But, again, this isn't something we know
how to do yet, although it's possible there might be some way to do it with
genetics — there are some primates with eyes that are very similar to cat eyes,
and so possibly we could study those primates and figure out which genes are
responsible for that trait, and then hopefully activate those genes in humans.
But that's very speculative and requires a lot of research.
Beyond turning us into cats, Liao also pondered the
mysterious dimensions of good and evil and the human soul, explaining that he
just might want to alter the human being to make him more charitable. And by
that, he doesn’t mean creating a greater love for God. Rather, Liao wants to
boost “feelings” of empathy to get rid of a person’s “weakness of will” when it
comes to giving to the usual leftist charities.
“It’s certainly ethically problematic to insert
beliefs into people, and so we want to be clear that's not something we’re
proposing,” Liao said.
What we have in mind has more to do with
weakness of will. For example, I might know that I ought to send a check to
Oxfam, but because of a weakness of will I might never write that check. But if
we increase my empathetic capacities with drugs, then maybe I might overcome my
weakness of will and write that check.
Liao explained that many might oppose his plan because
they are “biased” toward the “status quo.”
Infanticide Should Be Legal
Liao isn’t the only "academic" who has gone
off the deep end. Two professors at the University of Melbourne in Australia, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minvera, think infanticide is morally acceptable. The new
name for it is “after-birth abortion.”
They published a piece in the Journal of
Medical Ethics that says killing an infant is no different, for all intents and
purposes, than abortion, an ironic admission that pro-lifers are right in
equating the two.
“If the death of a newborn is not wrongful to her on
the grounds that she cannot have formed any aim that she is prevented from
accomplishing,” the pair wrote, “then it should also be permissible to practise an
after-birth abortion on a healthy newborn too, given that she has not formed
any aim yet.”
There are two reasons which, taken
together, justify this claim:
The moral status of an infant is
equivalent to that of a fetus, that is, neither can be considered a
"person" in a morally relevant sense.
It is not possible to damage a newborn
by preventing her from developing the potentiality to become a person in the
morally relevant sense.
Oddly, the pair equate the “fetus,” or unborn child, with a newborn. But they
reverse the pro-life point of view, which says a child is alive and endowed with a soul at conception, and therefore endowed with a
right to live. “Both a fetus and a newborn certainly are human beings and
potential persons, the professors argue, “but neither is a ‘person’ in the sense of ‘subject
of a moral right to life’.” So we are thus entitled to murder them.
That’s because a person is an “an individual who is
capable of attributing to her own existence some (at least) basic value such
that being deprived of this existence represents a loss to her.” But all those
“who are not in the condition of attributing any value to their own existence
are not persons. Merely being human is not in itself a reason for ascribing
someone a right to life.”
Thus, the professors aver, unborn children and
newborns are mere “potential persons” who cannot suffer “harm” because “for a
harm to occur, it is necessary that someone is in the condition of experiencing
that harm.”
If a potential person, like a fetus and
a newborn, does not become an actual person, like you and us, then there is
neither an actual nor a future person who can be harmed, which means that there
is no harm at all. So, if you ask one of us if we would have been harmed, had
our parents decided to kill us when we were fetuses or newborns, our answer is
‘no’, because they would have harmed someone who does not exist (the “us” whom
you are asking the question), which means no one. And if no one is harmed, then
no harm occurred.
The authors then claim that “after-birth abortion” is
justifiable because it might serve the interests of “actual persons.”
The alleged right of individuals (such
as fetuses and newborns) to develop their potentiality, which someone defends,
is over-ridden by the interests of actual people (parents, family, society) to
pursue their own well-being because, as we have just argued, merely potential people
cannot be harmed by not being brought into existence.
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