pershonhood theory

Occasional commentator to AOI blog and human rights activist Wesley J. Smith warns in a recent article that, “society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault…Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.”

He is correct. Read it carefully, think through the logic, and heed the warnings. The crisis in the West is one of anthropology with ominous implications.

Wesley J. Smith

By Wesley J. Smith. Published on The Church Report website.

Society’s belief in the unique moral value and importance of human life is under unprecedented assault. Most people still believe in human exceptionalism and are unaware that powerful social and cultural forces are working diligently to dismantle the sanctity of life ethic as the fundamental value of our social order.  But the time has come to pay attention.  If human life is knocked off the pedestal, universal human rights will be impossible to sustain.

Take bioethics, the influential field that exerts tremendous influence over medical ethics and health care public policy. The bioethical mainstream disdains the sanctity of life ethic as irrational and based on religion. In its place, they promote “personhood theory,” that equates moral value with cognitive capacities such as being self aware over time. This “quality of life” ethic, as it is sometimes called, creates a two-tiered system in which some humans have greater value than human non persons.

Who are these so called human non persons? All the unborn, to be sure, a presumption used to justify embryonic stem cell research, even fetal farming—growing fetuses to the later stage of gestation for use as organ sources, an odious idea already been promoted at the Huffington Post.

Personhood theory also denies the equal value of newborn infants. Thus, Princeton University’s Peter Singer—the most famous bioethicist in the world—argues that infants can be killed if they don’t serve their family’s interests.  He even compared the value of babies to that of fish, writing in Rethinking Life and Death, “Since neither a newborn infant nor a fish is a person, the wrongness of killing such beings is not as wrong as killing a person.” Continue reading →