‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
Or so we were told as children. Of late, alas, this maxim has come under sustained fire, as the conflation of physical violence and verbal criticism has become de rigueur. Hate-speech laws, which are now ten a penny outside of the United States, rely heavily on the preposterous presumption that opprobrium and disdain are equal in severity to battery and bloodshed, and that the state is capable of sensitively superintending their use. Once, it was accepted as a staple of the Enlightenment that any government that attempted to closely supervise speech was destined for disaster, if not for tyranny. Now, even the home of John Stuart Mill has slid backwards into the mire. In Britain each year, as across Europe, tens of thousands of people are investigated by the police for nothing more than being awful in public. And the voters applaud like seals.
By way of sobering example, take the news that an E-list British celebrity named Ursula Presgrave was this week found guilty in London of “malicious communication.” Her crimes? To have written on Facebook that “anyone born with down [sic] syndrome should be put down” before they are subjected to the “pointless life of a vegetable,” and to have saved onto her smartphone a series of memes that mocked the disabled. When asked by prosecutors whether she accepted that she had committed a crime, Presgrave confirmed her liability without so much as a fight. Within the month she will be sentenced, and, depending on the judge’s mood, required to spend half a year in prison or to pay a £5,000 fine. Another hammer has been used to crack another nut.
That a putatively free person so readily accepted the prospect of being jailed for holding ugly opinions should provide some insight into the contemporary state of intellectual liberty in Britain. Presgrave is without doubt a fool, and her views are morally repugnant. But that is the business neither of Her Majesty’s government nor of those under who operate beneath its carapace. There were no threats made here; there was no imminent danger or incitement to law-breaking; no conspiracies were uncovered. Instead, a person of below-average intellect and questionable ethical calibration issued an abstract opinion that both the majority and the chattering classes found abhorrent. In a country whose people are at liberty, this cannot be a crime. To the contrary: Toleration of precisely this sort of culturally egregious expression is what distinguishes free nations from tyrannies. By prosecuting Presgrave for what amounts to nothing more than thoughtcrime, Britain has erred badly.
#share#Bad as they are in and of themselves, the charges leveled against Presgrave are rendered all the more grievous when one observes that the opinion for which she was disciplined is both culturally normal and legally protected in Britain. Under that country’s laws, mothers who are expecting children with Down’s syndrome and other disabilities are permitted to abort right up to the moment of birth — months after the statutory limitation on termination have kicked in elsewhere. There is no reasonable way to comprehend this legal distinction other than as a reflection of the belief that disabled children are often better off dead — the very contention, in other words, that landed Presgrave in court. Judging by its behavior, we have no choice but to conclude that the British government considers not only that words can hurt as much as sticks and stones, but that they can hurt more. Under the current rules, the doctor who kills an unborn child a week before his due date is worthy of praise and legal immunity, while the minor celebrity who exalts the use of euthanasia a few days later in the cycle is deserving of incarceration. How’s that for a rabbit hole?
When lambasting the state’s inexorable temptation toward suppression, it is typical to cast the censors as the villains and the people at large as their innocent victims. In a dictatorship or a monarchy or when the government is at a remove, this habit makes perfect sense. But in Britain, a representative democracy, it does not. As the Daily Mirror confirms, Presgrave’s arrest came after a number of her fellow citizens lodged formal complaints with the police. It is a regrettable fact that to read of a free-speech outrage in England in 2015 is invariably to read of a group of vexed civilians willfully “shopping” to the authorities somebody they dislike. Nobody, it seems, is safe from the informants: not celebrities, not journalists, not university administrators, not drunken social-media users, not faithful Muslims, not unfaithful atheists — nobody. If you step out of line, somebody, somewhere will call the cops. Is there nobody left in Britain who will hang up with a chuckle?
Eugenics has always been about promoting desired utilitarian outcomes. The old eugenics wanted to improve the human herd through the crude manipulation of who could and should be parents. And, it also promoted the idea of infanticide–to rid the society of those who would drag it down. Margaret Sanger infamously referred to these as “the human weeds.”
The new eugenics doesn’t use such a crude lexicon, but still has the old goal of improving the human herd–as well as a new one of satisfying the personal desires of parents–through the more sophisticated weapons of genetic manipulation, eugenic abortion, and someday, infanticide. Of course, Peter Singer is very there.
He is asked with infanticide and abortion, babies are becoming a “commodity.” From an interview of him in Salon (my emphasis throughout):
Q: If you make the criteria so flexible, if you make matters of life and death negotiable, don’t you think babies will become a commodity?S: That may be happening anyway, in terms of selecting the children we have before birth.
Yes, with IVF and preimplantation genetic diagnosis, parents can–to a limited degree–choose the attributes they want in a child, mostly to eliminate a genetic disease or choosing sex.
Tomorrow it will be about other desired personal characteristics. So, Singer is saying, we are already in for an inch on the path to commodifying babies, so let’s go for the mile–no doubt covered by Obamacare. That’s how all standards collapse.
Q: You don’t think this is a problem?S: It would be a problem if you have a society divided along genetic lines, where the rich can buy the genes they want and the poor can’t. I don’t think that’s the society that would be best in promoting the happiness of most of its members. But I’m not convinced it would be a problem if these services were available to everyone. It’s an open question that is worth thinking about.Q: From your utilitarian philosophy you couldn’t argue against it.S: Some people might want to select according to characteristics that are in the interests of themselves and their children, but are not in the interests of society as a whole.
Pay close attention here. Just as the old eugenics ended up with state coercion, so would Singer’s. And, since he clearly favors the right to kill a baby because he or she is disabled, he is saying that allowing such murders would be in the best interests of society.
In Singer’s moral view, the grounds for choosing a child out of existence can become very superficial:
Q: What if parents don’t want an ugly child?S: If everyone had the opportunity to avoid having an ugly child, I don’t think I would have a problem.Q: Is ugliness a good enough reason to kill a baby?S: I don’t think there are parents who would be prepared to go through another pregnancy just because they thought their child was not going to be all that beautiful.Q: Parents would never refuse to take responsibility for their baby for frivolous reasons?S: Most parents are not going to do that. Most parents who go through pregnancy, and childbirth, are going to love and cherish that child.
Notice, he refuses to say it would be wrong to abort or kill a baby because he or she would be “ugly.” So long Abraham Lincoln and Mother Theresa!
And Singer’s blithe assurances ring hollow. I recall a poll some years ago in which about 11% of people said they would abort if they knew their child would be obese. Good grief, viable babies are aborted because of cleft palate!
Singer says he is about pursuing and promoting the “ethical life.” Read the whole interview. The crassly “amoral life” would be more accurate.
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