Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
I am, of course, aware that infanticide was accepted and practiced in ancient Greece and Rome, and is still practiced (usually secretly, with winks and nods from public authorities, and with guilty denials by those who perform the killings and those officials who tolerate and sometimes even encourage them) in places like India and China today; just as I am aware that slavery was accepted and practiced in ancient Greece and Rome (and in the American south until 1865), and is still practiced in some places (eg, Mauritania) today. But if philosophers, no matter how sophisticated, were to step forward today to argue that slavery is morally acceptable (eg, because some people would have better lives as slaves than the lives they will lead in circumstances of freedom—you can easily imagine how a clever argument might be constructed), I would call that madness.
Of course, the ‘madness’ I am referring to in condemning the advocacy of infanticide and slavery or their moral permissibility is moral madness. I am not making a clinical diagnosis of a psychiatric condition. I take it that this was obvious, but that Charles Camosy is nevertheless troubled that I would say such a thing. But I do say it. And at the risk of giving offense, I will say it again: advocating the moral permissibility of killing healthy newborn infants is moral madness; and it is scandalous, especially in a journal (the Journal of Medical Ethics) expressly directed not merely to philosophers (who—and I confess to being one—enjoy playing with every manner of shocking idea) but to physicians, nurses and other healthcare professionals—people whose attitudes shape decisions they make about the lives of real people, including real infants.
Whatever errors of fact and judgment are made possible by the complexities of human development or a prenatal …
Footnotes
-
Competing interests None.
-
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Linked Articles
Read the full text or download the PDF:
Other content recommended for you
- Infanticide and moral consistency
- Fetuses, newborns, & parental responsibility
- Of course the baby should live: against ‘after-birth abortion’
- Yes, the baby should live: a pro-choice response to Giubilini and Minerva
- Concern for our vulnerable prenatal and neonatal children: a brief reply to Giubilini and Minerva
- Dilemma for appeals to the moral significance of birth
- Potentials and burdens: a reply to Giubilini and Minerva
- The Italian reaction to the Giubilini and Minerva paper
- Birth, meaningful viability and abortion
- In defence of academic freedom: bioethics journals under siege