aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, January 28, 2007

A philosophically interesting question

I meant to quote this the other day when I linked to Peter Singer’s OpEd in the Times:

We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?