February 13, 2017 - 23:16
I’m probably not a philosopher as well, just like Harriet McBryde Johnson. In this chapter of Too Late to Die Young, when Peter Singer was pointing out the suffering disabled people bring to other people, Johnson argued “as a society we should pay workers to provide that care in the home.” A philosopher like Peter Singer would consider individual sufferings and balancing the equation of happiness, but a practioner like Johnson would consider the role of the society in solving real world problems. This can’t make me stop thinking about the infanticide situation in China. Infanticide has only become illegal in China since 1949. Before 1949, infanticide and throwing away babies (which is about the same thing as infanticide) were normal for undesired infants. After 1949, Chinese government defined that if an infant can breathe on his/her own, he/she will be counted as a person and a citizen of China, and therefore be protected by the constitution. Under the single child policy, families that had a disabled child as their first child were sometimes allowed to have a second child, but still disabled infants were often given up by families living in extreme poverty (which is not that uncommon in a third world country). On one hand, this is the reasonable thing to do, because without the huge burden caused by a disabled child and lose of a future labor force, the family can at least get food for everyone and send the kids to school. On the other hand, this is super unreasonable, because why should people living with disability be the ones being given up, shouldn’t the government and the society do something to help these citizens to not be a burden but contribute in the ways they can? In some developing countries like China where law enforcement and social support are weak and poverty is still a huge problem, the logic of Peter Singer might be closer to the reality (a lot of time people have no choice), but that shouldn’t be the ultimate goal, killing shouldn’t be the solution.
Reading Too Late to Die Young is an interesting experience. This is actually my second time reading Unspeakable Conversations by Harriet McBryde Johnson, but first time reading it after I attended the talk of Peter Singer at Haverford. I don’t quite remember the exact details of Singer’s talk at Haverford, but I remembered the overall feeling after the talk was strange. He appeared not as the evil monster that I had expected him to be, but his arguments on helping others gave me a feeling of coldness: everything is so reasonable and logical and yet somehow weirdly deflected from the reality. As said by Chris Gabbard in his article A Life Beyond Reason, “There are limits to reason.” It is hardly possible for human beings to live purely logical. Happiness, love, and sadness are all for most of the time illogical emotions.