Liberals Like Killing Babies

Peter Singer: If a House Were On Fire I’d Save 200 Pigs Before Saving One Human Child

Think about that as a reproductive strategy. Everyone, yourself included, is mating as fast as possible with as many people as possible, and having as many babies as possible. Your only goal is to see your genes predominate in the population through promiscuity.

Now imagine there are so many people that for the first time ever, there may not be enough resources for everyone. Even worse, you are competitively incompetent. In a short while, you will be going hungry, and your r-selected smorgasbord will be over.

You are walking along the street mulling the impending horror, and suddenly notice a building is burning. Hundreds of other people’s children are inside, about to burn to death. This means you will have plenty of food, and the free-sex/free-food/free-for-all will go on for another ten years.

If you have an r-selected reproductive strategy, would you be psychologically optimized to selflessly run into that building, or would you be optimized to view it as an astonishingly amazing stroke of good luck? Would you be a wolf risking death to save the pack’s pups, or a rabbit looking on dispassionately at another’s misfortune?

Now imagine being part of a tribe that needs to fight together to get food. You see your tribes kids burning inside that building. What do you do? How do you feel?

Where is Peter Singer on that continuum of r and K-selected strategies? Where are you?

You can see where r leads. It is an utterly self-absorbed strategy, where peers, kids around you, even mates, are not only meaningless – they threaten with K-selection. Those “ethics” researchers who say that a two year old toddler isn’t really conscious or alive, so you should be able to go to your family doctor to abort a baby up to two years post-birth, have something very different inside, akin to the cowbird-baby who instinctively pushes the other baby birds out of the nest so he can have all the food. Sometimes I shudder at the thought of just how fallen this world will become if technology ever reaches the post-scarcity point, because right now we are just on the path and nowhere near the destination. Think it’s crazy now? You have no idea where it could go, given enough time and resources. And in that world of evil and sin you will be told by the mob that you are the bizarre one, and it is your empathy, love, loyalty, and morals that need to be eradicated for good to prevail.

r/K makes so much of the nonsensical not just seem logical – it actually makes it predictable. Even if the predictions are utterly terrifying.