Clearly, you *don’t* do ethics. Otherwise you’d have never taken a swipe at someone based on who they are married to. That’s not only horrifically sexist, but logically spurious.

You’ve clearly got an axe to grind with Singer, judging by the comments you’ve left here and on my blog. Go take it up with him, but don’t pretend to have an understanding of how other ethicists or philosophers view him and his work. You’ll get a surprisingly diverse set of reactions around the world; something to worth thinking about before you go passing people off as automatons. The only intellectual bullying I see on this page is yours.

Everyone breathes. That does not mean everyone is qualified to be a pulmonologist.

Because people make decisions of a kind that can be classified as ethical or moral does not mean that they are necessarily making ethical or moral decisions, or that they are qualified to do so. Ethics, and by extension bioethics, are formal disciplines just like many others, and yes, some people are more qualified to make ethical recommendations than others. Part of that includes academic background and training, which, thank you very much, I have plenty of without my husband. But I do SO appreciate the sexism you brought into this by attempting to school me on my academic field while simultaneously insinuating that the only reason I wrote about it is because of my husband.

This will be the only post of yours that will show on my blog, as I have no intention of promoting the writings of an arrogant, ignorant sexist.

Perhaps the most over-arching one is the suggestion that only those with formal qualifications in ethics (or someone who is married to such a person?) can make legitimate or valid statements about it.

We all ‘do’ ethics – including bioethics – and have been doing so for most of our lives. Being professionally or academically engaged with the formalisms that currently (or historically) dominate the field does not make you a superior ethicist. However believing so makes you an elitist.

Peter Singer, for example, is widely respected among ‘qualified’ ethicists. But if you listen to even the most uneducated disability activist discussing his views on the relative value of the lives of infants and the appropriate ethical response to disabled ones you may reasonably conclude that he has a huge ethical blind spot. Possibly this is caused by his education and resultant dogmatic hubris. Or perhaps Koenigs, et al are onto something and Singer himself is disabled in a manner that cripples his otherwise innate ethical faculties. I don’t know.

But what I do know is that accepting an ethical POV on the basis of authority is not ethical at all. It is absolving yourself of ethical responsibility and rendering yourself a moral automaton. It is little more than the Nuremberg Defence. And remaining silent about your own moral outlook in the face of ethics ‘experts’ is simply knuckling under to intellectual bullying.