Is there a clear line? What does is necessary to ‘make a decision’? All organisms have stimulus/ response plus some degree of ‘memory’ about some environmental states.
This is very interesting and true and I think it needs an addendum regarding the qualitative, and not merely quantitative, difference between humans and lower animals. And your point really gives me the chance to expand on this and to explain why the soul is the foundation not only of true free will but also of human dignity.
Do you know who Peter Singer is?
Peter Singer’s position on newborn infants is that, although they are human beings and their suffering matters, they don’t yet have the same moral status as “persons” in the full sense. In his view, merely being biologically human is not enough to guarantee an equal right to life. What matters, rather, is whether a being has the characteristics that make killing it especially wrong, above all self-awareness, a sense of itself as existing over time, and preferences directed toward its own future. Because newborn infants have not yet developed those capacities, Singer argues that they are not “persons” in the morally decisive sense, and this is why he holds that killing a newborn is not morally equivalent to killing a self-aware adult human being. He also argues that, once this point is granted, it may follow that some nonhuman animals (including adult pigs, dogs, or chimpanzees ) can in certain respects have a stronger claim to life than a newborn infant, precisely because they possess a more developed conscious and psychological life.
The criteria underlying this view are not species membership, nor the mere fact of being human, but sentience, preference, self-awareness, and personhood. Sentience matters because a being that can suffer has interests, and those interests must be counted, but Singer thinks the wrongness of killing depends on something more than sentience alone: it depends on the kind of mind the being has, especially whether it’s capable of seeing itself as a continuing subject of experience with a future of its own.
That’s why he distinguishes between a human organism and a person in the morally weighty sense: newborn infants, on his account, are sentient but not yet persons in that stronger sense.
Once Singer’s view is stated in those terms, one can see why it makes perfect sense within a materialist anthropology, however appalling the conclusion may be: if the human being is nothing more than a highly developed animal, if there is no soul, no intrinsic dignity grounded in a rational nature as such, and no morally relevant difference in kind between human and nonhuman animals, then moral status cannot finally rest on what a being is. It must rest on what a being can presently experience and do.
In that framework, essence gives way to function, and the question becomes: which being has presently the richer conscious life, the stronger preferences, the greater self-awareness, and the more developed psychological organization? And once that is the question, Singer’s comparison between a newborn infant and an adult pig is no longer absurd, it’s exactly the sort of comparison one should expect.
This also relates to the point about freedom, though here one must speak carefully, as Singer’s own argument is not primarily about freedom in the classical sense, but about sentience, preference, and personhood.
Still, if one speaks in a purely functional and materialist way, an adult pig can indeed be said to be more operationally autonomous than a newborn infant: it’s more behaviorally integrated, more independent, more capable of pursuing goals, and more competent in navigating its environment. So while “more free” would be imprecise in a strong metaphysical sense, “more functionally autonomous” or “more developed in presently exercisable agency” would fit the point much better.
That’s why Singer’s conclusion is so disturbing: not because it’s irrational; It’s disturbing precisely because, once one denies the soul, intrinsic human dignity, and any ontological superiority belonging to the human being as such, his conclusion becomes brutally coherent.
If moral standing depends on presently exercisable capacities rather than on what a being is, then a newborn infant becomes vulnerable to being ranked below an adult animal whose conscious life is more developed. In that sense, Singer’s view is horrifying, but within a materialist framework it‘s perfectly rational.
The soul is necessary not only to ground free will in the true and robust sense (as I said above: not merely as freedom from external coercion, nor as the phenomenological impression of choosing within a predetermined material process ) but also to ground the ontological superiority of human beings over animals, and thus to explain why we are rightly horrified by claims such as Singer’s.
If there is no spiritual soul, then the human being is not a creature of a higher ontological order, but only a more complex animal, and the difference between man and beast becomes a difference of degree rather than of kind: greater intelligence, richer emotional life, more elaborate social behavior, more advanced cognition, but still no essential rupture in the order of being. Once that is granted, there’s no stable metaphysical basis for saying that every human being, simply by being human, possesses a dignity superior to that of any nonhuman animal.
At that point, comparisons such as Singer’s become not only possible, but in many ways unavoidable. If worth is measured by presently exercisable capacities, then some animals will indeed surpass some humans.
The spiritual soul, by contrast, grounds both intellect and will as powers that are not reducible to matter. Because man possesses a rational soul, he isn’t merely a sentient organism but a person: a being whose nature is ordered to truth, whose will is ordered to the good as such, and whose dignity belongs to him not because of his present level of performance, but because of what he is. That’s why a newborn infant, though undeveloped in operation, is still immeasurably above the animal: not because he currently performs better, but because he already possesses a rational nature, and therefore belongs to a higher order of being.
This also explains our horror: we are horrified by Singer’s view not simply because it is emotionally offensive, nor merely because it clashes with social instinct, but because it violates something metaphysically true about the human person.
We perceive that it’s a kind of sacrilege against the very structure of reality to place a human infant beneath an animal in dignity. Our revulsion is not just sentimentality; it’s the moral and spiritual response of reason to the denial of a real ontological difference. In other words, we recoil because we recognize that if Singer were right, then the weakest human beings would have no inviolable claim upon us, and the whole order of human dignity would collapse into a scale of functions and performances.
And Singer’s framework (which I hold to be nothing more than the logical and rational endpoint of materialism) also places the severely intellectually disabled and patients with advanced dementia in grave danger at the level of principle . Because yes, if a human being has less self-awareness, less rational integration, less future-directed preference, and less developed consciousness than certain animals, then, on a view that denies intrinsic human dignity and treats species membership as morally irrelevant, it becomes difficult to explain why that human being should always rank above those animals.
The problem isn’t that Singer is being inconsistent, if that we the care it would be a piece of cake to dismantle him, the problem is that he is being consistent with premises that make moral status depend on present function rather than on being.
This doesn’t mean that Singer straightforwardly advocates killing all such people simply because they are burdensome or expensive, that would overstate the point, but it certainly does mean that his framework (which, again, is nothing more than materialism unburdened by Christian borrowed moral capital) weakens, and in some cases removes, the principled barrier against judging some human lives to be of lesser value when their cognitive capacities are severely diminished.
And once that happens, considerations of utility, suffering, social cost, and preference-satisfaction can logically and rationally begin to dominate. In that sense, the elderly person with advanced dementia and the profoundly intellectually disabled person become exposed to the same underlying logic that Singer applies to newborns: they can no longer appeal to an inviolable dignity grounded simply in their humanity, but only to whatever morally relevant capacities they presently retain.
And this is exactly why the doctrine of the soul becomes philosophically indispensable.
Without it, and without accepting the fact that man has been made in God’s image, freedom is reduced to function (and even freedom from coercion wouldn’t mean freedom from predetermination, as I’ve shown above), dignity is reduced to cognition, and equality is reduced to a scale of measurable capacities. The result is that the weakest human beings inevitably become the least protected. Our horror at such a conclusion is not irrational sentimentality. It’s the recognition that once the human being is no longer understood as possessing a unique ontological status, moral community becomes radically unstable.
Citation from here Do We Need God to be Good? – Analogical Thoughts
“Singer is representative of the modern secular intellectual. Sure, he advocates some highly controversial ethical positions, but his general outlook isn’t fringe. In a sense, he’s only controversial because he’s willing to say openly what he takes to be the logical implications of his worldview. Singer takes for granted the standard naturalistic evolutionary account of human origins. His approach to ethics is a modern, sophisticated version of utilitarianism. He doesn’t have a religious bone in his body, so it would seem, and he doesn’t think there’s the slightest reason to believe in God. I got the impression he could barely conceal his incredulity at Bannister’s views. I suspect he rarely interacts with orthodox Christian intellectuals.”
P.s another interesting citation from the same link
“what’s striking about this exchange with Bannister is that Singer is operating with two distinct philosophical frameworks, and he subtly shifts back and forth between them depending on the point being pressed. Sometimes Singer answers questions from the standpoint of hard-nosed metaphysical naturalism. There’s no objective meaning or purpose in the universe! The neo-Darwinian evolutionary account of human origins is correct! Modern science has discredited the idea of final causes! Yet at other times — whenever the ethical ‘ought’ questions are posed — Singer adopts his moral non-naturalist stance, helping himself to objective moral norms to which he somehow has epistemic access. He hops from one foot to the other in the blink of an eye, but gives us no idea about how he would integrate these two frameworks in a coherent fashion. How does Singer reconcile his metaphysical naturalism with his moral non-naturalism? We’re left guessing.”
Which, in my view, reveals the intrinsic irrationality of materialism: although I recognize that Singer’s conclusions about newborn infants follow logically from his materialist premises, the problem is that materialism itself is irrational (on top of being dehumanizing). One can, after all, derive logical consequences (logical WITHIN that given system which stems from irrationality) from an irrational premise, provided one remains consistent with it. Yet materialism, precisely because of its own irrationality, gives rise to irrational thinkers who are prone to making these kinds of irrational leaps from one metaphysical framework to another, apparently seamlessly, without even recognizing the contradiction involved.
“The sleep of reason produced monsters”. Indeed.
Which is why materialism should be exposed and derided for the irrational and dehumanizing hogwash that it actually is, instead of being granted a cultural prestige and a credibility that it absolutely doesn’t deserve.
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Sorry but tldr. Also abortion is another problematic subject. I don’t think putting them together will clarify anything.
I wasn’t taking about abortion (which is indeed problematic to put it mildly), I was taking about infanticide.
But you are also onto something as I don’t consider infanticide different from abortion in any meaningful sense, even if the law treats them differently.
Well I’m not even interested in talking about free will tbh. So such a long post which veers off in a new direction does not interest me.
But this thread is about free will (which is obviously linked to other issues such as the nature of consciousness, moral accountability etc)
Probably only applies to how we choose though when we use it in describing what other creatures do we are probably guilty of anthropomorphizing. Human language is imperfect.
Incorrect approach, IMO.
Start from the opposite: what’s at the deterministic end of the spectrum?
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Aanyway since you asked
My post argues that Peter Singer’s controversial conclusions about newborn infants are not irrational within his own framework, but rather a consistent consequence of materialism. Since Singer bases moral worth not on mere species membership or biological humanity, but on traits like sentience, self-awareness, future-oriented preferences, and developed consciousness, newborn infants don’t yet qualify as “persons” in the fullest moral sense. On that logic, some nonhuman animals with more developed conscious lives can, in certain respects, have a stronger claim to life than a newborn human infant.
My point Is that this horrifying conclusion follows naturally once one denies the soul, intrinsic human dignity, and any essential difference in kind between humans and animals. If human beings are just more complex animals, then worth can only be measured by presently exercisable capacities, not by what a being is in itself. That means infants, the severely intellectually disabled, and people with advanced dementia become vulnerable, because they may possess fewer relevant capacities than some animals.
I also argue that the doctrine of the spiritual soul is what grounds true free will, human dignity, and the ontological superiority of human beings over animals. A human being has value not because of present performance, intelligence, or autonomy, but because of possessing a rational nature and being made in God’s image. That is why, on this view, even a newborn infant has a dignity immeasurably higher than any animal, despite lacking developed abilities.
My post also goes beyond criticizing Singer and attacks materialism itself, as you can read at the end of it. I have absolutely no respect whatsoever for materialism, it’s a laughable hogwash that could have gained some credibility only in a society as intellectually and morally bankrupt as ours (I’m talking about modern western civilizations).
Pastafarianism is far more rationally tenable than materialism and I’m not even joking.
Well that one was at least scannable. I agree with you that reductive materialism is not a good way to embrace our lives. Works great for sorting out some empirical questions but as soon as your self concept is contaminated your humanity is diminished.
Is science Pandora’s box?
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I really don’t think so. I view science as a way to better understand God*, the problem is that it has largely been hijacked by the materialist sect and by peole like Sean Carroll and the likes of him.
*Not God literally but His creation. Gaining a better understanding of creation may also give us, by proxy, a better understanding of God, in some way.
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I agree in a sense but I think we can never look around the curtain to study God at work.
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To be honest, I don’t expect to get anywhere except to clarify some questions and presuppositions we may have.
By bringing up other organisms, I’m trying a classic approach in science to find the minimal, model system that contains the traits of interest. Human are terrible model organisms, with many extraneous, complicating factors and limited permission to experiment upon 
. So yeah, near the deterministic end are probably bacteria, IMO. I can’t claim that humans aren’t also, but on the flip-side, if we’re going to assume humans have the facilities to have ‘choice’, I’d be hard pressed to make the case that other organisms don’t.
This is a devilishly clever way of arguing for abortion (and emphasis on devil). In a sense it makes sense that if you don’t realize you died, could you feel any “pain” (in the sense of knowing what things like love feel like). However, we obviously run into the issue that, well, it is a human child. I kinda prescribe to the idea that humans are special animals (since we evolved in the same way animals did) but taken as a special possession by God because of our ability to be self aware. So when you mentioned his view as infants being comparable to swine (and no one seems to care about what happens to swine; or at least I don’t want to see them die/want then to be treated the best they can but don’t mind eating them) I got very concerned. This puts a very hard burden between my view of God loving humans (and babies by extension) but also that humans are animals. I don’t want to derail this entire discussion too much, and hopefully this only turns into a small sidetrack, but could you speak on this argument more specifically? I hope I’m conveying this correctly…
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Well, the devil is very intelligent, on top of being murderer from the beginning ( John 8:44).
And precisely because he is intelligent, some of the arguments he and his own sons produce don’t arrive in a crude or obviously monstrous form, they often begin with something partly true, and then use that fragment of truth to justify something profoundly false.
And that’s exactly what’s going on here.
Singer does start from a real observation: a newborn does not yet exercise self-awareness, rational reflection, future planning, or stable preferences in the same way an adult does, but then he makes a catastrophic move (albeit coherent with his own metaphysical premise, namely materialism which has the peculiarity of turning man into a mere animal among animals): he turns those presently exercisable capacities into the measure of who counts fully as one of us in the morally decisive sense. And once you do that, you have changed the entire basis of moral worth, because then dignity no longer rests on what a being is, but on what it can currently do.
Which is why I said that, as consequence, the weakest human beings immediately become vulnerable: newborns, the severely disabled, the comatose, the deeply senile, the mentally shattered, even in some cases the temporarily unconscious: their right to life becomes conditional. It’s no longer something they possess by virtue of their being; it becomes something they hold only so long as they satisfy a certain threshold of functioning.
Your discomfort is not confusion at all, it’smoral sanity, and the Christian answer, isn’t to deny that human beings are animals in one real sense, because yes, there is biological continuity between us and the rest of the animal world.
But the thing is is that this isn’t the whole truth about man: the human being is not merely an animal, as man is made in the image of God, and the fact that he possesses an immortal soul and a true capacity for moral agency and true free will is what sets him apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.
And if man is made in the image of God, then human dignity doesn’t depend on intelligence, autonomy, self-expression, usefulness, or presently manifested capacities, it belongs to the human being as such, intrisicslly. Which is also why a baby doesn’t become valuable when he/she crosses some cognitive threshold, a baby is valuable because it’s already a human being we are talking about, someone, not something.
And if (and only if, which is why I said many times that materialism is inherently dehumanizing and the fact that some people who adopt it don’t adopt inhuman ideas is simply because they are incoherent with their own metaphysical premises, not because materialism doesn’t intrinsically lead to dehumanization and moral nihilism) that’s true, then the comparison with pigs, dogs, or chimpanzees, however cognitively sophisticated they may be, fails hard because yes, those animals matter, their suffering matters and cruelty to them is evil, but they are not human children, they aren’t made in God’s image.
This is why Singer’s ethic (which, again, its perfectly coherent with its materialist premises) is so dangerous: It ends up putting the weak at the mercy of the strong and makes the powerful the judges of who counts.
And whenever that happens, the ones who lose first are always the voiceless, the dependent, the inconvenient, and the burdensome.
Christianity does the exact opposite, as It says that the weak are not less sacred, but often more in need of reverence and protection.
It says that love is not earned by performance, that the child in the womb, the infant in the crib, the disabled person, the old man with dementia, the dying patient who can no longer speak, none of these fall out of the circle of human dignity because they have become weak. If anything, their weakness places us under an even deeper obligation of love.
And this is also why you don’t need to choose between saying that humans are animals and saying that God especially loves human beings, as Christians can affirm both biological continuity and theological uniqueness.
We are animals, yes, but rational animals called into a higher order, creatures made for communion with God, bearing His image, and therefore possessing a worth that doesn’t rise and fall with present cognitive performance. John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”.
But I have to say that I am grateful to Singer for his arguments, and not because they are any less devilish, but precisely because they are. They reveal materialism without its mask, stripped of the hypocritical, euphemistic, and often oxymoronic language that so often pervades its mainstream formulations, and they allow materialism to reach its ultimate and logically unavoidable consequences. Indeed, I wish more materialists were this candid, instead of sugarcoating the implications of their worldview beneath a veil of happy-go-lucky mannerism that leads many people to imagine that one can be a philosophical naturalist and still retain a strong moral framework without at the same time being a living oxymoron.
You are correct this is short sighted. Human infants are in fact incredibly adapted, acquiring knowledge and social skills at a uniquely fantastic rate, so valuable that other physical prowess are nearly eliminated as a waste of resource, with protection by the herd allowing that the only serious threats are disease and other humans. The dependency of the human infant is the very key to human dominion.
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Perhaps more importantly is where do we start with discussion of free will. If the scientists based all their assumptions on the materialistic entity alone, then, their conclusion will arise from that assumption which will be somewhat limited. If our assumptions arise from the belief that there is a dimension in our being (soul & spirit) that play an important part, then the answer to free will will be easier to imagine.
How do you researched the soul and spirit? as in Dallas Willard’s word, in this area we are all third world. No one expert in this area even with those so called experts.
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You make absolutely a good poin, but I don’t think it really reaches the heart of Singer’s argument.
What you are describing is the biological and evolutionary distinctiveness of the human infant, but Singer’s argument is not really about the evolutionary usefulness or adaptive promise of the newborn: it’s about moral status.
His point is that a newborn, here and now, doesn’t yet exercise the capacities he regards as morally decisive (namely self-awareness, a sense of itself over time, future-directed preferences, and so on). So he could easily grant everything you say about the biological brilliance of human infancy and still maintain that the newborn isn’t yet a “person” in the full moral sense. In other words, the appeal to the infant’s developmental promise doesn’t by itself answer the principle he’s using.
And I think this becomes even clearer in the especially disturbing cases Singer discusses, namely newborns with severe disabilities or malformations. In such cases, the appeal to the infant’s extraordinary developmental trajectory becomes much weaker, because those capacities may never emerge in the way your argument assumes. This is why I don’t think the evolutionary point really refutes him. It remains within a functional or developmental framework, whereas the real issue is whether human dignity depends on presently exercisable capacities at all.
And to be honest, from a narrowly evolutionary point of view, your reply may cut in the opposite direction in the very cases Singer is most concerned with (namely, severely disabled or malformed newborns). A crude fitness calculus doesn’t ask whether an infant belongs to a uniquely successful species; it asks about viability, expected reproductive payoff, parental investment costs, and trade-offs with other offspring or future reproduction, and once one thinks in those terms, the weak infant becomes more, not less, vulnerable.
That’s why I don’t think the evolutionary point really reaches the heart of the matter: evolutionary theory has often emphasized parental-investment trade-offs, parent-offspring conflict, and even the adaptive logic of infanticide under certain conditions in nonhuman animals. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s work https://www.researchgate.net/publication/239467664_Comparative_and_evolutionary_perspectives_on_infanticide_An_introduction_and_overviewhelped establish that infanticide can, under some ecological conditions, function as an evolved reproductive strategy rather than merely as pathology.Recent reviews in evolutionary biology still say as much: female infanticide in mammals is described as adaptive in contexts of intense reproductive competition, and human behavioral ecology literature describes withdrawal of parental investment as shaped by resource constraints, support networks, child health, and expected future reproductive success. The evolution of infanticide by females in mammals - PubMed
So, if one stays strictly within a natural-selection framework, assuming that human beings are not qualitatively and intrinsically different from other animals, there is no guarantee at all that the vulnerable infant comes out protected, quite the contrary in fact: the more one reasons in terms of fitness, cost, and reproductive trade-offs, the easier it becomes to treat the frail infant as dispensable.
That’s why Singer’s view is not really answered by saying that human infants are evolutionarily impressive, as his whole framework can simply reply: “perhaps normal infants are a good long-term investment, but some infants are not”.
Singer’s view is the direct and logical consequence of viewing human beings as merely animals among other animals, with no ontological difference at all.
And if Homo sapiens are, in qualitative terms, no different from other mammals and possess no greater intrinsic value, then why should they not behave like other mammals, whose behavior under certain circumstances is well known?
Irrelevant. Free will is not only or even primarily about the choice between good and evil. That is frankly just an unfortunate side effect. If we are truly free to make our own choices then we can unfortunately even choose perversely against life itself. So even though free will is used in answering the problem of evil, that does mean the choice between good and evil is why free will exists or what free will is really about.
Morality is an essential component of all community – rules made in order for the community to function. Just because people commandeer it in order to use religion as a means of power an control over people doesn’t mean that is where morality originally comes from.
yes. yes. yes. yes. and yes.
But there is always a question of how much free will. Things like nervous systems and language greatly enhance free will and consciousness. And when the differences are orders of magnitude then many of these have practically none by comparison to others.
I don’t think so. It is not only characteristic of the life process but the very essence and purpose of life.
The life process is necessary for both consciousness and free will.
And these two (consciousness and free will) are very much linked. You can hardly have the freedom to make choices when you have no awareness of them.
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