Noam Chomsky and Peter Singer on Abortion

These clips are taken from the 2006 Tony Kaye documentary "Lake of Fire" that graphically depicts the contemporary abortion debate in the United States.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is one of the fathers of modern linguistics. Since the 1960s, he has become known more widely as a political dissident, an anarchist, and libertarian socialist.

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics, approaching ethical issues from a secular utilitarian perspective.

This is a mirror of a video that was originally uploaded by LennyBound. Because his channel has two strikes, he has suggested that his videos be mirrored because he is concerned that his videos might be lost if his channel suffers another hit.
http://www.youtube.com/user/LennyBound

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Education

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• Applied
• Ethics
• Bioethics
• Abortion
• Infanticide
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[PhysicalsimForever]

Signer lives in Australia (awesome country, nice people) which is not a religious country, by the way.

[EvolvedAtheist]

@PhysicalsimForever

I agree on the "awesome country" and "nice people" bits, but, unfortunately, Australia seems to be growing more religious, or more nuttily religious, than it used to be :[

[greenrots]

Thanks for the upload.

[EvolvedAtheist]

You're welcome.

[atentso]

@PhysicalsimForever He was born and educated in Australia, but he currently teaches at Princeton University and resides in the United States.

[dharshana81]

Noam shows that those who might oppose legalized abortion may not be just 'religious nut-jobs' (as Peter Singer tries to generalize) but normal people who may have other more justifiable reasons against the idea.

[dharshana81]

the strange thing is that most people who argue that abortion should be a normal thing, a regular thing, nothing special may not be here if their mothers had the same 'right' that they fight for.

[dharshana81]

when 'rights' conflict, who suffers the the party with less power (this is the irony of the concept of right). if we come up with a concept like 'right to live for a fetus' or 'right to be born as a human' for a fetus, that right would be crushed by the 'right for a woman to kill a fetus, if she wants'. it happens not bcos the latter right is more 'rightly' but the party that holds the latter right merely have more power, at the given instance.

[dharshana81]

lot of things that Peter Singer takes as granted here are mere assumptions or rather 'beliefs'. For example, how does he know that the fetus doesn't want to go on. If fetus can respond to outside events, what makes one not think that it can have the most basic instinct of survival?



[budgiefly1]

I admire those two so much!

[wid85]

I love it when people take a polarised debate and explain that its not that one side or the other is stupid, per se, but that the debate is very complicated, and we need to go into it with goodwill and honesty.

[skaterboy21292]

Mr. Peter, your assuming that those are the reasons we as people are against the killing of innocent human beings, and thats where your argument falls apart