That's Not What I Meant At All . . .

Vaunted Moral Principles

Poor old Richie Dawkins is getting lots of bad press these days.  Most unfair.  The recent furore is over his general advice to any woman pregnant with a Downs Syndrome child to abort--that is, kill--the child immediately.  How odious for anyone to criticise such a patron saint of evolutionism, our established religion.

The Telegraph summarises the "incident":

Richard Dawkins, the atheist writer, has claimed it is “immoral” to allow unborn babies with Down’s syndrome to live. The Oxford professor posted a message on Twitter saying would-be parents who learn their child has the condition have an ethical responsibility to “abort it and try again”. . . .

Now, of course, Professor Dawkins has always suffered from a grossly enlarged sanctimony gland.  One cannot criticise him for this affliction.  It's the way things roll and who can criticise Nature?

One mindless critical response to his "abort it and try again" gaff suggested that he was making killing a Downs Syndrome victim in-utero a moral equivalent to killing a Downs Syndrome adult.  Not at all, insisted the good professor.  Don't you know that infants when born start to have "feelings" and that makes all the difference. Anything that is "unfeeling" is not a human life; once a Downs Syndrome baby has feelings, then he she or it deserves the protection of the law proscribing infanticide.  Whew.  Glad we got to hear that.


So, for Professor Dawkins the Rubicon of whether one is a human being or not is whether one has feelings, whatever they may be.  Clearly, the incontrovertible evidence--even to an empiricist such as the esteemed Professor--of infants in the womb feeling pain and trying to avoid it does not count.  But let's not split hairs.  Dawkins is a Professor, after all.  And from Oxford.  How could he be wrong.  And how could the bourgeois sentimentality and arbitrary morality Dawkins parades up and down the boardwalk be wrong--despite his  professing, at the same time, that all existence is merely by virtue of a particular random configuration of sub-atomic matter.  His sub-atomic quarks may configure him to draw the line between human and non-human at a certain place, but so what.  Ours don't.

Regrettably Dawkins's cosmology does not grant him the luxury of sanctimony.  His views and opinions, by his own lights, have no more weight or veracity than non-being, or something else entirely contrary to his particular configurations of matter.

But the good Professor wants to go further.  He grasps at a moral principle--hardly empirically based, we may add--which his own moral philosophy is based upon: he wants to increase the sum of happiness and reduce the sum of suffering.  Well whoopie.  Other peoples' electrons don't roll that way.

But since the good Professor's sanctimony is persistently nauseating, not to mention his inconsistency with his professed cosmology, we would venture some advice.  On the assumption that for Dawkins a cluster of sub-atomic matter has locked him into a dedication to increase the sum of happiness and reduce the sum of suffering--a moral position from which he has no escape since it has been materialistically determined--may we suggest that his morality might be admirably achieved by him self-immolating.  After all, his recent advice and comments have caused a tsunami of grief to so many, and he, himself, believes the general sum of happiness can be increased by terminating those who inflict suffering upon others. Such as Downs Syndrome babies, for example.

One imagines the Professor's sanctimony may impede this eminently sensible and rational application of his much-vaunted moral principles. All this leaves Richie Dawkins a bit worse for wear, a bit ridiculous, more than a bit hypocrtical.