May13

What Does It Mean to Have Intrinsic Worth?

What Does It Mean to Have Intrinsic Worth ? The Peter Singer Mini-Series: Part 2   Last week, I posted about Peter Singer’s justification of infanticide using excerpts from his book, Practical Ethics. Having spent some time reading his views lately, I’m starting to wonder whether he came up with this infanticide argument as a way of dealing with his own experience of abortion. Seeing as he is almost 70, it’s...

Read More
Apr02

Evangelium Vitae #15

Evangelium Vitae #15     Threats which are no less serious hang over the incurably ill and the dying. In a social and cultural context which makes it more difficult to face and accept suffering, the temptation becomes all the greater to resolve the problem of suffering by eliminating it at the root, by hastening death so that it occurs at the moment considered most suitable. Various considerations usually contribute to such...

Read More
Feb24

Evangelium Vitae #11

Evangelium Vitae #11 Here though we shall concentrate particular attention on another category of attacks, affecting life in its earliest and in its final stages, attacks which present new characteristics with respect to the past and which raise questions of extraordinary seriousness. It is not only that in generalised opinion these attacks tend no longer to be considered as ‘crimes’, paradoxically they assume the nature...

Read More
Feb03

Evangelium Vitae #8

Evangelium Vitae #8 Cain was ‘very angry’ and his countenance ‘fell’ because ‘the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering’ (Gen 4:4-5). The biblical text does not reveal the reason why God prefers Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s. It clearly shows however that God, although preferring Abel’s gift, does not interrupt his dialogue with Cain. He admonishes him, reminding him of his...

Read More
Dec06

Evangelium Vitae #4

        Evangelium Vitae #4 Unfortunately, this disturbing state of affairs, far from decreasing, is expanding: with the new prospects opened up by scientific and technological progress there arise new forms of attacks on the dignity of the human being. At the same time, a new cultural climate is developing and taking hold, which gives crimes against life a new and - if possible - even more sinister...

Read More