Peter J. Colosi

This essay examines various sources of worth intrinsic to persons, and offers an overview of Peter Singer's ethical thought. Critics of Singer's ethical philosophy admit that there is a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to a definitive critique of his views. The "Singer Problem" is the notion that there are no facts intrinsic to persons capable of grounding their dignity and equality. Yet these are not so much critics as thinkers who do not like the conclusions that follow from unquestioned premises which they share with Singer: an overly rationalistic approach to reality, and the view that goodness is not an objective property of things. By exploring the uniqueness of persons, John Crosby shows a deep source of worth intrinsic to persons, which grounds dignity and equality. Based exclusively on traits common to all persons, Singer's notion of personhood excludes love from ethics; but love has a place in ethics.

This paper has grown out of concerns that I have about the way in which some pro-life arguments have been developing recently, and it is written in a spirit of frank dialogue with those whom I consider allies. I present three basic problems within some prominent contemporary pro-life argumentation, all three of which are rooted in a general tendency towards relying on empirical science in an increasingly exclusive way as the foundation of those arguments. The three problems that I touch on are: a neglect of the role of God in human procreation, a neglect of the dignity of women, and a neglect of understanding personal being.

This three-part article will discuss: The approach of the U.S. bishops in order to thank them and praise their efforts against the HHS Mandate, while at the same time respectfully pointing out a certain oversight in their approach; some reasons not often mentioned for which the Obama Administration is enacting the HHS mandate; and some ideas on how most wisely to approach the question of contraception in the midst of the fight for religious freedom. The article, written in 2012, is preceded by a preface outlining key developments in the intervening years between 2012 and 2015 and explaining the importance of looking now at a clear snapshot of where we were three years ago.

There is a pedagogical method of bringing undergraduate students to conceive the body–soul question. Similarly, there is a simple philosophical argument in defense of the existence of the soul via contemporary autobiographical stories, recent neuroscientific literature, and Socrates’s distinction between condition and cause in Plato’s Phaedo. This method has proved helpful in enabling students to gain access to the mystery and grandeur of the body–soul question and its foundational importance with respect to ethics and, indeed, to the meaning of life. There must be a revival of collaboration between neuroscientists and philosophers to coauthor papers that explicitly challenge the materialist assumptions in the fields of neuroscience and psychology.

Although Christian ethics and contemporary utilitarianism both employ terms such as love and compassion, they are in fact polar opposite ethical views. This fact is not at all easy to discern. One key to perceiving the radical opposition between them lies in clarifying their respective concepts of suffering. In the Christian view, suffering is always understood as the suffering of individual persons, while in utilitarianism suffering is primarily understood as a quantifiable entity detached from the individuals who experience it. The paper attempts a primarily philosophical elucidation of this difference, including some theological points, by taking as its point of departure John Paul II's presentation of the three-fold sense in which suffering has the potential to unleash of love. Following a presentation of the utilitarian view, it then proceeds to explore the relation between suffering and love by probing the public statements on the experience of Peter Singer in the struggle with his mother s debilitating illness. The paper concludes with the presentation of a premise built into the structure of contemporary utilitarian ethics rendering it inherently self-defeating with respect to its own stated goal.