I remember leaving Singer’s lectures with a strange intellectual vertigo I was committed to believing that universal human value was more than just a well-meaning conceit of liberalism. What about the child whose disabilities or illness compromises her abilities to reason? Yet, without reference to some set of capacities as the basis of human worth, the intrinsic value of all human beings becomes an ungrounded assertion a premise which needs to be agreed upon before any conversation can take place. The natural world yields no egalitarian picture of human capacities.
Singer recognised that philosophy faces a vexing problem in relation to the issue of human worth. There, I attended three guest lectures by world-class philosopher and atheist public intellectual, Peter Singer. King’s is known for its secular ideology and my perception of Christianity fitted well with the views of my fellow students: Christians were anti-intellectual and self-righteous.Īfter Cambridge, I was elected to a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford. As an undergrad, I won the University Medal and a Commonwealth Scholarship to undertake my Ph.D. My identity lay in academic achievement, and my secular humanism was based on self-evident truths. I knew from the age of eight that I wanted to study history at Cambridge and become a historian. I grew up in Australia, in a loving, secular home, and arrived at Sydney University as a critic of “religion.” I didn’t need faith to ground my identity or my values.
0 kommentar(er)
