Human Exceptionalism

My friend, Wesley J. Smith, has a new, long-anticipated book critiquing the animal rights movement. It takes its title from an infamous statement by Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy. Animal rights, like environmentalism, sounds like something that every well-meaning person should support. But it’s Read More ›

If you want to accurately predict what could soon go wrong in society, just read the professional journals. Case in point: A bioethicist named Alasdair Cochrane, a deep thinker at the Centre for the Study of Human Rights in the UK, argued recently in Bioethics that we should discard our (already tenuous) embrace of intrinsic human dignity as the foundational basis for establishing Read More ›

In 1992, Jack Kevorkian proposed establishing a pilot program of euthanasia clinics, which, he argued in the Journal of Forensic Pathology, would be staffed by physician-killers, permitted legally to painlessly terminate patients who request it. At the time, euthanasia clinics were considered either a far kook fringe idea, or perhaps, a splendid fictional image reserved for dystopian science fiction. No longer. Read More ›

“The very people who deny human exceptionalism in the animal rights movement are asking us to engage in hyper-duties towards animals which would be an act of exceptionalism,” says Wesley J. Smith, author of A Rat Is a Pig Is a Dog Is a Boy: The Human Cost of the Animal Rights Movement. Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith was interviewed by National Review’s John Read More ›

As we come to the end of the first tenth of the 21st century, pundits are making lists about the decade just past: the biggest stories, the worst movies. In that spirit, here’s a list of the top ten stories in bioethics. This isn’t an idle exercise. Bioethics matters. The field exerts tremendous influence over the most important questions of Read More ›

Link to Talk Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith spoke recently to the University of Texas’ Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies as part of its Medical Ethics Lecture Series. Click on the link above to watch his talk.

Chris Mooney is a partisan author (The Republican War on Science) and a leftist political advocate. He has made a career of pushing ideological goals as if they were objective scientific agendas. And of course many science journalists–often in name only–have followed his lead, particularly in the fields of global warming and embryonic stem cell research, which I deal with, and Read More ›

This article, published by the Catholic Education Resource Center, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: Attorney and bioethics author Wesley Smith was first introduced to Koontz’s work following the publication of the novel One Door Away From Heaven. In that book, one of the storylines focuses on a bioethicist who sets out to breed disabled people so that he can Read More ›

Terri Schiavo continues to prick our collective conscience, our sensitivity to the way she died—deprived of all food and water, even the balm of ice chips for nearly two weeks—as raw today as on the day she drew her last breath five years ago next March.  Usually, the trauma remains just beneath the surface. But every once in a while Read More ›

The case of Terri Schiavo—who died five years ago next March, deprived for nearly two weeks of food and water, even the balm of ice chips—continues to prick consciences. That may be one reason the case of Rom Houben, a Belgian man who was misdiagnosed for 23 years as being in a persistent vegetative state, is now receiving international attention. Read More ›

“Flash Forward” is a new and interesting television drama presented on the ABC Television Network. The premise is brilliant – due to reasons still unknown, everyone in the world (except the bad guys) blackout for two minutes seventeen seconds. Planes crash, people collapse on the streets, swimmers drown, it is an utter catastrophe that results in the deaths of 20 Read More ›

This article, published by The Jewish Press, provides a review of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder and his book The Israel Test: George Gilder’s latest book, The Israel Test (Vigilante Books), is so unabashedly pro-Jewish and pro-Israel that it would make many Jews blush. The rest of the article can be found here.