> Singer is one of the few philosophers writing today who is willing to follow the logic of arguments made in defense of abortion all the way to the end of the long, dusty road, concluding ultimately that there is no important moral distinction between abortion and infanticide, and that the killing of some newborn babies ought to be permitted in law.<p>> “Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time,” he explains. “So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.” Singer can make such claims because he rejects the notion that there is something special (dare we say, <i>sacred</i>) about human beings, whatever their age or cognitive abilities. He argues that one ought to assess a being’s rights based on his or her individual capacities, not on his or her membership of the human species. Within this argument is, writes McBryde Johnson, a “terrible purity.”