How does Singer advocate the death of the disabled? He does not want to kill people because we have to respect their desire and preference to life. Besides killing people causes pain and suffering; furthermore, it violates others interests.
Peter Singer is a proponent of eugenics:
social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031202122825648
As noted, and to be fair, Singer was seemingly not in favor of proactive eugenics, like the forced sterilization of undesirables. Many, many were from the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th century. In fact, we (or at least US eugenics proponents) provided the blue print for the Nazi purity law and had a shameful, rigged supreme court case. Eugenics laws remained in place, and forced sterilizations continued to occur under them, up until the 1970s, when the Supreme Court finally reversed itself.
That surge in eugenics’ popularity, particularly western eugenics seems to have had a profound influence on the Church. First the Church left our long standing tradition of delayed ensoulment in place, but proclaimed that it was not relevant, abortion before that point was “anticipated murder” of a human being. By the turn of the century the Church went further and declared that even abortions for the welfare of the mother were illicit, something that the Church had declined to rule on as late as 1869. Even the language of eugenics seems to be condemned by 1913, and from the deliberations it seems clear that the eugenics movement and its horrific manifistation in the holocaust had a profound effect even decades later during the Second Vatican Council when LUMEN GENTIUM was drafted.
Even in the 1990s, Pope John Paul II used linguistic references to both eugenics and the holocaust when he gave his compelling speech regarding the individiuals in what was then called a “permanent vegative state”.
On the original question I can only say what I always say. To me, these comparisons are meaningless. The death of a single life is a tragedy almost beyond our ability to grasp. When we start trying to make quantitive comparisons between attrocities of such scale, we inevitably end up dehumanizing the victims. We do not love them as ourselves, we do not picture each and every one of them as someone even close to us. Since we cannot view the scale in God’s terms, our assessments are hollow at best.
