I pointed out to you before that this was people taking him daring to consider a lose-lose hypothetical (a trolley problem) and then using the fact he'd answered a lose-lose hypothetical against him. You didn't answer further at the time.

Hm. Well, I'm certainly a person on this blog who has argued -- recently, even -- that human life isn't a terminal value.

But it isn't clear to me that I'm someone "perfectly willing to disregard human rights as long as they can find a "rational" reason for it."

And if I were convinced that not terminally valuing human life reliably leads to disregarding human rights, that would encourage me to rethink my stance on the terminal value of human life. (Though I have to admit, I find such a connection implausible.)

Can you unpack the relationship a little more clearly for me?

Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn't have terminal value.

There are many who don't consider it the only terminal value. That is, there are other things that can be traded off against maximizing human life. (This is in accord with most religious treatments too. What price life on Earth if it prevent going to heaven?) Those few who don't consider it a terminal value, often have very important instrumental values for the protection of human life. Is this distinction that important when it leads to largely the same actions and decisions?

Peter Singer

No idea who this person is... but it doesn't actually answer the question - I think we were after examples where rationality causes people to disregard human rights, not just an example of a person who may have rationalised something to themselves.

Also - don't forget that rationalisation != rationality. There are a lot of posts on this site about that very misunderstanding.

Not to mention all the number of people on this blog arguing that human life doesn't have terminal value.

Sorry I don't understand what you mean by that sentence. Perhaps you could explain?

AFAICS the people on this blog argue quite strongly that life is very important and that we should try very hard to improve and prolong human life.

I haven't seen anything that would fit that description, so far as I can remember.

Are you referring to all the people who think the value of a human life has more to do with the mind contained in it than the base pairs of its DNA? That's not really the same as saying "human life doesn't have terminal value".

Well a theist could just as easily condemn atheism on fun theoretic grounds for being to depressing, or for removing the wonder from the world.

Well during the last century atheist and secular philosophies, i.e., communism and fascism, have done a lot more damage then religions.

A certain lack of introspection in the general population doesn't make blanket accusations of hypocrisy any more reasonable, particularly when the opinions at issue are entirely irrelevant with regard to the class you're accusing. If Alice the Atheist believes in a particular inalienable human right, accuses theists of ignoring it, and goes on to espouse a moral philosophy which rejects that right in some circumstances, that makes her either a bad rights theorist or a bad moral philosopher, but not a bad atheist -- and I remain unconvinced that there are many well-informed Alices out there.

Sure, there's some some arguments-as-soldiers thinking going on among atheists. That's never too hard to find in a closely fought ideological battle. But there's a vast gulf between "atheists identified as such are unlikely to call each other out on their particular ideological inconsistencies" and "atheists, as an unqualified class, are hypocritical in this particular way that has nothing to do with atheism".