Peter Singer Gets A Chair
by Wesley J. Smith
MOST PEOPLE KNOW THAT IT IS WRONG TO KILL BABIES. Most people understand that pigs are animals, not persons. Most people view the intentional killing of "medically incompetent" people as murder.
Not Peter Singer. The Australian philosopher, a founder of the animal-rights movement, claims that infants have no moral right to live and views infanticide as an ethical act. He believes that medically defenseless people should be killed if it will enhance the happiness of family and society. He seeks to elevate the moral status of animals to that now enjoyed by humans and equates animal farming and ranching with the evils of human slavery.
Strangest of all, Singer is by no means a fringe thinker. Over the last 20 years, his vigorous advocacy of utilitarianism have made him a darling among the bioethics set and with academic philosophers who share his antipathy to the traditional mores and values of Western Civilization. Singer is invited to speak at seminars, symposia, and philosophy association conventions, throughout the world. His 1979 book, Practical Ethics, which unabashedly advocates infanticide, euthanasia, and decries "discrimination" based on species (a bizarre notion Singer labels "speciesism"), has become a standard text in many college philosophy departments. Singer is now so mainstream that he even wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Those who are fighting a rear-guard action to protect the human rights of weak and medically vulnerable people in universities and in debates over public policy in the United States have benefited from the fact that Singer has spoken from the hinterlands: Monash University in Australia. But now, even that cold comfort is gone. Next year, Singer will become a permanent member of the Princeton University faculty, where he will be the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, a prestigious, tenured academic chair, at the university�s Center for Human Values.
When asked why someone with opinions as odious as Singer�s received such a prestigious appointment, a Princeton spokesman demurred. "Appointments to Princeton�s faculty are made solely in consideration of a candidate�s demonstrated qualities as a scholar and a teacher," said Justin Harmon, Director of Communications for the Center for Human Values. "Appointment does not imply endorsement of a scholar�s particular point of view." Perhaps, but it is hard to believe that Singer�s appointment just happened to result from a neutral, dispassionate search for academic talent. It is more likely that the academics who brought Singer to Princeton did so because of his views, not in spite of them. If true, the Singer appointment bodes ill for the future of Western values and ethics.
Singer�s ideas are truly crackpot. He is an animal-rights radical whose ultimate goal is to elevate the status, moral worth, and legal rights of "nonhuman animals," to use his misanthropic term, to that of human beings. To accomplish this end, Singer denigrates the moral worth of some human beings: e.g., infants and those with cognitive disabilities, by comparing their intellectual capacities to those of animals.
Singer believes that one�s membership in the human race should have nothing to do with one�s rights and moral worth. So, he proposes to replace the prevailing ethic that promotes the equality of all humans as an objective concept with one based on subjective notions of "quality of life." What counts is not being a human, but a "person." To Singer, all "persons" have equal rights and all persons have greater rights than nonpersons. This would not be a problem if Singer used the term "person" as a synonym for "human." He doesn�t. In Singer�s wacky world, a person is not necessarily human and a human is not necessarily a person.
In order to be a person, according to Singer, a "being" must exhibit certain "relevant characteristics," primarily rationality and "self awareness over time." Under this definition, most healthy humans are persons, but not all. Infants, even if healthy, are not persons because they allegedly are not yet self aware over time and lack the ability to reason. Nor are humans with significant cognitive disabilities, such as people with advanced Alzheimer�s disease, persons. To Singer, their moral status is the same as that of other forms of life he labels nonpersons, e.g. human embryos, human fetuses, chickens, and fish. On the other hand, a menagerie of animals are "persons": pigs, dogs, elephants, monkeys, chimpanzees, gorillas, whales, dolphins, cattle, seals, bears, sheep. This is true, he writes in Practical Ethics, "perhaps even to the point where it [personhood] includes all mammals."
In Singer�s philosophy, there is a crucial distinction between persons and nonpersons. Only persons have the right to live. Nonpersons can be killed without significant moral concern on the basis that their lives are "interchangeable" and "replaceable."
As one of his chief arguing points, Singer has rationalized the killing of human babies. In Practical Ethics, he supports the killing of newborns with hemophilia. As he writes: "When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if the killing of the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others it would . . . be right to kill him."
Singer reiterated the point, using a different example, in Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics: "To have a child with Down�s syndrome is to have a very different experience from having a normal child. . . . We may not want a child to start on life�s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage of the voyage we may be able to make a fresh start. . . . Instead of going forward and putting all our efforts into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning."
His use of passive language does not blunt his meaning: Singer is advocating infanticide as a parental prerogative. In the most extreme form of his argument, he has even suggested that parents have 28 days in which to decide whether to keep or kill their infants.
When Singer gives examples of babies who are appropriate to kill, he usually writes or speaks, as above, of children born with disabilities. But it is important to note that under his thesis, disability has little actual relevance. Utilitarian considerations of maximizing happiness and reducing suffering are what count to Singer. Thus, if a parent is unhappy with the birth of a child, if that child�s death will cause them more happiness than keeping it, or if keeping the child will make life less happy for potential future children, then infanticide is an acceptable alternative. (Perhaps Brian Peterson and Amy Grossberg, who recently pled guilty to manslaughter after they wrapped their newborn baby in plastic and then tossed him into a waste receptacle, should have called Singer as a defense witness instead of copping a plea. After all, they were simply maximizing their happiness and ending the life of a replaceable being.)