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In 1998, after a long search, Princeton University announced the appointment of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer, effective July 1, 1999, to fill a newly established chair as Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the university's Center for Human Values. To many observers, the appointment recalled the perverse logic of Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal." The DeCamp Professor of Bioethics is in fact an implacable enemy of life, going further than most of his colleagues in his enthusiasm for our society's "little murders" (mercy killing, assisted suicide, abortion, infanticide, etc.), and decrying our tendency to regard life as sacred. As for "Human Values," he has little use for most of the central elements of ethical sensibility and compunction, seeing rights and virtues as mere instruments in the service of maximizing the satisfaction of interests; and indeed he vigorously rejects the notion that there are distinctively human values—a view he dismisses as the pernicious consequence of "speciesism."
Singer's appointment provoked a flurry of protest and a number of articles in the popular press, pro and con. Before long, the furor died down with little apparent consequence, though Singer credits the controversy with inspiring his most recent book, Writings on an Ethical Life, in which he has compiled a representative selection of his writings.
Almost a decade before this American controversy, Singer was confronted in Germany by activists for the handicapped, who were appalled by his views that brain-damaged and otherwise disadvantaged individuals might be subpersonal, without rights, and entitled to little protection against being put to death for what others perceive as their interests or others'. The German protesters' refusal to let him address a conference led to a physical scuffle in which Singer's glasses were broken, an incident he describes, not without indignation and self-pity, in his essay "Being Silenced in Germany," first published in The New York Review of Books and reprinted both in the second edition of his notorious book, Practical Ethics, and in Writings on an Ethical Life.
Princeton has, predictably, defended his appointment on the grounds of academic freedom (which doesn't really reach the issue of whether he is a suitable person to hold such a chair) and, more to the point, by pointing out the quantity and prominence of Singer's professional work. Certainly, Singer has been both active and productive. A founder of the chief international professional organization in bioethics and also founder of one of the field's major journals, Singer is a prolific author as well, with more than two dozen books and scores of articles to his credit. In fact, he has enough terrible ideas to fill all these and many more volumes that are sure to come. Here is a sampling:
- Your Alzheimer's-stricken grandmother isn't a person, but her healthy cat is. Grandma stopped being a person, for Singer, when she lost her sense of herself as someone who endures through time. She doesn't think (certain things), so she isn't, in a kind of parody of Descartes. If the family hasn't enough money to support both the grandmother and the cat, you can see whom it's more efficient, rational, and therefore, in Singer's view, more moral to put down.
- Parents of defective newborns should be granted an indefinite waiting period (perhaps a month or more, constituting what Singer considers the infants' "pre-personal" stage), during which to decide whether to kill them and try again later in hopes of doing better.
- We ought to do more to distribute usable organs to those likely to benefit most from them, even if that means killing me, once my prospects get quite poor, and transplanting my vital organs to you. Yes, that will shock when we kill some to help others, but as we move in a direction Singer regards as progress, he reminds us that we'll need to leave behind the doctrine that human life possesses a distinctive sanctity and, with it, the "dead donor" rule requiring us to take transplant organs only from those who have died (without our killing them).
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