A few weeks ago I mentioned
that the Wall Street Journal published two scathing attacks on
Princeton for naming animal rights advocate Peter Singer to the prestigious
position of De Camp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton’s Center for Human
Values. Aside from his position on animal liberation, Singer has argued
for infanticide and involuntary euthanasia for people he claims
aren’t leading lives that have value, such as the severely retarded.
Singer and Princeton recently
launched a counterattack, writing letters to the Journal arguing
that the articles distorted Singer’s views on euthanasia and infanticide,
and claiming academic freedom should allow Singer to make his arguments
and let others decide their validity. Journal columnist William
McGurn effectively debunked both these arguments in the Nov. 13 edition
of the paper.
Has the Journal distorted
Singer’s record? Singer claims he qualifies his support of murder, but
as the Journal points out, those qualifications are rarely very
edifying. For example Singer has written, “We should certainly put
very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions
might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic
wrongness of killing an infant.”
In other words, there’s nothing
wrong per se with killing a severely retarded infant, but certain
restrictions might be necessary to make it appear less horrific to those
of us still squeamish and irrational enough to believe in the sanctity
of human life. As McGurn points out, this only highlights the fundamental
problem with Singer’s utilitarian philosophy — Singer sees human beings
as merely means and never ends in themselves.
Singer also tries to sidestep
the problems with his views by pointing out that technology creates many
of these dilemmas — some severely retarded infants, who in earlier periods
would have died, can now be made to live — and at least he is willing
to debate the issues that technology brings up. McGurn demolishes this
sophistry, writing:
… normally when changing circumstances challenge our principles we
look to adapt them. The Internet, for example, has made things easier
for pedophiles. But we do not conclude that our view of pedophilia is
old-fashioned. It is similarly difficult to believe that the path to
a healthy debate begins with a man whose own starting point is the jettisoning
of the understanding of man’s dignity that has defined Western civilization
for two millennia, and who apparently can’t conceive of someone who
could both understand him and disagree.
Finally, does academic freedom
require universities to hire people who believe infanticide is morally
permissible? McGurn writes that a Princeton spokesperson told him that
Singer’s views fall “this side of the moral divide between moral
debate and Nazism.” This is the standard applied at our elite universities
— as long as someone isn’t an out and out Nazi, he or she is more than
welcome. One wonders what keeps Princeton from being selective enough
to exclude Nazis. Would David Duke be acceptable to Princeton, McGurn
asks, if he had a Ph.D.?
As McGurn sums up his article,
Singer’s appointment “leaves us with one of our most elite universities
anointing an ethicist who can at once argue for the killing of infants
while teaching that drawing a moral distinction between child and chimp
is mere prejudice. And then we wonder why so many of our best and brightest
have such a hard time telling right from wrong.”