Academia's "doctor death"

Human Life Review, Fall 1998 by Oderberg, David S

A society constructed on Singerian lines (we're getting there, of course) would, it should now be apparent, be shot through with deception, delusion, secrecy, mixed messages, bland but false reassurances, gentle proddings, financial inducements, sweet promises, and maybe even threats, force and incarceration.

So: What about this much-debated comparison with the Nazis, to which Singer objects with such a great sense of having been wounded, being Jewish himself, and the son of refugee parents? Has he been plain misunderstood? Defamed? Calumniated? This overview, brief as it is, should lay to rest the idea that there is something outrageous in comparing his policies with those of Nazi Germany.21 There may be obvious differences, but the overlaps are hardly trivial, certainly when one looks both at what Singer explicitly advocates and at what his position logically implies. Singer believes the comparison introduces blind emotion into what should otherwise be a rational debate.

He even goes so far as to compare the activities of his opponents withyou guessed it-the rise of Nazism in the 1920s and '30s.22 Leaving aside the obvious tu quoque, I note that Singer believes his opponents are the fanatics, lacking balance and common sense, appealing to emotion, stoking up hoary old historical monsters, drawing blatant disanalogies, throwing dust in the eyes of the unwary.

And yet I suspect Prof. Singer knows exactly why many people, handicapped or not, are scared of him. As he himself has written: "One protester quoted from a passage in which I compare the capacities of intellectually disabled humans and nonhuman animals."23 Thus the idea he propagates that he is a wounded innocent is, I would suggest, disingenuous.

But should his opponents disrupt his lectures and force the cancellation of conferences at which he is invited to speak? The Cambridge philosopher Jenny Teichman has courageously exposed Singer's philosophy for several years now, a philosophy she called "false and dangerous" in the Australian magazine Quadrant (December 1992, pps. 26-9). Needless to say, her supporters in the academy have been few. In a recent article, she points out with great cogency that it is not Singer's right to speak which is being objected to by his opponents, but his right to regular access to a public platform. This right "is not a universal human right but a special right. In some cases it goes with wealth and power, and in others with certain kinds of work. It is a privilege which belongs to popes, and politicians, and newspaper proprietors, and journalists, and television programmers. One kind of work the privilege goes with is teaching ...."

However, Teichman adds, "the privilege is not always deserved. It can be used for good, and also for evil.... In my view academics abuse the privilege when they advocate 'euthanasia' of human beings too young or too old or too ill to answer back."24

If a person abuses his right to a public platform, if he airs views which reach millions of people, and which are morally abhorrent, how can it not be right to show disapproval by protests and demonstrations and lawful inhibition of that person's abuse of his right?