Princeton defends its professor of infanticide

Human Life Review, Winter 1999 by McGurn, William

[The following column was first published in The Wall Street Journal, November 13,1998. It is reprinted with permission of The Wall Street Journal 1998 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Mr. McGurn is editor of the Taste page of the Weekend Journal.]

When I was an undergraduate in philosophy I had a roommate who, having stumbled across Cicero's dictum that there is nothing so absurd that some philosopher hasn't said it, never tired of repeating it to me. He was more right than he knew. Princeton's decision to name animal-liberationist Peter Singer its prestigious DeCamp Professor of Bioethics suggests a new wrinkle in this old truth: Today's absurdity more than likely will boast not only a defending philosopher but an endowed chair.

Given Mr. Singer's belief that the moral difference between a human being and a horse is but a matter of degree, there is a delicious irony in that his appointment is to Princeton's Center for Human Values. After a colleague of mine, Naomi Schaefer, mused about the implications of Mr. Singer's values in an editorial-page article, Mr. Singer & Co. fired back with letters accusing her of distortion. Princeton President Harold Shapiro repeated the party line before a recent meeting with parents of incoming freshman. What matters, he told them, is not the ideas but whether they can be rationally defended.

This is orthodoxy in academe today, and it helps explain why enrolling in a university ethics course ranks as one of the most debilitating things that can happen to a young student's moral compass. And it helps illuminate the Singer appointment. Unlike Miss Schaefer, official Princeton prides itself on being not the least concerned with Mr. Singer's embrace of infanticide, his equating of animal with human life or the general drift of his utilitarian ethic. And oh, yes, Mr. Singer's defenders had great fun with Miss Schaefer's reference to Mr. Singer as "somewhat obscure."

I wonder if they also complained to the Princeton Alumni Weekly, which described Mr. Singer as "largely unknown" to the Princeton community. More to the point, parents and alumni might be interested to learn that the man chosen to clarify our thoughts on bioethics deems those who hold human life inherently more sacred than animal life as "speciesist," in thrall to a "prejudice no better founded than the prejudice of white slaveowners against taking the interests of their African slaves seriously."

Indeed, in his more candid moments Mr. Singer concedes that his "quality of life" ethic explicitly rejects the "sanctity of life" view that has defined the Western canon for roughly the past 2,000 years. It is precisely that which Boston University's John Silber had in mind when, at a meeting of 3,000 philosophers this past August, he lambasted the profession for its rejection of ultimate truth and the consequent relativizing of all values. Ours, after all, is a nation founded upon a conception of man derived from "the laws of nature and nature's God"-the same conception enshrined in Latin under the Princeton crest: Dei Sub Numine Viget ("We will flourish under the command of God").

Mr. Singer likes to say that his conclusions are highly qualified and usually taken out of context. but the conclusions are there. E.g., "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, people are not ends but means. Surely the point is that once each human life is not deemed inherently sacred, there are any number of plausible reasons that might be advanced for doing away with them.

Mr. Singer responds by saying that, unlike his critics, he is willing to debate the challenges presented by technology and does not flinch from more controversial conclusions. We are all for debate. But 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.

Which leads us back to Princeton. Its spokesman told me that the Singer appointment represented the university's decision that he falls on "this side of the moral divide between moral debate and Nazism." Hmmmn. Is Nazism evil because it cannot be defended rationally (fascism had many defenders, after all, in a society considered the cream of developed Europe) or because of its founding assumptions? Was the Gulag more palatable because Marx was an intellectual? Might David Duke expect a welcome at the Center for Human Values were he to have a Ph.D. along with his white hood?