Putting feelings aside: The predicament of Peter Singer

Human Life Review, Fall 1999 by van Gend, David

The recommendation to "put feelings aside" in the killing of unwanted infants or senile old people recurs in the writings of Professor Peter Singer, the Australian newly appointed to the chair of bioethics at prestigious Princeton University. His is a coldly cerebral approach to life, with an "impressive, if lunatic, consistency to his arguments," as the Wall Street Journal put it; yet a tragic event in his own life, a flicker of complex human sentiment, may signal a thaw in this icy consistency.

The category of "non-person" has, until now, been crystal clear to Singer. Because "human babies are not born self-aware... they are not persons." In fact, "the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee," and we should therefore "put aside emotionally moving but strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby." This means all babies, not just the lethally handicapped, and accounts for his defense of the killing of unwanted girl babies in China.

For the same reason, senile or severely handicapped adults "are non-persons"; they are not "self-conscious, rational, or autonomous, and so considerations of a right to life ... do not apply." For influential sentiments such as these, disabled groups label Singer "the most dangerous man in the world," and have besieged Princeton with mass protests.

Enter his mother, Cora Singer, who has rapidly descended into Alzheimer's dementia and no longer recognises her son. One protester from the disabled group Not Dead Yet has not missed the tragic irony: "The whole terrifying point of his philosophy is that people like his mother should be killed if it's cost-efficient for the community or desirable for their families."

The abstract edifice of his philosophy is one thing; his mother going gently and so slowly into that good night makes it hard to practice the art of "putting feelings aside. " Says Singer, I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult. Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it is your own mother."

The question is, will this flicker of feeling be enough to thaw the ice of cerebral Singerism? Unlikely-but then, it is worth considering critically how thin this ice is. Look to the foundation of all his philosophy, his credulous Credo, which is found in one paragraph of Practical Ethics (p. 331) under the heading "Has Life a Meaning?":

When we reject belief in a god we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some preordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of gases; it then evolved through random mutation and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen to any overall purpose. Now that it has resulted in the existence of beings who prefer some states of affairs to others, however, it may be possible for particular lives to be meaningful. In this sense atheists can find meaning in life.

It is a brave man who would adhere to such simplistic evolutionism with colleagues like Paul Davies at large, and a con-man who would try to sell this as a plausible motive for the nobler strivings of the human spirit. Our roots go much deeper than Singer allows-and perhaps Singer is beginning to sense that shallowness. The sole foundation of his ethical edifice is the blindly-evolved, chemically-determined preference for some states of affairs to others-a proposal so trivial and sterile that, when set up against the great gnarled growth of living ethics (Ghandi, Mother Teresa, "Weary" Dunlop), it should crumble in a rubble of derision.

Paradoxically, some of Singer's adversaries consider that the appointment of such a radical ideologue may serve to brace and strengthen the traditional Western ethic that Singer so derides. One writes that "the appointment of a professor of infanticide to the faculty of venerable Princeton should be a loud wake-up call; a reveille." Another, in the Wall Street Journal, wonders "what may happen when Princeton students begin to think critically about what Peter Singer is saying? ... His philosophy may unintentionally do more damage to liberal pieties than a thousand Alan Blooms ever could."

The last word on "putting feelings aside" might go to an older professor, who may have shared a bus with the young Singer at Oxford University. C.S. Lewis, the antithesis of the young atheist, observed in Men without Chests: "It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are not bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so."

[The following appeared in slightly different form in News Weekly the week of October 18. In response to the International Society of Abortion Doctors conference described here, the World Federation of Doctors Who Respect Life quickly organized a "rival" conference, "Confronting Abortion's Culture of Death" in the same town and on the same weekend, which Dr van Gend later wrote HLR, enjoyed "fairly sympathetic" media coverage. I