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Peter Singer helped kick start the contemporary animal rights movement with his 1975 book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals. Although some in the animal rights community try to distance themselves from Singer, his ideas have generally been embraced by mainstream animal rights groups (for example, the copy of Animal Liberation I own was reprinted in cooperation with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals which advertises itself on the cover and end pages).
Singer was recently offered The Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, which led the Wall Street Journal to attack Singer and Princeton in a September 25 editorial by Naomi Schaefer and in an unsigned October 2 opinion piece in the Journal's weekend section.
Why the criticism? Because Singer has fulfilled one of the main predictions made by those opposed to animal rights; he regularly uses the implications of his pro-animal rights arguments to grossly devalue human life. Singer’s philosophy is based on utilitarianism, meaning he believes morality consists of minimizing suffering and maximizing pleasure or happiness. Unlike most utilitarians he argues that animal suffering and happiness are also morally relevant. In Animal Liberation, he argued that humans should abandon the use of animals for food and medical experiments in order to minimize suffering. In doing so Singer explicitly equated the suffering or happiness of non-humans such as chimpanzees with humans who are mentally impaired in some way, such as very young children or the mentally retarded.
But aside from simply not actively harming others, there is another way to minimize suffering from the point of view of a utilitarian – namely by killing beings that are suffering and likely to continue such suffering indefinitely. After all, dead things (whether human or non-human) don’t suffer. Most utilitarians twist themselves into knots to avoid the harsh conclusion that murder is sometimes the moral thing to do. But not Singer. He’s more than happy to see human beings living "miserable lives" killed to minimize the overall level of suffering.
Schaefer quoted from Singer's book, Practical Ethics, in which Singer argued that abortion is morally permissible because "the life of a fetus is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel, etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person." A pretty standard pro-choice argument, but Singer insists on taking his thinking to what he believes is its logical conclusion, continuing, "Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus." As Schaefer sums up this bizarre passage, Singer agrees with some antiabortion activists that abortion is like infanticide.
The main difference being that Singer approves of infanticide. Singer has written that "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person." And Singer doesn’t restrict his killing impulses to just severely retarded and disabled infants. He also argues, for example, that it is morally permissible to kill a hemophiliac infant if by doing so it would improve the prospects of a non-hemophiliac infant.
Singer makes similar arguments about forcible euthanasia. Many people in the United States and elsewhere support the right of individuals who are terminally ill to voluntarily end their lives, but Singer goes way beyond this. He favors killing people who have a low "quality of life" even when those people would prefer to live -- i.e. Singer endorses murder. Singer tries to pass off this astounding conclusion in pseudo-intellectual drivel, writing that society "would have to accept in some cases that it would be right to kill a person who does not choose to die on the grounds that the person will otherwise lead a miserable life."
Presumably it would be Singer and others like him who would get to decide what qualifies as a "miserable life" (may I suggest, just to get priority on the idea, that someone who opposes medical research that could lead to a cure for terminal illness, while simultaneously arguing it is okay to murder those who suffer from such diseases certainly qualifies as leading a miserable life?)