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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."