[The Boston Globe Online][Boston.com] [Boston Globe Online / Metro | Region] [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version | Add to Daily User ] Furor follows Princeton philosopher By James Bandler, Globe Correspondent, 07/27/99 [Image]EW YORK - Peter Singer walks slowly down the supermarket aisle passing boxes of diapers and tidily wrapped packages of meat. This philosopher and Princeton University professor earns his daily bread contemplating questions of life and death - and some of his answers have caused a furor. Pausing beneath a shelf of Pampers and beside a stack of Tobin's First Prize bacon, he expounds, a bit reluctantly at first, on the differences between newborn babies and pigs. ''I would guess that the pig is more self-aware,'' Singer said, measuring his words with care, ''particularly if the infant has a brain disease and has no capacity to see itself as self-aware.'' So which has more of a right to life: the infant or the pig? ''I think you'd have to say,'' Singer said, ''that the pig has the greater claim.'' Stark statements such as these have made this lanky Australian one of the most controversial voices in academia. Now anger over his appointment to a prestigious chair in bioethics at Princeton's Center for Human Values is bubbling up into the national political arena. Steve Forbes, the Republican presidential candidate and a member of the Princeton board of trustees, has urged that Princeton rescind Singer's appointment. ''The Singer appointment,'' Forbes wrote in May to Princeton president Harold Shapiro, ''sends a dangerous and debilitating message that anything goes, that there are no bounds when it comes to questions of life and death.'' Singer's utilitarian views, Forbes continued, ''fit right in with the thinking that the Nazis used to justify their euthanasia programs on the physically and mentally handicapped before the Second World War ...'' Forbes's campaign manager, Bill Dal Col, elaborated with a reference to the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. ''With students as sensitive to issues - and Columbine is a perfect example - we shouldn't be promoting the culture of death in any form,'' he said. Genetic testing, embryo experimentation, and other laboratory advances have brought Singer's concerns to the forefront of public opinion. His Princeton appointment last year touched off a storm of protest from those who advocate for the disabled or against abortion. Some called him ''Professor Death'' and ''Baby Killer.'' The Wall Street Journal has called him a symbol of all that's wrong in colleges and universities. Even academic admirers find some of his views beyond the pale. For Singer, who lost three grandparents in the Nazi Holocaust, the Forbes letter is especially infuriating. ''It's a glib, superficial use of the Nazi analogy,'' said Singer, a married father of three adult daughters. ''I just don't think he can have read the stuff I've written.'' Singer gave a series of roaming interviews recently, holding forth in his New York City rental apartment, a restaurant, and the local Grand Union supermarket, where he discussed the cruelties inherent in factory farming. Forbes wrote to Princeton after prodding by conservatives. Neither university officials nor a Forbes spokesman would say if he originally voted to approve the appointment. Forbes is just one of several prominent politicians on the board of trustees, including Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, and former secretary of state James Baker. Justin Harmon, a Princeton spokesman, said he could not believe Forbes would demand that the university president rescind a faculty member's appointment to a tenured chair on ideological grounds. ''No one who understands their role as a trustee would ask to rescind the appointment of someone who is academically qualified,'' Harmon said, adding that what was at stake was nothing less than academic freedom. Princeton, he said, would not buckle to pressure. Singer's defenders say the tumult has obscured the work of a man who has written widely on a host of thorny social questions, including medical ethics, overseas aid, civil disobedience, treatment of refugees, and the status of animals. Singer's academic and activist credentials are impressive. Holding an Oxford degree, the former professor at Monash University in Melbourne founded the International Association of Bioethics. His 1975 book, ''Animal Liberation,'' which compared treatment of animals with slavery, launched the animal-rights movement; it has sold 400,000 copies in nine languages and has turned tens of thousands of people into vegetarians while inspiring international reforms in the treatment of lab animals and livestock. He is the president of the Great Ape Project, which is dedicated to the protection of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. As a philosopher, he appears to practice what he preaches: He is a committed vegetarian; he gives one-fifth of his income away to international relief agencies. ''He is one of the rare people who have had an impact,'' said Arthur Caplan, the director of the center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, who said he disagrees with much of what Singer has written but still calls him a friend. ''This makes him frightening to people who have political agendas. Normally no one cares what eggheads say in ivory towers or in academic journals with circulations under three digits.'' Singer's philosophy flows from the utilitarian ethic of 19th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Utilitarians focus on the consequences of acts rather than underlying motives. At the root of Singer's world view is an abhorrence of cruelty and suffering and a belief that the interests of all sentient beings ought to be given similar consideration. It is from this perspective that he advocates giving parents and doctors - not the state - the right to kill newborns with severe defects that will condemn them to lives of pain with limited mental development. An infant, Singer said, is a being that is neither rational nor self-conscious; unlike adults or even some animals, it is incapable of seeing itself as a distinct entity existing over time. In his 1981 book ''The Expanding Circle,'' Singer argues that starvation in Africa should be considered as horrifying as hunger in America; animal suffering should be deemed as scandalous as a child's suffering. He argues for considering euthanasia for the elderly or accident victims who are not ''self-conscious, rational or autonomous,'' as long as while they were rational they did not expressly say they opposed being put to death under these circumstances. Singer and his admirers argue, with some justification, that his views on the relative rights of animals and children have been twisted and misunderstood. For instance, it is not true that Singer ever stated that snails have more of a right to life than newborn infants. What he did say, though, was that neither snails nor newborns have self-awareness. ''It's a factual claim, not an ethical one,'' said Singer. But even in their context his views are radical and disturbing. Because they are autonomous and self-conscious creatures, he believes certain adult animals - chimpanzees, dogs, pigs, and cats - have a greater right to life than children. He would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to kill babies with such defects as spina bifida or Down syndrome, he writes in his book ''Practical Ethics.'' In rare cases, he can see an argument for killing babies with hemophilia, even though they may have the prospect of relatively normal lives. ''The total (utilitarian) view makes it necessary to ask whether the death of the hemophiliac infant would lead to the creation of another being who would not otherwise have existed,'' Singer writes. ''In other words, if the hemophiliac child is killed, will his parents have another child whom they would not have if the hemophiliac child lives? If they would, is the second child likely to have a better life than the one killed? Often it will be possible to answer both these questions affirmatively.'' These views, Singer admits, are radical, but they're also highly qualified and nuanced and they're not his final word on the subject, he said. ''It's more a matter of pursuing a philosophical point.'' Singer makes it clear that he is not advocating killing handicapped people who are old enough to express a preference to go on living. Even with these qualifications, disabled people still find his views threatening. Killing disabled infants, they say, is just a hop-skip-and-jump down the ethical path to killing disabled adults. Singer, who sees no moral distinction between killing a newborn infant and a fetus (he argues neither is a self-conscious being),doesn't understand the fuss. Millions of women, he notes, terminate their pregnancies after tests turn up genetic abnormalities. ''All of these women and all of the people who endorse that practice are making the exact same judgment that I am,'' Singer said. ''They're saying it's better to not have a child with spina bifida than with; they're saying it's better not to have a child with Down syndrome than with.'' Singer does appear to be retreating from some of his earlier views. In the book he co-authored with Helga Kuhse, ''Should The Baby Live?'' Singer argues that parents and doctors should have 28 days to perform diagnostic tests on their newborn infant before deciding whether it should be killed or live. Today, he's not so sure. ''Now I think that's arbitrary,'' he said. ''It's better to work on a case-by-case basis.'' Some of Singer's friends have advised him to cloak his words more in euphemism. ''Some things are easier to swallow buffered or coded,'' said Caplan. But Singer isn't about to change. ''It's better to be a little blunt and to get people to think about what they're doing,'' he said. ''At least then we get to have a clear head-to-head debate.'' This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 07/27/99. © Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company. [ Send this story to a friend | Easy-print version | Add to Daily User ]