THE AUSTRALIAN ETHICIST WHO FATHERED THEANIMAL RIGHTS MOVEMENT IS
COMING TO THE U.S. BRACE YOURSELF FOR A STORM OF CONTROVERSY
He has been called a "notorious messenger of death" in his hometown
of Melbourne, Australia. The British media have denounced him as "the man
who would kill disabled babies," and in Germany he's been compared to
Hitler's henchman Martin Borman. Protesters in wheelchairs have fought
his appearances, chained themselves to barricades and smashed his
glasses.
He's also been called the most influential philosopher
alive.
Now, with Peter Singer's upcoming appointment as the Ira W. DeCamp
Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values,
controversy is erupting in the United States as well, sparking editorials
in newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, and
prompting Commentary magazine to compare his philosophy to the "life
unworthy of life" eugenics program of the Nazis.
Who is the man behind all the furor? Peter Singer, director of the
Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Australia, is a
52-year-old Australian Jew whose grandparents, ironically, were victims
of the Holocaust. In person, he's tall, slender, soft-spoken, even
affable.
His most famous book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975,
jumpstarted the entire animal rights movement, converting many readers to
lifelong vegetarianism and inspiring reforms in humane treatment for
laboratory animals and livestock. But animal liberation is only one facet
of Singer's ethics. Indeed, his goal is to reconfigure our entire moral
landscape.
According to Singer, religion's 2000-year domination of morality
ended early this decade, specifically in 1993, when British law ruled
that a comatose man named Anthony Bland could be killed by his doctors.
That decision, he maintains, dealt a "mortal" blow to the unquestioned
sanctity of human life.
Singer argues that ethics today should be guided by a particular
brand of utilitarianism: he calls himself a "preference utilitarian." In
classic utilitarianism, what is good is defined as what brings happiness.
But happiness is hard to measure. Singer proposes instead that good be
defined by "preference." Under this philosophy, moral decisions are based
on the most intense preferences of a given individual or group.
Thus, claims Singer, many times animals will be more deserving of
life than certain humans, including disabled babies and adults who are
brain-injured or in vegetative comas. Presumably, a healthy chimp's
preference for life is more intense than a disabled infant's. This
philosophy would rule out most medical experimentation on animals, as
well as the breeding of animals to provide organs for human
transplants.
Even more radical, Singer suggests that since preference is
influenced by self-awareness, babies should not be considered "persons"
until they are one month old. Before that time, parents and their doctors
should be free to kill a baby if, for instance, it has Down's syndrome
and the parents don't wish to raise it.
Though many people will find Singer's proposals deeply troubling,
he defends his points with powerful arguments, as PT's Jill Neimark found
when she caught up with him recently in his 19th-century row house on the
water in Melbourne, Australia.
PT: One of the great ironies connected with your work is that your
ideas are continually compared to those of the Nazis, although you
yourself are Jewish and your parents escaped from Vienna just before the
Holocaust. Do you feel misunderstood?
PS: In those instances, very much. My entire philosophy is shaped
by an abhorrence of suffering and cruelty. My grandparents actually went
through the concentration camps, and my grandfather died there.
PT: Do you think that your family history influenced your choice to
be an ethicist?
PS: It probably did, though I don't know exactly what the link is.
I've noticed that quite a lot of people who are prominent in the animal
liberation movement: are Jews. Maybe we are simply not prepared to see
the powerful hurting the weak.
PT: Can you sum up your philosophy?
PS: I want us to have a graduated moral approach to all sentient
beings, related to their capacities to feel and suffer. If the being has
self-awareness, we ought to give it even more rights. I'm not a
biological egalitarian. I do not think that all nonhuman animals have the
same claim to protection of their lives as humans do. I don't think it's
as bad to kill a simple animal, like a frog or fish, as it is to kill a
normal human being.
You have to ask yourself what actually makes it worse to kill one
being rather than another, and the best answer I can come up with is
one's sense of self, that you are alive and have a past and future. And
apart from the great apes, I have made no claim that any other nonhuman
animals are definitely capable of the self-awareness that I think gives
humans, beyond the newborn stage, a more serious claim to protection of
their life than other beings. But I would give animals of some other
species the benefit of the doubt where that is possible.
PT: One of the aspects of your philosophy that is most galling to
some people is that you don't view human life as sacred. According to
you, since a person in a vegetative coma is a being without
self-awareness, he or she should be accorded fewer rights than a
fully-aware chimpanzee. Needless to say, you've enraged a bunch of
religious and disabled folk.
Tags:
animal rights,
animal rights movement,
death,
ethicist,
ethics,
human rights,
laboratory animals,
melbourne australia,
morality,
princeton university,
s center,
university in australia
