An Ethicist’s Brutish Compassion
With his efforts to promote his new book The Life You Can Save, ethicist Peter Singer offers proof that altruism is not always a sign of goodness.
In his interview with Stephen Colbert, Singer compared charitable giving to getting an expensive business suit wet in order to save a drowning child. Basically, as he said in his New York Times interview, “If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.” Thus, in his view, when citizens of wealthy nations do not give large parts of our income to charities like his favorite UN-supported leftist NGOs, UNICEF and Oxfam, we are letting his theoretical child drown.
Singer is consistent in his efforts to guilt-trip Americans during a time of crisis. Immediately after 9/11 Singer made a similar effort to convince us to give huge sums of money to leftist NGOs and the United Nations when he said, “How can we justify giving such huge sums to the families of the firefighters and police when we do so little for people in other countries whose needs are much more desperate?”
Although many fans of wealth redistribution reviewed The Life You Can Save enthusiastically — Oxfam loved it and the New York Times critiqued it with the investigative insight of a two-month-old puppy — most noted in passing that Singer is “controversial.” Before covering Singer in wet puppy licks, the Times mentioned that Singer “has made a career out of making people feel uncomfortable.”
What on earth could this man who is so generous with other people’s money have to say that would make people uncomfortable? Well, quite a lot. From his book Practical Ethics, here are some examples of Professor Singer’s “controversial” views:
The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it; it is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings. … No infant — disabled or not — has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time. …
Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against, killing it.
These statements aren’t just “controversial”; they’re morally reprehensible and the fact that this ethicist holds these views should be a part of every interview with Singer. When Colbert interviewed Singer, it’s a shame that he didn’t listen to his mentor Jon Stewart’s criticism of bad reporting when he said, during his discussion with financial journalist Jim Cramer, “I’m under the assumption that [reporters] don’t take [interviewees'] word at face value, that you actually go around and try to figure it out.”
Singer’s gentle demeanor and words should not be taken at face value when we know the malign philosophy that motivates him. When Singer offered his metaphor of “saving a drowning child,” the obvious question would be: if the drowning child were handicapped, would you save the child or would you let it die?
Peter Singer also holds some weird views regarding sexual activity between human beings and animals! This guy is a quintessential example of the post modernist domination of most American academic institutions. And yes, in many respects, there is little difference between Singer’s views and those of the Nazis. Most Americans are unaware of his existence. This should not be the case.
Singer is a perfect example of the sad and very frustrating fact that some people are alive ONLY because it is against the law to KILL them!
Singer and his ilk provide an excellent example of socialism in microcosm. They pontificate about what the producers in society should do – without actually producing or contributing themselves. They consider their pontifications their contribution.
Singer and his ilk cry that we give so much to our own – while there is such great need world wide. What Singer fails to understand is that the ability to “take care of our own” is the very reason for the wealth he would seek to redistribute. Taking care of my self, my family and the issues I personally believe in is the very reason I get up and work every day. They are the reasons I do what I do and have what I have. Singer seems to believe that wealth is random and that it is his duty to spread it around.
So Mr. Singer – if you believe my wealth is misspent – I believe your time is misspent. If you want to impress me – here is what you do: Go out and earn a graduate degree in something useful, maybe engineering or medicine. Go get a 6 – 7 figure job or start a business. Then live on $40K, and permanently donate the rest to your cause of the day. Encourage your leftie buddies to do the same.
You won’t do that – will you? You have no desire to actually work and produce to support what you believe. You want only that I work and produce to support what YOU believe. You will continue to just pontificate because you like to pontificate.
I’ll tell you what. You keep on doing what you think is important for your own reasons. So will I.
I’ve known some really intelligent people. And a lot of them tend to be the stereotypical evil genius. Especially if they’re involved in the sciences.
sorry that Peter Singer ,a fellow Australian,has inflicted his dehumanising views upon the USA and particularly at Princeton.
Figure this out. The bloke (you call them guys) is Jewish,and i think the son of Holocaust survivors.I despised him here in Australia and I again apologise that he is now troubling your land. Oh yes and i found out he is a friend of a close relative of mine. Sometimes one should choose their friends more carefully
I generally find that most intellectuals’ words are far stronger second hand than they are in the reading (in other words, when you read their works, their thoughts are more nuanced than their critics give them credit for). The principle seems to hold for both the Left and the Right.
Peter Singer is a flagrant exception to that rule. No matter what you have heard from even his harshest critic, you find new horrors once you actually read him in his own words. His ethics induce a pit of your stomach moral revulsion. And yet he is totally excused within the “mainstream” Left. Just recently, Newsweek Magazine ran an essay by him, crediting him as merely an “ethicist” from Princeton.
For those of us, like myself, who have fled from the Left specificially over their contempt for human rights and individual worth, Singer makes it all crystal clear as to what we must stand for, and against.
I think it is moral to kill and eat Peter Singer. He isn’t an ethicist; he is a monster.
Objectivism is a junk philosophy propogated by sociopaths to justify antisocial behavior. Anyone who subscribes to this crap is either a soulless psychopath or is just naive and hasn’t really thought about the philosophy’s implications for society.
Peter Singer is drowning and I am standing on shore in a new expensive suit. Sorry Pete, I paid a lot for the threads and you can be replaced easily and cheaply.
Peter Singer is a smart-alec, deliberately taking shocking positions so that he will be noticed. The term “ethicist” means nothing; there are no experts in ethics, so that Socrates never found anyone who knew what the good was. Peter Singer writes about and teaches ethical theories.
I think it is moral to kill and eat Peter Singer.
If Singer’s “ethics” were used as a basis for our laws, any sort of murder could probably be justified if one could ‘prove’ that killing the victim made someone’s life easier or happier. Or, that it provided some benefit to large communities of flies and worms, who are equal in many ways to us.
Which is why we really don’t want Singer to get away with marketing himself a do-gooder or an ethicist; he is neither.
Objectivism is a junk philosophy propogated by sociopaths to justify antisocial behavior..
Objectivism does have limitations – it’s an interesting philosophy, but it doesn’t work as a political idea because it doesn’t take into account the fact that large urban societies need a well-maintained infrastructure (roads, schools, water, sewer, etc.) to survive.
But if we’re looking at actions and not words, innovators inspired by their own goals have done more to help society than Singer’s ‘Earth First’ and PETA followers.
I think it’s hilarious that Singer thinks it’s okay to kill defective kids, but wants us to support the entire third world.
Just remember: Singer, and those like him, are all in favor of supporting, and sustaining, Hamas, or any third-world Thugocracy, and the chimp that attacked the woman and tried to gnaw off her face; that’s our moral duty, after all, and we must support poorer nations, and the animal world, blah, blah, blah; but he hates disabled kids, because he somehow feels they’re not worthy of support. Think about it.
And how does he justify Americans giving money to the UN, or whoever, because of their “needs”? After all, if human worth is determined, as he claim, by “autonomy”, and consciousness, how we be sure that said money will go to sustain those who qualify as fully human under his terms? Wouldn’t it be wrong, according to his lights, to help such people? Apparently not. Apparently, when it comes to the third world, “need” is all that matters (no matter how dysfunctional, tyrannical or incompetent a particular third world nation might be).
Guy’s just a guilt-tripper, who hates life.
WOW, a truly sick man with a twisted mind.
Singer,is a reincarnation of Dr. Mengele,in a bland, liberal guise!
Peter Singer is to ethics and philosophy, what the late Andy Kaufman was to comedy. He parodies the genre in order to demonstrate his contempt for the bourgeoisie and their expectations. His fans love it because it confirms their world view. His blatant contradictions and inconsistencies give them room for the hypocrisy of their lifestyles as measured by their pronouncements.
Tis a pity that we have to live through it. But every age has its own Count Cagliostros, and he is ours.
What this libtard tumor and Dr. Mengele Wannabe has to say about children not being fully human relative to adults, can be said about libtards.Therefore, to quote this tumor,”killing them cannot be equated with killing normal human beings”. Thank you Dr. Singer;if anyone doubts that a liberal is merely a laundered Stalinist,just read the good doctor!
He’s the same as any other environmental/animal rights nut. A few years ago, the Palestinians used a donkey strapped with explosives in an attempt to kill some Jews. The head of PETA contacted them, asking them politely to leave animals out of the conflict, as they never did a thing to anyone. Not a word for the Jews who that donkey was planned for, but hey, Jews aren’t cute like Donkeys and Bunnies and Puppies
And someone needs to explain to Singer and all those other bleeding hearts, that it is PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for them to actually, truly care about people in third world countries. Those people are outside their “monkeysphere”, and it is literally CHEMICALLY IMPOSSIBLE for our brains to care about those people. Anyone who claims to care about the population of the third world is LYING; they only have their own agenda to worry about.
http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
I know it’s a humour site, but bear with it and give the article a read
The sooner we clear out academia of nuts like Singer, the better off we will be.
He can find a soapbox and lecture the world from a public park and that’s all that our public funding (the park setting) should grant him.
And yes, I am aware of the fact that Princeton is a private university. It is also a university that accepts financial aid for the students who take Singer’s classes. PU can pay for this with PU’s own money from here on out as far as I am concerned.
He makes me physically ill. Here’s my ethical theory: anyone not capable of caring for others rights as people is not fully human and thus can and should be killed. I like animals and think causing them needless suffering is wrong. But animals are not human. Period. If I had to choose between my beloved cat and some stranger’s life, there’d be no need to think. People come first.
One of my favorite authors is Dean Koontz, and he skewers this sort of “ethicist” in his works and in interviews, quite regularly.
He is just another carbon glob.
Ethicist? I love guys like this. They demonstrate the fallacy of the idea that people can develop a solid moral code without a Higher Moral Authority. Without God, who’s to say your maorals/ethics are any more valid than mine?
Without God, who’s to say your maorals/ethics are any more valid than mine?
With God, who’s to say that your holy book is more valid than my holy book? Who’s to say that your God is more valid than Buddha or a multitude of Gods and Goddesses?
I first heard about Peter Singer when a group of very lefty academics protested against the fact that he was allowed to teach (or speak at) an ethics class at Penn State. Most people who value human life find his ideas repugnant, even if they’re atheists or agnostics.
There is logic in that revulsion. Most societies are repulsed by things like cannibalism, terrorism, incest, bestiality, because if these practices became established in the society, the society would eventually destroy itself.
There’s a fine line between ordinary, unlikable human vices and abhorrence. Given people’s reactions to his work, Singer may be crossing it.
I halfway expect our punch drunk president to appoint this creep HHS secretary. They both seem to agree on the idea of lebensunwertes leben. How else to explain Obama’s votes against the Born Alive act, when he voted ‘present’ on anything else even slightly controversial?
Peter Singer is alive and Michael Crichton is dead. There is no God.
Or…we are in hell.
David, Singer cannot be appointed HHS as he is still an Australian citizen. He does not even have the guts to stand in Australian elections,preffering before Princeton to skulk the Halls of Monash University here in Melbourne. Oh and he totally despises theologians of any shade
Sigh. Unfortunately, Singer’s ideas are perfectly consistent with the notion that we are the accidental byproducts of a cosmic burp some umpty-billion years ago, and consistent with the idea that a human in the fetus stage is fair game for any mother who wants to deliver him into the hands of a butcher. So what if “[m]ost societies are repulsed by things like cannibalism, terrorism, incest, bestiality, because if these practices became established in the society, the society would eventually destroy itself”? Such a notion in no way imposes an obligation on anyone to oppose such things, it only pretends to explain the existence of said opposition in some societies and, therefore, in some people.
However, we know with an absolute certainty that Singer is wrong in valuing the life of an adult chimpanzee over that of a human being. If we are actually here by accident, we wouldn’t really know this, we would only be programmed to THINK we know it. You can’t have it both ways.
Most societies SHOULD be repulsed with the idea that it’s OK to pull a baby halfway out of his mother, stab him in the skull, and pull him the rest of the way out dead. Ours used to be, until evolutionary fantasies gained ascendance.
Peter Singer will be my guest on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com at 5 PM New York time Friday March 27.
Please go to my blog then at http://www.garybaumgarten.com and click on the link to join the chat to talk to him.
Thanks,
Gary
Peter Singer is a misanthropic freak from the darkside.
Western ethics are based on the Talmud and Spinoza’s translation of it. I don’t recall anywhere where its says that its alright to kill infants whether they have defects or not. Has this man read the Talmud? I don’t think so. However, he really enjoys putting a burr under our saddle. He lives for the attention that it creates. If we all conceded that he was just an idiot and not worth listening to, he would just dry up and be blown away by a puff of wind. Some people really don’t deserve to be listened to.
He makes me sad.
33Mike: He makes me sick!
He lives for the attention that it creates. If we all conceded that he was just an idiot and not worth listening to, he would just dry up and be blown away by a puff of wind. Some people really don’t deserve to be listened to.
That would probably work if we could convince universities and the media to stop listening to him (and promoting him).
But we’d still have to deal with Singer-inspired eco-terrorism. Most of the world tries to ignore these loonies, but that doesn’t stop them.
The Eugenics urge that reared it’s ugly head in the time of Woodrow Wilson and thrilled the so-called “progressives” of that era is back; er, —it never left, really. It motivated the Nazi desire to “cleanse” the population of unwanted, undesirable, unclean “sub-humans” – including homosexuals, gypsies, “mental defectives”, not to mention Jews and others. And then, this eugenics urge reared itself again in America in our mental institutions where forced sterilizations were rationalized as a way to protect the population. The interesting part about this is that the “eugenics urge” always, always comes from the progressive thinkers on the left end of the political spectrum, clothed in some moral and intellectual superiority.
It is vomit inducing.
Steve P. says: “Objectivism is a junk philosophy propagated by sociopaths to justify antisocial behavior. Anyone who subscribes to this crap is either a soulless psychopath or is just naive and hasn’t really thought about the philosophy’s implications for society.”
I say, Steve P. hasn’t done more than a topical study of Objectivism or egoism. Objectivism’s moral system is based on rational self-interest.
Where is the rationality in being anti-social, when a person benefits enormously from living in a society? Through division of labor and trade, the standard of living for all are raised. By living in a society your chances of survival and flourishing as a being are greater than on your own.
The concept of Individualism does not mean that anti-social psychopath is the only possible outcome. It means the reliance on your own judgment based on reason. This does not mean that what you want is right because you want it. It means that you have to validate right and wrong through a process of thought.
If that is “limited” as a philosophy, then you may as well discard all science and all technology as well, because in the end they are all based on that fundamental: reason.
#25 Mary Madigan – It is easy to say whose religion is better. Better religions produce better societies. Islamic countries, for example, always live in brutal conditions eventually. It leads to wealthy elites and massive numbers of poor, as do all tyrranies. Compare that to the openness and wealth of Judeo-Christian countries. As it fades in a country, tyrrany and poverty rises. Too, human/animal sacrifice was common in ancient religions until ended by the dominance of Christianity. Sorry, but I happily and easily claim the superiority of the Judeo-Christian belief system.
You also make a great assumption that most societies reject a number of repulsive behaviors. That is simply not true. Without the civlizing influence of religions to impose moral restrictions from within, immoral behavior grows rampant, and people do not reject these repulsive behaviors.
Take a long look at the world. Do we naturally reject genocide? Not at all. It is commonplace. How about slavery? Um, no. The sex-slave trade, for example, is thriving. The Qu’ran states twice that slavery is okey-dokey. Incest? Not necessarily. Without tight societal condemnation, it, too, thrives. In some societies, it is institutionalized. Cold callous murder? One must fight hard to keep it at bay. When society breaks down, people will rapidly gravitate to such methods. Many will kill just for something to do. Bloodsport is also a common decadence.
Men are not rational animals. They are rationalizing animals. They find a way to give into their baser urges, even when there are controls. Without these controls, no thought whatsoever is given to the wrongness of a deed. The idea that we are naturally good is just laughable. The history of the world proves otherwise. You are just too sheltered by our good society to appreciate the moral bankruptcy of the majority of Mankind.
Without the civlizing influence of religions to impose moral restrictions from within, immoral behavior grows rampant, and people do not reject these repulsive behaviors.
Marc, here is a page that shows how the church co-operated with Hitler, including the Vatican’s alliance with the Nazis:
Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli (later to become Pope Pius XII) signs the Concordat between Nazi Germany and the Vatican at a formal ceremony in Rome on 20 July 1933. Nazi Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen sits at the left, Pacelli in the middle, and the Rudolf Buttmann sits at the right.
The Concordat effectively legitimized Hitler and the Nazi government to the eyes of Catholicism, Christianity, and the world.
The most violent and repressive authoritarian ideologies, fascism and communism, were created by people living in predominantly Christian nations. That’s not to say that Christianity is responsible for the millions of deaths and the mass destruction that resulted from these ideologies – but religion didn’t stop it from happening.
Religion can be a solution to many problems, but it doesn’t cure everything.
#39 Mary Madigan – Yes, I knew about this alliance. The Catholic Church has a poor record in many ways. It’s why there was a Reformation. That said, Hitler repudiated Christianity, and began to tout Norse gods nonsense. The SS were often referred to as Valkyries, and State funerals invoked the same nonsense.
Christianity was highly discouraged in his governement, and even among his Wehrmacht. It took a brave General to openly profess his worship of Christ, as the SS and Hitler, himself, always viewed them with great suspicion. As I said in my previous post, when Christianity recedes, tyranny rises. (And I can’t believe I previously misspelled tyranny. Grr.)
Christianity was highly discouraged in his governement..
There are pictures of Nazis going to church, celebrating Christmas and being married.
As I said in my previous post, when Christianity recedes, tyranny rises.
Christian leaders, like most religious leaders, cooperate with the people in power. If Peter Singer were our president, most religious groups would make an effort to cooperate with our new leader, because they want their organization and their traditions, to carry on. One reason why religion is no safeguard against tyranny.
Ethicist? Moral relativist is more like it… and with a predetermined conclusion: anything good is wrong. There’s a word for it: Evil.
Singer should be asked what a society should do to ethicists who undermine that society’s fundamental moral basis.
Peter Singer was hired as a professor at Princeton, and I should mentioned very highly recommended, by the then president of Princeton, Nathan Shapiro, who coincidently (?) was the chairman of our nation’s Bio-Ethics Committee at the time. It was Bill Clinton who appointed Mr. Shapiro to that important position. It would appear to be a meeting of the minds.
Hey Frank whatcha mean Jews aren’t cute? Check out Israeli Bar Rafeli and tell me she’s not cute. All kidding aside, Singer is just another liberal elitist who has no problem lecturing the rest of the huddled masses on who should be killed and who should be spared. Keep in mind that long before the Nazi’s got to work on exterminating Jews they were busy exterminating Germans who they deemed as “useless eaters”.