Ron, here's another article justifying this guys philosophy from the "Chronical of Higher Education", one of the premier academic journals in the US. The fact that they want to justify Singer, tells us volumes about what is and isn't controversial in the universities.
From the issue dated March 10, 2000
FOR EDUCATIONAL AND DISCUSSION PURPOSES ONLY
chronicle.com
Why Are We Afraid of Peter Singer?
The world's most reviled philosopher just wants more happiness for everyone
By JEFF SHARLET
Peter Singer's troubles began when he was finally allowed to speak in Germany. It was 1989. The Australian philosopher had gone to lecture in the country that his parents had fled five decades before, and that had sent three of his grandparents to their deaths in concentration camps.
His topic was euthanasia. He is in favor of it. Not just for the terminally ill, but also, in some cases, for the very young. In a book called Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1979), he'd written: "killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all."
Those sentences have trailed him ever since, "exposed" on editorial pages like an old rap sheet resurfacing. They do not mean what they seem to mean here, shorn of the logical reasoning with which they're surrounded in the book, the qualifiers and the disputes over definitions that make philosophy philosophy. But standing alone they are terrifying. Many Germans who encountered them quoted like that before Mr. Singer's arrival heard echoes of the past. In 1939, Hitler had instructed the doctors of the Third Reich to pursue a policy of putting incurable patients to death. He termed it "mercy killing." Was that what Mr. Singer considered "philosophy"?
Whatever he called it, some leftist Germans thought they knew better; this was fascism in disguise, and because Germans no longer cared for such thoughts, several universities canceled his speaking engagements. Then, when he finally took the stage at the University of Saarbrucken, members of the audience conspired to give him a history lesson. They opened their mouths as Mr. Singer stepped to the podium and prepared to open his, and they hooted and hollered and told Mr. Singer to go home.
That time he held his ground, but to little avail. His lecture turned into an opportunity for his opponents to testify to his crimes, and Mr. Singer's notoriety spread like wildfire through German-speaking lands. When he returned to the region, in 1991, to address an audience at the University of Zurich, he found an even more organized resistance. As he rose to speak, the crowd stood with him, and began to chant in unison: "Singer raus! Singer raus!"
"I had an overwhelming feeling that this was what it must have been like to attempt to reason against the rising tide of Nazism in the declining days of the Weimar Republic," Mr. Singer later wrote in the journal Kriterion. "The difference was that the chant would have been not 'Singer raus,' but 'Juden raus.'"
Mr. Singer tried to draw that parallel at the lecture hall, too; in response, a protester tore his glasses from his face and smashed them.
When Mr. Singer came to Princeton University last fall to fill a chair in bioethics, a crowd of equally distraught protesters awaited him. Some of them belonged to a group of disabled-rights activists called Not Dead Yet. Some belonged to a group called the Roman Catholic Church.
Many conservatives saw him as an apostle of the worst kind of relativism. The Weekly Standard called him a "crackpot," a "megalomaniac" with the audacity to present himself as a sort of secular pope. The Wall Street Journal likened him to Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann.
But this time, Mr. Singer had come prepared for a storm. He stood sanguinely against the shouting, snapped back with humor when in one of its tirades against him the Journal featured a drawing of another Peter Singer, and volunteered to discuss his ideas with champions of the disabled. "And I took security measures," he says, though he won't explain how and he remains easily accessible on the campus.
The strategy seems to have worked; his glasses remain unbroken, and for the most part he lectures to quiet but crowded halls. One recent class featured no manifestoes for murder, but rather a thoughtful talk on the ethics of eating mollusks (better not, he concluded, since they might suffer). A small crowd followed him out afterward to ask questions such as "If I were the last man on earth, would ethics exist?" Mr. Singer seemed to have great patience for such inquiries. He paused beneath a tree, propped his chin on one hand and said, "All right, suppose you were the last man, OK, then ..."
But he is aware that several more-pressing dilemmas remain unresolved. Unlike his fiercest critics, Mr. Singer does not consider himself beyond the pale. "Have I created a new ethical theory?" he says. "No. In that sense, I'm not original."
His contributions, he believes, have been in his attentions to a host of specific issues. In 1972 his second published article, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" stated the case for a kind of radical charity -- giving until it hurts -- so cogently and forcefully that philosophers have been looking for good reasons to keep their extra cash to themselves ever since. After being converted to vegetarianism while a graduate student at the University of Oxford, he amplified his newfound views in a 1973 essay for The New York Review of Books that became the best-selling Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (New York Review/Random House) in 1975.
Since then, Mr. Singer has addressed more-fundamental questions: What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to die?
But his work is not abstract. In Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (St. Martin's Griffin, 1994), he presents a host of true-life tales. There's Trisha Marshall, a California woman shot to death while attempting robbery, then kept on life support for three and a half months so that her baby would survive when delivered prematurely; Nancy Cruzan, a Missouri woman turned into a vegetable in a car crash but kept breathing for seven years despite the wishes of her family; Anthony Bland, a young British man crushed at a soccer match, eventually allowed to die by the British courts.
Critics often accuse Mr. Singer of being cold-hearted, a man who measures happiness in numbers and considers love a replaceable resource. But to him the symbol of the "tragic farce" brought on by an inhumane adherence to the sanctity-of-life principle is "Rudy Linares, a twenty-three-year-old Chicago housepainter, standing in a hospital ward, keeping nurses at bay with a gun while he disconnects the respirator that for eight months has kept his comatose infant son Samuel alive. When Samuel is free of the respirator at last, Linares cradles him in his arms until, half an hour later, the child dies. Then Linares puts down the gun and, weeping, gives himself up."
That was April 26, 1989. Cook County charged Mr. Linares with first-degree murder, but the criminal case was over by May, when a grand jury refused to indict him.
Who wouldn't sympathize with Mr. Linares? But still, argue traditionalists, Samuel was a living being, worthy of as much consideration as any other. Absolutely, replies Mr. Singer, so let's consider his interests. Samuel looked forward to nothing. He remembered nothing. He most likely had no sense of himself. Since he was in a coma, he probably did not even feel any pain. The writer Philip K. Dick titled a classic science-fiction story "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" In Samuel's case, did he dream of anything?
Rudy Linares no doubt did. Maybe he dreamed of a son who was not a son, a person who would never have a personality. And this was not a dream, but a nightmare, one he wanted to end. Rudy Linares had interests. By Mr. Singer's reckoning, they outweighed those of Samuel's. Rudy Linares suffered, whereas Samuel could not. So to reduce the overall suffering of the Linares family most ethically, Samuel should have been allowed to die.
That he was not, says Mr. Singer, is the result of a "fig leaf" obscuring the truths of life and death. The technology that extends life has sharpened the question not of what life is so much as whether there ever comes a time to end it deliberately. What if the heart of a baby born without a brain can save another child who'd one day experience happiness? Should you take a heart from a living human?
"When infants born without brains never lived for more than a few days, and organ transplantation did not exist, it was easy enough to say that every human being has a right to life," Mr. Singer writes. "We did not have to ask whether some lives are more valuable than others. Now we cannot avoid that question."
Mr. Singer believes he can answer it with utilitarianism. But far from placing him on the frontiers of philosophy, that notion puts him in the middle of the mainstream.
As its name suggests, utilitarianism is no pie-in-the-sky utopian (or dystopian) scheme. It's the school originated by the 19th-century British thinker Jeremy Bentham, with the reasonable-sounding formula "Each to count for one and none more than one." Bentham went on to say that maximizing overall happiness should be our guide when we do our counting.
Bentham's utilitarianism grew into one of the major strands of Western thought. In some senses, you might even say that we are all utilitarians now. "We live in the most utilitarian public-policy nation in the world," says Arthur L. Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "We live by cost-benefit analyses."
"In terms of the hullabaloo over Peter," says Catherine Myser, a bioethicist at the University of Vermont, "people would be well-advised to read any of the bioethics literature, because there are tons of utilitarians doing exactly the same stuff. There's nothing scary or unique in what Peter's doing. It's mainstream Anglo-American philosophy."
Hilde Lindemann Nelson, a philosopher at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, is even firmer in declaring utilitarianism safe for public consumption. "These views served to liberate European heads of households from the moral demands of the church and the state," she says. "It gave each a freedom to be his own conscience. But its day may be past. It's too austere, too simple to do some of the moral work that Singer aspires to do."
Ms. Nelson describes herself as a feminist theorist, while Ms. Myser identifies herself as a philosopher of culture. Mr. Caplan, meanwhile, grudgingly accepts the label of pragmatist, with a small p. If utilitarianism represents a dominant strand of philosophy, it's one that a great many philosophers seem to be leaving behind.
"Singer's work is at this point historical," says Mr. Caplan -- a piece of the past philosophers must master before they move on to the challenges of the present. "In one sense, he's on the margins. There are very few people who advocate for infant euthanasia in any circumstances. But the process by which he comes to his conclusions, that's very familiar."
Mr. Singer's strength as a philosopher may be his ability to follow hard roads further than other scholars care to do. At the point when one comes to the notion of infant euthanasia in the service of some greater good, most bioethicists veer off on an exit that might as well be labeled "Kant." The 18th-century German philosopher derived his ethics from the idea that certain moral truths were self-evident and thus unalterably right, duties that one couldn't in good conscience deny.
Mr. Singer finds such an approach blind at best and possibly unethical. "I reject the view that says let justice be done though the heavens fall. I think if the heavens fall, then the result is likely to be unjust for everyone, so justice isn't being done at all."
If that seems like common sense, consider that it's Kant's line of thinking that allows you to justify caring for your mother even while you ignore a homeless woman you might pass on your way to see her. Mr. Singer's treatment of his mother, in fact, has been a subject of much of the unfavorable press he's received. It's not that he's a bad son. Rather, it's that he spends significant sums of money for nursing care for his mother, who has Alzheimer's disease. That action alone, some critics charge, disproves the whole body of his work -- as if he would be worth listening to only if he took a pillow and suffocated his mother.
On that issue, his critics seem to have forgotten that philosophy need not be autobiographical. The validity of Mr. Singer's ideas doesn't depend on his qualities as a son or his personal failings as a utilitarian. His rigor isn't so much in his behavior as it is in his willingness to contemplate fully the end of a line of reasoning, even if he doesn't go there himself. "The sentence that's always quoted about the disabled baby," he says. "If you look at it in context, you see that I'm putting forward the implication of a position."
But those implications are so shocking to some people that they cast the rest of Mr. Singer's work in shadow. "People look at Peter Singer's conclusions and make judgments on all his work based on whether they agree or not," says Jeffrey P. Kahn, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics. "Conclusions are important, and his are pretty challenging, but you can't judge the quality of his work by them alone."
The process may in fact be more important than the results, says Richard Rorty, a Stanford University philosopher almost as well-known for his public-sphere work as Mr. Singer. "Singer's trying to be a consistent utilitarian, which is a difficult position to make plausible. Like any theory that tries to deduce solutions to particular problems from one or two axioms, you get weird results, like that it's OK to kill a couple of people if it saves a hundred people."
But Mr. Rorty considers that a valuable finding. Employing the highest terms of praise one can offer a utilitarian, he calls Mr. Singer "an extremely useful intellectual, because he does confront all the hard problems, and he does ask about the limits of general theories."
It's those limits -- the fact that paths laid out by love lead to conclusions that by themselves can seem surreal or even monstrous -- that so frightens the world, says Carlin Romano, a philosopher at Bennington College. Mr. Singer has made enemies on the left because his work points to intellectual vulnerabilities in its flanks. "And the clearest sign" that he scares conservatives, says Mr. Romano, speaking of a long and hostile essay on Mr. Singer in The New Republic, "is that they've been aiming howitzers at him. They don't want to disagree, they want to demolish him."
Left or right, says Mr. Romano, "Singer reminds policy types of what they know deep down they're not doing, which is confronting philosophy."
Some critics believe Mr. Singer also sidesteps important philosophical questions. Mr. Rorty is the leading advocate of Pragmatism, capital P. As Mr. Rorty has developed it, Pragmatism is a deliberately patchwork system. It has to be if it is to bridge the great divide in modern philosophy between analytic and Continental thought -- the latter of which has been so completely ignored by most bioethicists that many claim not to know what it is.
Analytic thought is engaged in what Wittgenstein called the "battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Continental thinking views such a fight as folly. You can deconstruct language, turn its meanings over and over, but you can never pierce the veil -- there is no ultimate truth to be found.
Most bioethicists are skeptical of Continental philosophy's potential to contribute to their field. "There's no such thing as deconstructionist public policy," says Minnesota's Mr. Kahn. "It's about the greatest good for the greatest number."
But although "it's hard to take Sartre and put him into a clinical setting," according to Vermont's Ms. Myser, she believes that the Continental/analytic rift is particularly damaging to bioethics. "Bioethics closes itself off to a lot of considerations -- the power issues feminists would look at, the culture, the way language constructs things." Utilitarianism's followers, she thinks, may be able to read the music, but they're tone-deaf.
Mr. Singer is a stalwart of the analytic camp. He waves away a reporter's questions about the relevance of postmodernism to bioethics with a snort. "Life's too short for that sort of thing," he says.
But it's also too complicated for Mr. Singer's kind of thing, counters Mr. Rorty. "Singer is caught in the following dilemma: As a philosopher, he needs general theories. As a practical ethicist who is actually asked to provide advice as to what to do with concrete cases, he has to fudge the general theories. Bentham was a utilitarian who tried to measure quantities of pleasure and pain. Utilitarians have been backing up ever since."
That's where Mr. Singer's brilliance lies, argues Shelly Kagan. A Yale University philosopher who describes himself as "the other crazy utilitarian." Mr. Kagan counts Mr. Singer's 1972 paper on charity, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," as a turning point in contemporary thought precisely because it argued a utilitarian view without limiting itself to utilitarianism.
Mr. Singer often makes arguments that seem at first blush to appeal more to the gut than to the mind. When he urged a redistribution of wealth in The New York Times Magazine last fall, he did so with the example of a man who must decide whether to drive his prized sports car into the path of a train in order to save a child. You don't need to be a philosopher to tackle that dilemma, but the extension of the typical response to it -- to hell with the car -- leads you to what some would see as softer ground. Why wait for the train, for instance? There's a little girl somewhere starving right now. Are you ready to sell your car and use the money to feed her?
"Singer made use of the materials of common sense, moral reflection," says Mr. Kagan. "And that may be why some people are scared of his work, even if they disagree with it -- his threat to the comfortable life is considerable, and it strikes most people as false, but they can't just wave it away as utilitarianism."
Another common mistake when it comes to reading Mr. Singer, says Mr. Kagan, is to see his exploration of the total, or absolute, view of a position as the only option he believes in. There's no God in Mr. Singer's work, but many of his opponents seem to assume that if there were an almighty there, it'd be an angry one: Follow the rules or else.
In fact, says Mr. Kagan, Mr. Singer's work is unusual in the room it allows for exceptions. "What most of us believe is that certain actions are morally offensive, even though more good would be done," says Mr. Kagan. "Now, that view does not fit into the classical utilitarian picture. But Singer leaves room for that in his official pronouncements." He is more interested in debating the issues than in enforcing others' adherence to his line of reasoning.
"The scarier people are those policymakers who every day are putting utilitarian ideas into place," without understanding the principles behind them, says Ms. Myser of Vermont. "At least Peter Singer knows what he's doing. He's standing out there waving a flag with a 'U' on it."
Mr. Singer doesn't shy away from flying banners for views considered outdated. Dismayed by what he considers a conservative stranglehold on the insights of Darwin, he decided to reclaim for progressivism the naturalist best known for the phrase "survival of the fittest." In A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation, a short book to be published by Yale next month, Mr. Singer argues that once we separate "ought" from "is," Darwinism will be freed of its ideological baggage. By "is" he means the way things are, as we perceive them through Darwin's lens. By "ought" he means the decisions we make based on those observations. For example, he writes, "To say that human beings have a tendency to form hierarchies is not to say that it is right for our society to remain hierarchal; but it is to issue a warning that we should not expect to abolish hierarchy by eliminating the particular hierarchy we have in our society."
Mr. Singer puts great stock in a popular riddle, known as "the prisoner's dilemma," as a path to a new view of human behavior. It goes like this: You and another prisoner are being held incommunicado from each other and the world. Your interrogator gives you a set of options. If you rat on the other guy and he stays mum, you go free while he rots for 20 years. Or vice versa if you don't talk and he does. If you both talk, you each get 10 years. If neither of you squeals, six months each, and then you're both free.
The old view of Darwinism suggested that most people would betray the other prisoner, and that whoever did so first was the Darwinian "winner." But a study that ran the scenario 200 times using the same players in order to observe how people modified their behavior to respond to each other revealed that the most effective strategy was what Mr. Singer calls "tit for tat." Simply put, start nice, then mirror the moves made by the other player. If he or she is selfish, adopt the same posture. But if both players start nice -- and players who do so are most likely to survive -- the game never comes to blows.
"This amounts to nothing less than an experimental refutation of Jesus' celebrated teaching about turning the other cheek," says Mr. Singer. The idea excites him. In fact, it seems almost too good to be true. So although Mr. Singer actually first explored it in his 1995 book How Are We to Live? (Prometheus), he could not resist including it in his new manifesto for an ethical Darwinian future. There's a world ahead that "we can barely glimpse," he now writes, one he's convinced does not need to be utopian. By that he means rooted in reason rather than faith, equal interests rather than anything so shaky and susceptible to corruption as rights, duties, or laws.
If Mr. Singer is a visionary, even a skewed one, it is not evident in his bearing. He speaks in a resonant baritone, but he often lets it subside into a gentle, if disarming, nothingness. He is proud that even if his views are hard to accept, they are not difficult to grasp. He freely admits that some of his best ideas were spelled out fully a century ago. He likes to take an argument as far as it will go. It does not seem to occur to him that people could get hurt along the way, even by intangible ideas.
That may be why laypeople across the ideological spectrum distrust him: As Rudy Linares is a piece in one of Mr. Singer's logic puzzles, Mr. Singer, the most practical of thinkers, has become a symbol to many of abstraction at its worst.
"We're not all of us rational contractors," points out Tennessee's Ms. Nelson. "We're not gamesmen who play these games in which you try to figure out the prisoner's dilemma."
The negative reactions to Mr. Singer's ideas may be answers to utilitarian questions themselves. The total sum of happiness is based also on the context of culture: guilt and powerlessness, lies we tell ourselves, truths we disdain. When his ideas are considered in the public sphere, the debate is not so much over whether we should donate 20 percent of our earnings or 25, or even whether brain waves or parental love should define the line between life and death for an infant born without a brain. It is more a matter of the details of history versus the examples of philosophy, and the lived present versus an unguessable future. People with doubts about human nature prefer the former, while Mr. Singer cannot help but look ahead to the next move, with reason alone his guide. |
