Daniel J. Flynn

    Princeton University’s newest faculty member was greeted with a massive protest during his first day of teaching classes. Professor Peter Singer, who believes it is acceptable for parents to kill their small children but “speciesist” to eat meat, sparked a demonstration that resulted in more than a dozen arrests and the barricading of the school’s administration building. 

    More than 200 people demonstrated on Tuesday, September 21 at the Ivy League campus’ Nassau Hall, the structure that houses the offices of the president and other top Princeton leaders. After an hour of protesting members of the disabled-activist group, Not Dead Yet, surrounded the administration building and sealed off its offices for two hours. Fourteen handicapped protestors were arrested by the school’s campus police. Others less interested in civil disobedience continued to protest peacefully. 

    While the campuses are replete with stories of administrators cozying up to activists protesting various causes, the handicapped activists at Princeton had no such luck and were dragged away by campus police. University spokesman Justin Harmon was dismissive of the members of Not Dead Yet who surrounded the administration building. “This is their little moment of political theater, and they’ve been planning it for a while,” hecommented to the  Daily Princetonian. 

    Princeton spokesmen declined comment on the event to Campus Report and refused to return calls. 

    Singer’s course, “Questions of Life and Death,” was not interrupted by the protests. The school has announced that it will be placing a guard outside of Singer’s classroom for the remainder of the semester. 

Bizarre Philosophy 
    Singer’s ideology is a melange of animal-rights activism, environmentalism, and Marxism, with a very casual view of the value of human life thrown into the mix. He claims to be an adherent of utilitarianism, a philosophy championed by Jeremy Bentham, an Industrial Age Englishman who advocated a society in which the happiness of the greatest number of people trumped all other concerns. Critics of the ideology note that it transforms moral questions into mathematical ones—something that might sound nice in a classroom or a book, but that rarely works in the real world. 

Killing Babies
    It is Singer’s beliefs about questions involving life and death that have sparked the most controversy. Singer believes in euthanasia, encourages sterilization in Third World countries, and thinks that abortion, even for “the most trivial of reasons,” is appropriate. Perhaps more controversial are his views on infanticide. “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life,” he writes in Practical Ethics, “the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.” Killing the disabled infant, Singer suggests, should not only be allowed—it should be considered “right.” 

    Singer’s promotion of infanticide extends to healthy babies, as well. His book Rethinking Life and Death argues that “newborn infants, especially if unwanted, are not yet full members of the moral community,” and thus, it is acceptable to kill them. He offers a plan in which “a period of twenty-eight days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others.” During this time, parents would be allowed to kill their baby. Singer believes that there is “wide support for medical infanticide” and that “the world already has enough human beings.” 

    In other cultures, Singer opines, women often “smother” their babies, and this “does not prevent them from being loving mothers.” The West, the bioethics professor posits, is culturally deficient in its taboo on such behavior and “in the case of infanticide, it is our culture that has something to learn from others, especially now that we, like them, are in a situation where we must limit family size.”

Barnyard Concentration Camps?
    Nearly as controversial are Singer’s views concerning the “tyranny of human over nonhuman animals.” He compares scientists who engage in research on animals to Nazi doctors and likens the lives of animals on farms to the lives of blacks on slave plantations. Central to his argument is the notion of “speciesism,” a form of discrimination toward animals that he equates with racism, sexism, and various other “isms.” 

    “Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race,” declares Singer. “Sexists violate the principle of equality by favoring the interests of their own sex. Similarly, speciesists allow the interests of their own species to override the greater interests of members of other species. The pattern is identical in each case.” 

    Critics accuse Singer of using the classroom as a soapbox to preach his bizarre ideas. The tone of his supposedly scholarly works, they say, is more fitting for activist screeds. 

    “Should we break in and free the animals?” Singer asks in Animal Liberation, a tome that is considered the Bible of the animal rights movement. “That is illegal, but the obligation to break the law is not absolute. It was justifiably broken by those who helped runaway slaves in the American South.” Later in the book, which is given to all new members of the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, he reveals the names of scientists who experiment on animals. “I see no reason to protect experimenters behind a cloak of anonymity,” he remarks.

    Hunting, fishing, farming, experimenting on animals—even an act as benign as eating a hamburger—is compared to murder in Singer’s worldview. Do hunters, Singer asks, “consider that the animal might have a spouse who will suffer”?

    The “tyranny” against animals, Singer writes in Animal Liberation, “can only be compared with that which resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black humans.” Yet Singer freely invokes various other human tragedies to hammer his point home. “Hens, like humans in concentration camps, will cling tenaciously to life under the most miserable conditions,” he emotionally argues. He likens medical research on animals to  experiments on humans in Nazi Germany, as well. 

Princeton Labels Singer ‘Mainstream’ 
    Singer, whose hiring in the school’s Center for Human Values was announced last year, is Princeton’s first bioethics professor. “Orwellian” is how many describe the hiring of a proponent of legalized infanticide and euthanasia for many disabled people for a “bioethics” position in a “Center for Human Values.” Princeton’s president, Harold Shapiro, is the chairman of a bioethics panel appointed by President Clinton and approved bringing on board the Australian philosopher. 

    Shapiro defended his decision by saying, “You wouldn’t want to come to a university where only certain views are allowed.” Yet many say that that is exactly what Princeton is, noting that the school’s faculty is dominated by leftists. 

    The director of Princeton’s Center for Human Values, Amy Gutmann,  explained her belief that “[Singer’s] view is a mainstream philosophical view.” She insisted, “I don’t think any university can deny tenure to any individual who’s done first-rate work.” Yet in the past, Gutmann has been vocal about banning the hiring of faculty who exhibit “ethnic, sexist, homophobic and other forms of offensive speech directed against members of a disadvantaged group.” Just what constitutes such speech, she has left vague. Curiously, Guttman doesn’t categorize the groups that Singer says should be allowed to be killed—infants, the disabled, the elderly—as disadvantaged. She explained in 1992 that views that display “misogyny, racial and ethnic hatred, or rationalization of self-interest and group interest parading as historical or scientific knowledge” should not be given a hearing on campus. 

    The current controversy caused Princeton Trustee and billionaire Steve Forbes to declare that the school’s hiring of Singer has forced him to withhold supporting the 252 year-old university. “I have given no money to Princeton since Peter Singer was appointed to be a professor of bioethics,” the presidential candidate announced, “and I pledge to you today that so long as Peter Singer remains a tenured professor there, I will not financially contribute to Princeton University.” 

    Whether the hiring of Singer provokes other alumni to do the same, Princeton will soon find out.