The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, February 3, 2025

Notably: Peter Singer is the 78-year-old Australian ethicist and philosopher made his name writing and advocating about such things as animal rights (as, if I understand him correctly, equal to,  or nearly equal to, human rights). His appointment to Princeton University–to a chair in bioethics at the Center for Human Values–in 1999  was almost as controversial as Bertrand Russell’s appointment to City University of New York in 1940. Steve Forbes, running for president in 1999, demanded that Princeton rescind the appointment because, he wrote in a letter to the university president, it  ”sends a dangerous and debilitating message that anything goes, that there are no bounds when it comes to questions of life and death.” Singer has advocated giving parents the right to kill newborns who have severe birth defects. Contrary to detractors’ misconceptions, he says he has not put the life of a snail above that of a child so much as he has placed the lack of consciousness of both snail and infants on the same plane. Somehow people like him, intellectuals, thinkers, philosophers and ethicists who make us rethink our assumptions without causing an iota of harm, are branded as controversial and dangerous while, say, a criminal who lies, cheats and commits real harms is elected president of the United States. Peter Singer also proposes pragmatic ways to end poverty. At any rate: I just wanted to excerpt a morsel from his recent interview with The New York Times’s David Marchese, where he is asked about his recent little book, Consider the Turkey. Marchese was curious why Singer was essentially wasting his time on turkeys. “There aren’t really new arguments in it,” Marchese tells him, right around Thanksgiving slaughters. “Could that time have been better spent doing something else?” Singer’s response: “This is an important issue. We’re talking about over 200 million turkeys who are reared in a way that comes close to being described as torture. It hurts them to stand up because their immature leg bones don’t bear the immense weight that they’ve been bred to put on in a short time. They suffer at slaughter and, as I describe in the book, if they get bird flu, the entire shed is killed by heatstroke quite commonly. It’s not the only method used in the United States, but it’s used on millions of birds. The ventilation is stopped in the shed, heaters are brought in, and they are deliberately heated to death over a period of hours. That’s something that Americans don’t know, and it’s important they should know, because it should stop. I think that’s definitely worth the time it took to write this book.” Ponder that as you pass the relish. 

—P.T.

 

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Perhaps the most egregious example of Singer’s bad habit of treating as a settled matter issues over which reasonable people disagree–and certainly the most significant such misrepresentation for his own theory–is his grandiose repudiation of the doctrine of “the sanctity of human life.” Singer argues that the doctrine of the sanctity of human life is a form of “speciesism,” an irrational prejudice rooted in discredited medieval religious ideas that gives priority to human beings while sanctioning discrimination against and oppression of non-human animals. […] On the basis of his atheistic premise, coupled with Singer’s contention that “the claim to equality does not rest on the possession of intelligence, moral personality, rationality, or similar matters of fact,” one might wonder what obstacle remains to the conclusion that might makes right, or what resources could be called upon to justify treating any form of animal life, human or non-human, as deserving of respect. Singer has an answer, naturally; but the answer hurls his theory into incoherence.

–From Peter Berkowitz’z “Other People’s Mothers,” a review essay on Peter Singer, The New Republic, January 10, 2000.

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