Calling Peter Singer controversial is of course, an
understatement. Be that as it may, the controversial Princeton
University professor of ethics packed a downtown D.C. bookstore
Friday hawking his new book, The President of Good and Evil:
The Ethics of George W. Bush (Dutton, 288 pages, $24.95). If
the ethicist’s reaction was any indicator, the event was less than
a rousing success.
This heavily Democrat crowd, weaned on the argumentation of
Molly Ivins and Michael Moore, must have become so accustomed to
any sentence with Bush’s name in it ending with a punch line that,
on several occasions, they broke out the laughs while Singer was
clearing his throat or striking a thoughtful pause. Think of
annoying drunks at a comedy club who have come determined to laugh
at anything and you’ll begin to get an idea.
Rather than the black-clad, twenty-something pseudo-anarchists
that one might expect Singer to draw, the crowd was made up
overwhelmingly of well dressed middle aged, mom and pop liberals.
The only outliers were a few obvious kooks in Indian shawls with
thick hemp necklaces, who kept dancing around.
During the crowd’s unwelcome outbursts, the slight, pale
professor often stared disdainfully out at his audience as if he
was looking at a rowdy classroom full of freshmen students who were
there not to reach a higher level of consciousness, but to get a
general educational requirement out of the way.
SUFFERING THROUGH THIS AGE of liberal anti-intellectualism, one
might be inclined to feel sorry for Singer, but flipping through
the pages of his latest book will quickly strangle any sympathy in
the crib — it is clear he has brought this plague of stupidity
upon himself. Singer’s other works have led many conservatives to
accuse the ethicist of having a deviant sense of morality, but
there is an undeniable brilliance and lucidity in his writing.
Singer’s critique of Bush’s ethics, on the other hand — both in
speeches and in his new book — is juvenile. Discussing the
president’s opposition to using human embryos for research, Singer
states that yes, embryos are unique, but so are snowflakes, and “we
don’t have laws protecting snowflakes.”
The U.S.’s involvement in Iraq is completely unethical since we
did not intervene in Rwanda and also because we will likely keep
military bases there. Even the Taliban are on a higher moral plane
then the United States as they proved “willing to hand over Osama
Bin Laden to a court provided with an Islamic judge.”
Singer also takes Bush to task for being a “bad Christian.” “If
you say you follow the Bible, as Bush does, you ought to at least
take seriously the idea that you should turn the other cheek when
someone strikes you,” Singer sermonized to applause. After
September 11, Bush was “actually upset” the military couldn’t get
moving faster, and “wanted to kill people.” All of which Singer
declared was decidedly un-Christian behavior, even as made sure the
crowd knew he doesn’t go in for that Christian nonsense in the
first place.
Throwing a bone to the conspiracy-minded, Singer told the mom
and pops that Bush’s reign may be the result of the efforts of a
cabal of neoconservative followers of Leo Strauss. These
Straussians believe that “the masses can never be trusted with the
truth” and that religion should be used to “keep people in line.”
Unfortunately these intellectuals didn’t have the personalities to
win elections and so were forced to use the simple-minded,
“patrician” marionette to seize power.
Of course, Singer wanted to raise this paranoid fantasy without
accepting any responsibility to present actual proof. “It’s a
speculation worth considering,” Singer allowed, his index finger
thoughtfully tapping his chin.
THOSE WHO KNOW Peter Singer’s work understand there is something
genuinely perverse about his passing judgment on anyone’s
ethics.
I happen to agree with the premise of his 1975 book, Animal
Liberation; that those with the ability to understand
suffering and its causes have a responsibility to avoid inflicting
it. This stance, however, is difficult to square with Singer’s
subsequent work, which advocates the right of parents to kill
“defective” children up until age three. “Killing a disabled infant
is not morally equivalent to killing a person,” Singer argues
plainly. “Very often, it is not wrong at all.”
What constitutes a “defect” is left up to parents, and children
of Baby Boomers will be happy to know that Singer thinks we are all
capable of deciding whether our parents belong in a nursing home or
a hole in the ground. That’d be one way to solve the looming Social
Security crisis, I suppose.
Let’s play that again: The same man who argued we should avoid
causing suffering to clams by not eating them, writes in
Practical Ethics that, “the life of a newborn baby is of
less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a
chimpanzee.”
Singer urges readers to “put aside these emotionally moving but
strictly irrelevant aspects of the killing of a baby” so we can
understand that “the grounds for not killing persons do not apply
to newborn infants.” Suggesting a human baby has more intrinsic
worth than a pig is dismissed as rank “speciesism.”
YET DURING THE BRIEF question and answer period, no one stood up to
challenge Singer, on his silly new book or his deeply troubling
corpus. “Isn’t going after Bush on ethics just too easy?” one
person asked, as if Bush’s villainy and depravity were generally
accepted hypotheses with this crowd. Later, Singer cracked one of
the only smiles of the night as the noise of the cash register
ringing up copy after copy of his book filled the room.
