Princeton ethicist has controversial views
The Layman Online, September 15, 1999
Bob Abernethy of Religion & Ethics Newsweekly recently had an interview with the controversial Peter Singer, who is Professor of Ethics in the Center of Human Values at Princeton University, a school that was founded by Presbyterians.
The full text of the interview is published on the Religion & Ethics Newsweekly web site. The following are excerpts from Professor Singer’s comments.
Peter Singer,
Professor of Ethics in the Center of Human Values at Princeton UniversityGenesis is ‘factually false’
“I think that the Judeo-Christian tradition does have an unjustifiable bias in favor of human beings as clay human beings. And to that extent, it needs to be fairly fundamentally revised. I mean if you look simply at the book of Genesis, you see there the idea that humans are special, that God created humans in his own image, that he gave them dominion over the other animals. Since Darwin, we’ve known that that’s factually false, and now we’ve got to draw the moral implications of understanding that it’s factually false.”
Existence of God ‘makes no sense’
“I don’t believe in the existence of God, so it makes no sense to me to say that each human being is a creature of God. It’s as simple as that.”
Golden Rule is not exclusive
“… I could say that I am part of a religious tradition in that it’s – it’s very like the Golden Rule. But, of course, the Golden Rule is not exclusive to the Judeo-Christian tradition. You find it in other religions -religious traditions, too.”
How to reduce suffering
“Now, one of the things that I see as various ways in which we could quite easily reduce the amount of suffering there is in the universe – we could stop doing a lot of things to animals that we don’t need to do that would relieve their suffering. We could give some of the superfluous wealth that we enjoy in nations like the United States and use it relieve the terrible suffering of people on the edge of malnutrition and dying from easily preventable diseases in India, or parts of Africa, or wherever. And, of course, we could enable people who are dying from diseases like cancer, who are in pain and distress and say, ‘Look, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to go on’ – we could enable them to reach their own decision about when they’ve had enough.”
It’s OK to kill a ‘sick, old person’
“It would be all right to kill a sick, old person when that person has asked to be killed, and when that request has been made clearly and persistently; and when we are convinced that the person is in a sound, rational frame of mind and is, you know, making that decision for good reason – such as the fact that he or she has terminal cancer. That’s the only case in which I think it would be justified.”
Case for animal liberation
“The case for animal liberation is very simple. It’s that animals can feel or have interests. There is no reason why we should give less consideration to their interests than we give to similar interests of our own. I mean the fact that they’re not members of our species is, in itself, no more morally relevant than the fact that a . . . being is not a member of my race or not a member of my sex would be morally relevant to saying that we should give that being less consideration than we give ourselves.”
A student organization, Princeton Students Against Infanticide, has been strongly critical of Singer’s views about the sanctity of life. The organization will hold a rally, “A Witness to the Value of All Human Life,” at 1 p.m. September 21. The students are also circulating a petition against Singer’s hiring.