Steve Forbes has it right: The presence on the Princeton University faculty of Peter Singer — the Australian animal-rights activist who proclaims that a baby is of less value than a pig and who advocates a 28-day trial period before accepting newborns into the human race — is “intolerable and unconscionable.”
But Forbes, whose family has given millions to the university since his graduation in 1970 and who sits on its board of trustees with the likes of Bill Bradley and Senator Bill Frist, has now been publicly rebuked by Robert H. Rawson Jr., the board’s chairman. “The trustees collectively have a special and overarching responsibility to advance and protect the core values of the University, which include the essential principles of academic freedom,” Rawson wrote two weeks ago. “We sincerely regret that one of our members apparently is not willing to accept this fundamental responsibility.” This was in response to a letter of complaint from Amy Gutmann (who directs Princeton’s Center for Human Values at which Singer holds the chair in bioethics), George Kateb (who led the search committee that proposed Singer’s appointment), and two other faculty members.
The blow-up over Forbes is only the latest installment in the controversy that has raged since Singer came to Princeton in July. There was the public debate with the blind professor who accused him of desiring her death, the protesters in wheelchairs hauled away by the police from his classes, the ongoing argument about whether utilitarian moral theory actually implies that there are, in Singer’s words, “living human beings whose lives may intentionally be terminated” — the newborn and the handicapped, the elderly and the infirm, and the unborn, of course (whom Singer believes are as much living humans as any other infants, and so equally eligible for death).
But let’s be honest. Peter Singer was not brought to Princeton to slaughter the first baby, like the ceremonial cutting of a ribbon to open a new dormitory. He was not even hired primarily to advance the legality of infanticide, though the Laurence Rockefeller/population-control money that finances his position may desire that eventual result.
No, Singer was selected for a Princeton chair by Kateb and Gutmann precisely because his selection would generate controversy, and thereby use the stature of Princeton to raise as a debatable proposition — the inviolability of human life — what most of us supposed was a fundamental principle. “John Paul II proclaims that the widespread acceptance of abortion is a mortal threat to the traditional moral order,” Singer wrote in “Killing Babies Isn’t Always Wrong,” a 1995 article in the London Spectator. “I sometimes think that he and I at least share the virtue of seeing clearly what is at stake.”
There’s a megalomania here, of course: a vision of himself in which the gigantic figure of Peter Singer sits across from the pope at the chessboard of humankind, locked in a grim battle for the future of all us little folk. But there’s also a sleight of hand — so obvious, it’s positively shameless — in which any disagreement is arbitrarily defined as religious and everything religious is arbitrarily banned from rational discourse.
Academic courtesy, the collegiality that professors are supposed to show, has kept from news reports what is common knowledge among the faculty: that Singer is a second-rater. This is a man who has no real standing in bioethics, no significant publications in ethical theory, no major importance even in his own narrow world of utilitarianism. To animal-rights and abortion activists, Peter Singer is a founding philosopher, but to philosophers, he’s mostly an activist. On a campus with faculty of the stature of the epistemologist Saul Kripke, the constitutional lawyer Robert George, and, yes, even Gutmann and Kateb, Singer is an embarrassment. It’s no accident that he was not invited to join the philosophy department when he received his chair at the Center for Human Values, and he remains the only faculty member without an appointment to an actual academic department.
This is the disingenuousness of Gutmann and Kateb when they complain that Forbes’s “attack on academic freedom” has “struck at the heart of Princeton.” Singer doesn’t belong at Princeton, either as thinker, teacher, or even on the spurious grounds of intellectual diversity, which his defenders — with breathtaking bad faith — also invoke.
There exist distinguished thinkers with views opposed to Singer’s — the British philosopher G. E. M. Anscombe, for instance, who since the 1950s has translated Wittgenstein, written on moral theory, and defended pro-life positions. Suppose Anscombe were to argue (as she has not) that doctors who perform abortions have ceased to be human beings and we have a duty to assassinate them. Now there is a wrongheaded view that’s currently unrepresented amid the ostensible diversity of thought at Ivy League schools. But can anyone imagine the faculty and trustees rising in the name of academic freedom to defend the right of someone to pronounce it from a chair at Princeton University?
Of course not. Like professorial collegiality and the duty of trustees to defend their university, academic freedom is a real principle. But in the hands of Singer’s defenders, it has become only a slogan, useful chiefly for bullying into silence anyone who objects to their efforts to shatter the culture’s last vestiges of traditional morality. And, by prompting Rawson’s rebuke of Forbes, the device has proved successful once more.
It was, in fact, G. E. M. Anscombe who foresaw part of this. In a brilliant essay back in 1958, she pointed out that somewhere between John Stuart Mill in the 1840s and G. E. Moore in the 1920s, the British utilitarian tradition lost the ability to explain why the taking of innocent life is wrong. And she predicted that there would eventually come along someone willing to say that we should kill babies, because utilitarianism offers no explanation of why we shouldn’t.
Anscombe seems to have imagined that the result would be the rejection of utilitarian ethics — for, after all, killing babies is wrong and a moral theory that arrives at a contrary result must be mistaken. What she didn’t guess is that the one who came along to proclaim infanticide would be a second-rater like Peter Singer, or that he would be promoted as a stalking horse by those who don’t actually care one way or the other about the sufferings of handicapped children or the philosophical problems of utilitarian theory, but only about wrecking the last remaining moral compass by which the culture can still steer.
But who could have guessed it? There is a sense in which Singer’s promoters have already won. His presence at Princeton compels presidential candidates to take a position against infanticide. It forces columnists and pundits to explain that they are personally opposed to baby-killing, though they can’t quite say why. Even if, after extended discussion, we answer as a nation that Singer is wrong, it is too late. His appointment transforms the slaughter of the innocents into a debatable moral question rather than an undebatable moral principle — the touchstone by which we are able to judge the rightness or wrongness of other moral claims.
And the key fact in the whole controversy is that Peter Singer didn’t do it; any crackpot can rant and rave. Princeton did it, by giving that crackpot a distinguished chair. The fame, history, and eminence of our great colleges lend an immediate prominence to those they hire. Princeton University let itself be used, thoroughly and degradingly, by Amy Gutmann and her Center for Human Values, by George Kateb and his search committee, and by the population-control money financing them. Don’t any of his fellow trustees — Mr. Bradley? Senator Frist? — see why Steve Forbes objects in the name of the school he loves?
J. Bottum, for the Editors
