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A lightning-rod philosophy

Peter Singer's ideas for making the world a more moral place have infuriated some groups with opposing views.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF Times Staff Writer
Published September 14, 2006

Singer's search for a global morality frequently offends antiabortion groups, the disabled, the religious and the corporate. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the world's 100 most influential people. Tonight he will give a public lecture at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg.

Singer, 60, a husband and father of three, was born in Melbourne, Australia.

The son of Jewish refugees, Singer has been compared to Hitler by critics who oppose his views on euthanasia and abortion rights. In the early 1990s he was physically assaulted by protesters during a thwarted lecture tour in Germany.

Appointed as the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton in 1999, he was greeted upon arrival by a group of the disabled who chanted, "We're not dead yet." He received death threats. And the mail scanner.

He is the author and editor of about 30 books. His newly published The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter, was co-written with Jim Mason. The book examines the costs of families' everyday food choices to animals, industry workers and the environment.

Singer spoke to the St. Petersburg Times last week by telephone from Princeton.

Do strong reactions to what you say surprise you? Hurt you?

I don't like people hearing about me secondhand and firing off abuses at me. That's frustrating. If people really look at what I've written, and grappled with the problems I've dealt with, then it's different. Hearing different views is part of the process.

How do you fight a moral war on terror?

One of the things you do is minimize the loss of life of innocents. The other difficulty is to try and protect individual liberties and civil rights. You have to have some procedures - you can't just hold people indefinitely.

You are a vegetarian as a moral choice. But do you really believe animals and humans are equal?

In Austria, the girl who was kept captive for years and years, then got free, everybody thinks that's a scandal. (Natascha Kampusch in August escaped a man who abducted her in 1998 when she was 10 years old.) But nobody thinks it's a scandal that we keep millions of pigs in captivity in such tight conditions that they can't turn around.

Sometimes I think we care more about animals than people. We always get a stronger response from readers to a story about an abused dog than a story about an abused child.

It's not that people care more about animals than children. Maybe they care more about dogs than other animals. If someone found dogs in small crates on concrete they'd be horrified. And yet they eat bacon and ham from pigs kept that way.

I don't think we should play favorites. I'm concerned about preventing suffering. We're talking about a being that can suffer.

You've talked about what you'd do if you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save both. Is it a toss-up?

My point is not that we should give less weight to humans than we give to animals. I'm not saying if you have the choice of saving a human being or a dog from a burning building, you might as well toss a coin. That's not true. Even if we didn't have self awareness, we'd somehow be superior.

What about animals used for medical research?

I think we have an institution (tradition) that does research on animals that doesn't take their interests seriously. The way research is conducted is not justifiable. There may be individual experiments that are justifiable.

You've written about Terri Schiavo. You say people have the right to end their lives, or those of their loved ones. Where do you draw the line?

You have to distinguish cases where people are competent to make their own decisions and cases where human beings are not competent, and who should then make those decisions. If it's a newborn baby, it's really the parents.

When we talk about decisions that are made in utero, most people would agree that a pregnant woman who has a fetus with a severe abnormality ought to be able to terminate the pregnancy. Most people, including Catholic hospitals, don't say you have to do everything to keep a newborn infant alive.

When you talk about charity, you say there is no reason to favor recipients by geography. Isn't the average American pretty generous if he sees the need?

People may be generous to their friends or someone who's right in front of them. We're not particularly generous in terms of foreign aid as a nation, given how little the government gives.

What can someone do right now for a more ethical world?

This nation is much too slow to take action - there's a kind of selfishness and indifference to problems in other countries. Global warming is causing major difficulties in other places and the United States won't get involved. One of the things you can do is stop eating factory farm products.

A POP QUIZ ON MORALITY

Do you make moral choices? Consider this scenario from Peter Singer:

A runaway train is going to hit a child or destroy your Bugatti a rare and priceless automobile. Should you divert the train from the child to the automobile? Yes, of course, Singer says.

Still, losing the Bugatti costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, all to save a single child.

You must save the child, you insist.

So, asks Singer, why do people not give up some income to save children from extreme poverty and disease? We do not live up to our stated values, he says. In practice, we purchase luxuries instead of saving the lives of not one child, but many.

If you go

Peter Singer will speak at 7:30 p.m. tonight at Fox Hall at Eckerd College, 4200 54th Ave. S, St. Petersburg.

Admission is free.

Susan Aschoff can be reached at aschoff@sptimes.com or (727) 892-2293.

[Last modified September 13, 2006, 15:07:47]