Infanticide Chic II: Professor Singer goes to Princeton

Last June, Princeton University announced the appointment of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer to the Ira W. DeCamp Professorship of Bioethics at the University's Center for Human Values. Singer is well-known to us, coming to our attention with his 1975 book Animal Rights, which argued that humans as a species should not necessarily be given special rights over animals, and continuing with his work promoting infanticide and euthanasia. Singer may well be the bestknown world champion of the Culture of Death.

His appointment to a prestigious American university is thus appalling, and worth, we thought, a symposium on the professor and his courses in killing. We call it "Infanticide Chic II" because it adds to our previous symposium on Professor Steven Pinker, whose views on infanticide were the subject of the special section in our Winter, 1998 issue.

We first heard of Singer's appointment in a Washington Times Op-Ed column (June 30), and we asked the author, Professor David Oderberg, to expand on it for us-he graciously did so, and his trenchant "Academia's `Doctor Death"' leads our section. We then asked our esteemed contributor (also a professor) George McKenna to weigh in with his thoughts. The resulting article is a powerful dissection of Singer's beliefs and what the acceptance of his ethics would really meannihilism. And yet McKenna hopes that Singer's very radicalism will provide a wake-up call to the academic world that Singer's "views" are beyond the pale.

Naomi Schaefer, writing in the Wall Street Journal, echoes McKenna's hope: perhaps Singer's blatant disregard for any sanctity in human life will strip bare for his students the lethal philosophy behind abortion and euthanasia.

Next we have Ellen Wilson Fielding, picking up on a piece we had in our Summer issue by another Australian, Marilyn Hogben, who destroyed her frozen embryos after getting counsel from Peter Singer himself (via e-mail!). Though sympathetic to Hogben's anguish, Fielding makes it clear that her decision to kill was, in fact, encouraged by Singerian ethics.

Finally, we bring you a powerful article written in 1995 by Dr. David van Gend, an Australian physician who knows Singer as few in this country do, having followed his career for years. He brings us back to basics with a look at Singer's views on babies, including his promotion of partial-birth abortion. Singer's "new ethic," is actually as "old as Moloch and Gehennah"-and King Herod-but, van Gend adds, "Nevertheless, Herod could not slaughter all the innocents," and "Singer will not corrupt the love of innocence in every reader"-or student. MARIA McFADDEN EXECUTIVE EDITOR

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