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I don’t know if the pen is mightier than the sword but
there is no shortage of authors trying to find out.
This being an election year, most pundits seem to have
George W. Bush in the crosshairs of their Pentels. Books by Bob
Woodward of the Washington Post, former anti-terrorism honcho
Richard Clarke, and convicted Watergate felon John Dean have
received the most publicity, though plenty of others are taking
shots from every imaginable angle.
Perhaps the oddest is “The President of Good and Evil:
the Ethics of George W. Bush” by Peter Singer (Dutton Books, 2004).
I have not read Singer’s book, nor will I, so this is not a book
review. Still, if one claims to be an expert on ethics, his
qualifications are fair game.
Peter Singer is an Australian-born professor of
bioethics at Princeton University. In a promotional interview with
the Australian daily newspaper The Age, Singer claims a truly
Christian president would have “turned the other cheek” after the
September 11 terror attacks.
“Bush claims to believe that human life is sacred,”
Singer told the paper, “So my book asks whether his statements about
human life, and his willingness to go to war in Iraq are actually
consistent, or is it evidence of muddled thinking?” The problem,
claims Singer, is that the president has “the moral development of a
13-year-old boy.”
The idea of Singer questioning anyone else’s regard for
human life is laughable. In a 1983 article in Pediatrics magazine,
Singer claimed “Once the religious mumbo jumbo surrounding the term
‘human’ has been stripped away...we will not regard as sacrosanct
the life of each and every member of our species, no matter how
limited its capacity for intelligent or even conscious life may
be.”
In Singer’s world, only zealots make moral distinctions
between humans and animals. In his 1975 book “Animal Liberation,”
Singer wrote, “It can no longer be maintained by anyone but a
religious fanatic that man is the special darling of the universe …”
Singer’s1999 appointment at Princeton brought a wave of
protests, many from organizations for disabled persons. Singer
believes parents should have the right to euthanize children with
disabilities such as spina bifida, Down syndrome, and hemophilia, a
notion the protesters, many in wheelchairs, took personally.
He doesn’t think much more of children without
handicaps. A strong supporter of abortion, Singer would carry it to
its logical extreme. In a 1998 article in the journal “Practical
Ethics,” Singer wrote, “If the fetus does not have the same claim to
life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either,
and the life of a newborn baby is of less value than the life of a
pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee.” He has written favorably of the
reported practice of killing female children in China due that
country’s limit of one child per couple, claiming that children
under one month of age have no consciousness and thus are not really
alive in any meaningful sense.
He doesn’t stop with handicapped children and healthy
babies; Singer also supports “non-voluntary” euthanasia for the
senile and terminally ill. Fortunately, Singer is enough of a
hypocrite to care for his own Alzheimer’s stricken mother, a
contradiction he explains by saying “I think this has made me see
how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really
very difficult … perhaps it is more difficult than I thought,
because it is different when it’s your mother.”
I imagine it is especially difficult if you don’t know
the difference between a pig and a human being to begin with. Until
he does, I wouldn’t give a rat’s rump for Singer’s assessment of the
ethics of George Bush or anyone else.
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