profile 

the dangerous philosopher
Peter Singer's belief that animals should be treated like people 
gave birth to the animal-rights movement.  Does he also
think that people should be treated like animals?
september 6, 1999


1.  

     It has been ten years since the breezy April afternoon when
ninety-six British football fans were crushed to death at Hillsborough
Stadium, in Sheffield, England.  There was an important playoff
match scheduled that day, between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest,
but as more and more people crammed themselves onto one of the
runways leading to the stands the crowd panicked.  The final victim,
a seventeen-year-old named Tony Bland, didn't die at Hillsborough--at
least, not technically.  But he was trampled so badly that his
chest caved in and his lungs collapsed.  Cut off from its oxygen
supply, his cerebral cortex was destroyed within minutes.  Four
years later, this is how Lord Justice Hoffman described the young
man's condition:

     Since April 15, 1989, Anthony Bland has been in persistent
vegetative state.  He lies in Airedale General Hospital...fed liquid
food by a pump through a tube passing though his nose.  .  .  .  His
bladder is emptied through a catheter....Reflex movements in the
throat cause him to vomit and dribble.  Of all this...Anthony Bland
has no consciousness at all.  The parts of his brain that provided
him with consciousness have turned to fluid.  The darkness and
oblivion which descended at Hillsborough will never depart.  His
body is alive, but he has no life in the sense that even the most
pitifully handicapped but conscious human being has a life.  But
the advances of modern medicine permit him to be kept in this
state for years, even perhaps for decades.

      The justices decided not to let that happen.  When they ruled,
on February 4, 1993, that doctors could remove the feeding tubes
and let Bland die, Britain's highest court made a reasoned decision
to kill an innocent human being.  Many people were outraged, but
the Australian ethicist Peter Singer was not among them; in fact,
Singer has argued for many years that euthanasia and infanticide
are obvious necessities of the modern world.  He wrote that the
court's decision reflected "major shifts deep in the bedrock
of western ethics,'' because Bland's death represented the collapse
of a two- thousand-year-old system of values--one that had enshrined
the sanctity of human life, no matter how compromised.  

     "The day had to come, just as the day had to come when
Copernicus proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe,''
Singer told me not long ago.  We were flying from Melbourne, where
he lived, to Sydney, where he was to present a paper at a conference
on reproductive genetics.  "It is ridiculous to pretend that
the old ethics still make sense when plainly they do not."
Singer is a lean, rangy fifty-three-year-old, with a broad forehead
and a ring of hair around his balding head which shoots in wisps
straight into the air.  He has a rich, deep baritone voice, but
he doesn't like to use it; his words were so often drowned out
by the drone of the jet engines that I had to ask more than once
if he would mind speaking up.

      "The notion that human life is sacred just because it's
human life is medieval," he continued, talking about the
treatment of the hopelessly ill.  "The person that used to
be there is gone.  It doesn't matter how sad it makes us.  All I
am saying is that it's time to stop pretending that the world
is not the way we know it to be."

2.

      Peter Singer may be the most controversial philosopher alive;
he is certainly among the most influential.  And this month, as
he begins a new job as Princeton University's first professor
of bioethics, his unorthodox views will be debated in America
more passionately than ever before.  For nearly thirty years, Singer
has written with great severity on subjects ranging from what
people should put on their dinner plates each night to how they
should spend their money or assess the value of human life.  He
is always relevant, but what he has to say often seems outrageous:
Singer believes, for example, that a human's life is not necessarily
more sacred than a dog's, and that it might be more compassionate
to carry out medical experiments on hopelessly disabled, unconscious
orphans than on perfectly healthy rats.  Yet his books are far
more popular than those of any other modern philosopher.  "Animal
Liberation," which was first published in 1975, has sold
half a million copies and is widely regarded as the touchstone
of the animal-rights movement.  In 1979, he brought out "Practical
Ethics," which has sold more than a hundred and twenty thousand
copies, making it the most successful philosophy text ever published
by Cambridge University Press.  

      Singer laid out his brutally frank approach to ethics in his
first major paper, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality,"
which has become required reading for thousands of university
students.  "As I write this in November 1971, people are dying
in East Bengal from lack of food, shelter, and medical care,''
Singer's essay began.  "The suffering and death that are occurring
there now are not inevitable, not unavoidable.'' The problem,
he explained, is a result of the moral blindness of rich human
beings who are far too selfish to come to the aid of the poor.

     Following in the tradition of the eighteenth-century moral
philosopher William Godwin--who asked, famously, "What magic
is there in the pronoun `my' to overturn the decisions of everlasting
truth?"--Singer argues that proximity means nothing when
it comes to moral decisions, and that personal relationships don't
mean much, either.  Saving your daughter's life is a fine thing
to do, for example, but it can never measure up to saving the
lives of ten strangers.  If you were faced with the choice, Singer's
ethics would require you to save the strangers.  "It makes
no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor's
child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never
know, ten thousand miles away,'' he wrote in his essay.  Singer
believes we are obliged to give money away until our sacrifice
is of "comparable moral importance'' to the agony of people
starving to death.  "This would mean, of course,'' he continued,
approvingly, "that one would reduce oneself to very near
the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee."

      Singer's views on animal rights are even bolder: he calls
man's dominion over other animals a "speciesist" outrage that 
can properly be compared only to the pain and suffering "which
resulted from the centuries of tyranny by white humans over black
humans."  For Singer, that "tyranny" is one of the central social 
issues of our age.  Yet what has brought him infamy is his radical 
position on an even more compelling set of moral questions: how 
to cope with the borders between birth, life, and death in an era 
when we are becoming technologically capable of controlling them all.  

     Singer's beliefs have led him places where few others are willing
to go.  He has suggested, for example, that parents who give birth
to a hemophiliac might be better off killing it, especially if
they could replace that dead infant with one who would be "likely
to have a better life."  Singer often complains, with justification,
that his comments on such issues are exaggerated and taken out
of context.  So it might be best to let him present the argument
himself:

      When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth
of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total
amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is
killed.  The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed
by the gain of a happier life for the second.  Therefore, if killing
the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would,
according to the total view, be right to kill him.

     Few people will ever consider infants replaceable in the way
that they consider free-range chickens replaceable, and Singer
knows that.  Yet many of those who would never act on his 
conclusions still agree that if an infant really had no hope of 
happiness, death would be more merciful than a life governed 
by misery.

3.

      Singer's philosophy is a contempo-rary version of utilitarianism,
and its basic intellectual weaponry rests on a simple thought
crafted by Jeremy Bentham, in the nineteenth century: all sentient
creatures have an interest in avoiding pain.  Bentham lived in
a newly industrial England--a place where six-year-olds worked,
suffered, and died in hellish factories owned by people who were
becoming indescribably rich.  He established the first, essential
principle of his new philosophy with the formula "each to
count for one and none for more than one"; in other words,
the happiness of any one person is no more important than the
happiness of another.  It was a revolutionary idea, and in 1861
John Stuart Mill elaborated on it in "Utilitarianism":
humanity should strive for the greatest possible happiness for
the greatest number of people.  

     Singer studied at Oxford with R.  M.  Hare--perhaps the most
important twentieth-century descendant of Bentham and Mill--and
his philosophy is called preference-utilitarianism.  It is a more
nuanced version of what Mill had in mind, with personal preferences
taking the place of happiness.  Singer's thought is shaped by the
assumption that the results of your behavior should agree with
the preferences of anyone whom your behavior would affect.  For
Singer, killing is wrong because when you kill someone who wants
to live you make it impossible for that person to fulfill his
preferences.  Obviously, if you kill somebody whose preferences
don't have much chance of success--a severely disabled infant,
for example, or somebody in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease--the
moral equation becomes entirely different.

      Singer uses the word "person" to refer to self-conscious
creatures: animals often fit that definition, and many humans
do not.  So when Singer says that you are more likely to do moral
harm by killing a healthy cow than by killing a severely handicapped
infant he means that the cow is more likely to anticipate pain
and suffer from it than would the child.  Singer believes that even 
relatively dumb animals--a chicken, for instance, or a mouse--deserve
to be protected from unnecessary pain.  And the more an animal
is able to suffer and understand its surroundings, the more consideration
it ought to be given.  But he also believes the opposite--that
any animal that has no hope of becoming self-aware has no hope
of becoming a person.  This is the reasoning that permitted Singer
to write, in words that are almost always quoted out of context
to portray him as evil or irrational, "Killing a disabled infant is not 
morally equivalent to killing a person.  Very often it is not wrong at all."  

     Singer relies on a principle he calls "equal consideration
of interests" to acknowledge the differences among species
while still valuing all of them.  Equal consideration and equal
rights are not the same, though.  For Singer, consideration varies
with the complexity of the creature.  So he would never say that
since neither a baby nor a kitten is a person it doesn't matter
which one you rescue from a burning house.  You ought to save the
baby.  But equal consideration is his version of the Golden Rule,
and he uses it to question the traditional distinctions between
humans and other animals.

      You don't need to suffer from existential doubt to be miserable:
the anguish of a pig that lives only to be confined and then butchered
counts as suffering to Singer in just the same way that human
anxiety does.  Singer says, as did Bentham, that what matters is
not whether an animal can reason or talk but whether it can suffer.
And if an animal can suffer we have no moral right to torture
it for medical research or to slaughter it for supper.  ("When
the United States Defense Department finds that its use of beagles
to test lethal gases has evoked a howl of protest and offers to
use rats instead," he wrote in "Animal Liberation,"
"I am not appeased.")

     Singer has never been afraid to take pure reason and drive
it over a cliff.  He asks horrifying questions and then answers
them in unexpected ways.  If killing baby girls (painlessly, of
course) makes sense for farmers in China, then why not kill them?
If a pregnant woman has inconclusive results from amniocentesis,
Singer doesn't see why she shouldn't carry the fetus to term.
Then, if the baby is severely disabled and the parents prefer
to kill it, they should be allowed to.  That way there would be
fewer needless abortions and more healthy babies.  (If killing
the child would cause the parents distress, however, Singer believes
that it would be wrong.) "What I am saying is that those
decisions can also be made when life hasn't really got going,''
he told me, "because there isn't a being, a person who leads
that life."  

      As an ethicist, Singer addresses questions faced by any family
that has ever been confronted with an elderly, sick, or helpless
relative.  He is important for the same reason that he is alarming:
unlike most of us, Singer is willing--even eager--to answer those
questions in the most unpleasantly honest way.  "To say that
I believe Peter is wrong about most of what he says would be an
understatement,'' says Norman Ford, a Catholic priest and the
director of Melbourne's Caroline Chisolm Center for Health Ethics,
who has known and admired Singer for years.  "But at least
he is willing to talk about what is on everybody's mind.  He is
not afraid to say, `These are the problems of our time.  Now let's
deal with them.' He is not up there on Olympus--he is in the 
marketplace.  And for a philosopher that is rare."

     Many of Singer's opponents are offended by his activism, however.
George Pell, the Archbishop of Melbourne, has called Singer "Herod's
propaganda minister,'' and recently, in a particularly ill-informed
series of editorials, the Wall Street Journal compared him to Hitler's 
ideological henchman Martin Bormann.  The attack was nothing new.  
Singer has been prevented from speaking at conferences
in Germany, in Austria, and even in Switzerland, where he was
once assaulted by people who saw in his philosophy an echo of
the Nazi view that some lives are worth living and others are
not.  "When I rose to speak, a section of the audience...began
to chant, `Singer raus!  Singer raus!'" he wrote in 1991.  "As I 
heard this chanted, in German...I had an overwhelming feeling 
that this was what it must have been like to attempt to reason 
against the rising tide of Nazism in the declining days of the 
Weimar Republic.  The difference was that the chant would have 
been not `Singer raus!' but `Juden raus!'" (That three of Singer's 
four grandparents perished in concentration camps was never 
mentioned by the protesters.) 

4.

      I wasn't sure what to expect when I travelled to Melbourne,
in May, to see the man who had for so many years caused such fury.
Despite the strident certainty of his prose, he hadn't seemed
like a priggish moralist when we talked on the telephone.  One
friend told me, though, that unless I wanted to provoke a confrontation
it would be inappropriate to wear leather shoes around a man who
wrote that our refusal to grant other animals moral equality is
like saying that all human beings--even psychopaths and murderers--are
superior to any dolphin or chimpanzee.  

     Singer had warned me that after such a long flight I would
be good for little more than a walk, and when I got to my hotel
and called him he suggested that we take one.  He lived nearby,
and said he'd come right over.  I almost changed into sneakers,
but it looked like rain, and I decided not to be ridiculous.  I
wondered if Singer would be lucid, articulate, and cold in person--a
kind of high-end automaton.  (His twenty-four-year-old daughter,
Marion, told me that once when her mother was away from home for
several months Singer prepared the same dinner of spicy Asian
soup for himself nearly every night.)

      Singer appeared within minutes.  He turned out to be a genial
man, both eager to talk and happy to listen.  He was dressed in
brown wide-wale corduroys (which he wore nearly every day I spent
with him), a green ribbed sweater, and canvas shoes.  The Australian
winter was on its way, and it was windy as we walked by Port Phillip
Bay.  Singer and his wife, Renata, were then living in a lovely
Victorian row house across the street from the Royal Yacht Club,
in a neighborhood called St.  Kilda.  It hadn't been long since
the area was dominated by strip joints and junkies, but in the
past decade St.  Kilda had made the inevitable demographic shift
toward noodle shops, Borders Books, and big-screen multiplexes.
Singer asked if I wanted lunch, and wondered how I felt about
vegetarian food.  It was clear that he was prepared to watch me
eat a chicken sandwich if necessary, but we ended up in a tiny
place that served delicious macrobiotic vegan casseroles with
unpronounceable names.  

     Because I didn't want to discuss anything too controversial
in our first encounter, I told Singer what a profound effect "Animal
Liberation" had had on many of the people I'd spoken with
before travelling to Australia.  It had originated in 1973 as an
unsolicited contribution to The New York Review of Books--the
first of many pieces he would publish there.  The article received
so much attention that Singer expanded it into a book.  I asked
him if he had been surprised by its lasting impact.

      "To be honest, I was somewhat disappointed,'' Singer
told me, a slightly wistful tone creeping into his voice.  "It's
had effects around the margins, of course, but they have mostly
been minor.  When I wrote it, I really thought the book would change
the world.  I know it sounds a little grand now, but at the time
the sixties still existed for us.  It looked as if real changes
were possible, and I let myself believe that this would be one
of them.  All you have to do is walk around the corner to McDonald's
to see how successful I have been.''

     It was hard for me to believe he felt that way.  The book has
been used by scores of organizations, including the aggressive
and extremely visible People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals,
which was created in its wake.  And it remains influential: next
spring, for the first time, Harvard Law School is offering a course
on animal- rights law, and "Animal Liberation" is on
the syllabus.  Singer stayed glum for only a moment, though.  "It's
one of the important things I intend to work on in the U.S.,''
he told me, adding that America is the most callous and brazen
producer of factory-made food.  "The United States is the
worst offender of the major countries.  But obviously it's the
most important."

      Although Singer has been called a right-wing killer by his
most frenzied and ignorant enemies, he is really more of an enlightenment
liberal.  (He has just completed a book that attempts to reclaim
the legacy of Charles Darwin for the political left.) He is intensely
political, and he knows how to wield his renown: this is a philosopher
who sat in a cage in the middle of Melbourne to publicize the
plight of battery hens, who has often protested against circuses,
and who was once arrested while trying to photograph sows confined
on a pig farm owned by the Australian Prime Minister.  In 1996,
hobbled by compulsive honesty, he ran a spectacularly unsuccessful
race as a Green candidate for the Australian Senate.  Had he been
elected, Singer told me, he was prepared to give up academia completely--
and I sensed that he wouldn't have minded a bit.  Instead, his
tenured chair at Princeton will make it possible for him to become
the most prominent bioethicist in the United States.

     Singer didn't seek the job at Princeton but felt that he couldn't
turn it down.  In "How Are We to Live?," his 1993 examination
of ethics in an age of self-interest, Singer wrote, "In the
United States today, the social fabric of society has decayed
to the point at which there are grounds for fearing that it has
passed the point of no return.'' When I asked him why he thought
it was worth bothering with the place if it was so far gone, he
replied, "The alternatives are all too horrible to consider.
I have to at least give it a try.'' 

5.

      Singer has never been reluctant to speak his mind.  Born in
Melbourne, in 1946, he and his older sister, Joan, grew up in
a prosperous, happy family.  His father, Ernest, who died in 1982,
was a successful importer of coffee and tea.  The family rarely
celebrated any Jewish holiday; even so, his parents were astonished
when Peter told them that he had no intention of going through
with his bar mitzvah, because he did not believe in God.  "Maybe
my father was a little bit disappointed, although he was not really
religious,'' Singer told me.  "But my mother was probably
quite pleased.  My mother didn't identify with the Jewish community
at all.''

     At the University of Melbourne, Singer became interested in
philosophy, but he found metaphysics dry.  "You can get into
discussions about `Is this a table in front of us?' for quite
a while,'' he said, pointing to a coffee table in his living room.
"But the ethical discussions and the political philosophy
seemed to be a lot more relevant and interesting."  Singer
was at Oxford when the war in Vietnam and the American civil-rights
movement made academic philosophy seem antiquated.  "I did
a thesis at Oxford on civil disobedience, using Vietnam and Northern
Ireland as examples,'' he said.  "I wanted to pursue ethics,
but not at an academic and theoretical level.''

      At Oxford, Singer was surprised when
he noticed that friends of his were not eating meat, and more
surprised when they told him they were vegetarians for moral reasons.
He had never given the issue much thought.  But within weeks he
and his wife decided that vegetarianism was the only ethical way
to live.  "When you start analyzing it,'' Singer told me,
"it's so clearly wrong to eat the flesh of other animals
that we simply had no choice."

     Critics say that his moral certainty is one of Singer's most 
significant flaws--that he is too demanding, too impersonal, and 
too dismissive of the way people actually relate to one another.  
In its rawest form, Singer's philosophy condemns people for caring 
more about their families than about strangers.  "People do have 
special relationships with their families, their communities, and 
their countries,'' Alan Ryan, the warden of New College, Oxford, 
told me.  Ryan has written extensively on John Stuart Mill and he 
taught for many years at Princeton. "This is the standard equipment 
of humanity, and most people, in all of human history, have seen 
nothing wrong with it.  Singer is an interesting and important fellow, 
but I am afraid that human beings just aren't put together the way 
that he wishes they were." In Ryan's view, no moral philosophy 
that departs so fundamentally from such common sentiments 
could possibly make sense.

      Other philosophers criticize Singer more for the logical 
consequences of his beliefs than for his refusal to acknowledge that 
emotion plays an essential role in the narrative of life.  For example,
if we could take an action today that would benefit many people
in three thousand years, Singer would tell us to do it.  It wouldn't
matter that we would never see the benefits--or that the action
might even cause us some harm.  Yet predicting the long-term effects
of something is like guessing how the winds passing over the Sahara
this summer will affect the world's weather in fifty years.  There will 
be an impact, but who could accurately assess it now?  Often, acts 
that seem benevolent--such as providing aid to starving nations--can
have unforeseen and disastrous results, causing warfare, corruption,
and, ultimately, more starvation.  Even Singer's laudable desire
to reduce suffering in the present can be seen as a recipe for
the ruin of the world economy.  Colin McGinn, who is a professor
of philosophy at Rutgers University, asks, "What if you took
every penny you ever had and gave it to the poor of Africa, as
he would have us do?  What we would have is no economy, no 
ability to generate new wealth or help anybody.'' 

     Despite Singer's immense influence--and perhaps because of
it--most academic philosophers do not consider him an original
thinker.  "In many ways, I think Singer is more of a politician
than a philosopher,'' McGinn told me.  "He is a practical
man, not a theorist.  Yet, when it comes to a broader impact, I
would have to admit that he may be the most influential philosopher
alive.  Singer wants to get out there and change the world, and
to a degree that is surprising he has already succeeded."
Even those who show real ambivalence about Singer as an intellectual
leader show none about his qualifications for the new post at
Princeton.  After all, he has turned out a small mountain of prose
in the past quarter century-- more than two dozen books, as well
as scores of articles in the scholarly and popular press--touching
on many of the crucial ethical issues of our time, from cloning
and genetic screening to what it means to live a moral life.  With
his closest colleague at Melbourne's Monash University, Helga
Kuhse, he edited Bioethics, one of the field's most authoritative
journals.  

      "Would I elect him to public office?"  asked Henry Greely, 
professor of law and co-director of the program on Genomics,
Ethics, and Society at Stanford University.  "No.  Would I
make him a university president or a dean?  Probably not.  But is
he a real and important philosopher?  Yes.  I think we, as a society,
should give our philosophers room to think and write and say things
that are against the social mores.  Otherwise, we might as well
be Athenians on one of their more deplorable days, executing Socrates."

6.

     DeCamp Professor of Bioethics for nearly a decade.  In many
respects, Singer was an obvious choice, but he was also a controversial
one.  The philosophy department wanted a theorist, and Singer specializes
in applied ethics, with its focus on the world outside the academy.
The biology department was nervous about hiring anyone who might
oppose experiments with animals.  The university, however, wanted
to hire a professor who could stimulate debate.  So Princeton made
an unusual decision: Singer won't be a member of either department.
Instead, he has been appointed solely to the university's Center
for Human Values.  

      Princeton's leaders have been valiant in defending their new
professor's right to say whatever he wants.  Still, the school
is reeling from the public reaction to its choice.  Long before
Singer moved to America, in July, the university was picketed
by groups such as Not Dead Yet, whose leader, Diane Coleman, told
me that Singer "was a public advocate of genocide and the
most dangerous man on earth.'' There were demonstrations against
Singer last spring, and Coleman told me that pickets would return
when school begins again.  

     There has also been dissent among Princeton officials.  Not
long ago, Steve Forbes, a Republican Presidential candidate, who
is a member of Princeton's board of trustees, sent a sharply worded
letter--which invoked the Nazi euthanasia program--to the university's
president, Harold Shapiro, urging him to rescind the appointment.
Shapiro, who is also the chairman of President Clinton's National
Bioethics Advisory Commission, told me that he would never attempt
to do such a thing, and noted, pointedly, that the appointment
should not have caught Forbes by surprise, since Princeton's board
must approve the hiring of every tenured professor.  Even so, Princeton
was unprepared for the intensity of the protest that has accompanied
the selection.  The university has been forced to take elaborate
measures to insure Singer's safety; Shapiro has received death
threats; a campus group has been established to protest infanticide;
and even the usually tame Princeton Alumni Weekly has printed
letters like one from a member of the class of '38, which states,
"Nothing I have seen or heard epitomizes the decline of Western
civilization so much as the hiring of Peter Singer to teach in
the university's Center for Human Values.''

7.

      Watching Peter Singer think is like staring at the shifting
gears of a precision engine: when you ask him about something,
no matter how contentious or complex it is, you can see him churning
through the calculations needed to produce a response.  In the
week I spent with him, he never once begged off a question.  Singer
told me that heroin should be legal, since its "prohibition
has done more harm than good,'' and that violations of seat-belt
laws should be punished, because the consequences of traffic accidents
place an unfair burden on society.  I asked about one probable
result of genetic research, the ability to grow--from embryonic
stem cells--organs to be used solely for spare body parts.  He
agreed that it was a tricky area with possibilities for abuse,
by which he meant that only rich people would be able to dip into
a vault to retrieve, say, a spare liver or heart.  But in principle
he doesn't see the harm in it.  "I wouldn't say it's intrinsically
wrong,'' he told me.  "Some people would just say, `Well,
using a human being as a means for spare parts is wrong.' I am
not there."

     This sort of reasoning can seem both numbingly logical and
excessively coarse.  Take, for example, his view of charity.  Singer
has written that humans need to overcome their greed, but more
than once, as we strolled along the streets of Melbourne and Sydney,
I saw him walk past homeless beggars without giving them a glance.
When I asked if that was difficult, he looked surprised.  "Not
at all,'' he said.  "Maybe you just help them take themselves
into oblivion for a while.  I would much rather give where I am
convinced that the money will be used for good."  The logic
is hard to deny, yet there was something strangely disquieting
about the ease with which this man--who, in the words of the British
philosopher Bernard Williams, "is always so keen to mortify
himself and tell everyone how to live''--could walk by people
who were so desperately in need.  

      Despite Singer's often inflexible rhetoric, he has always
acknowledged the gap between what he writes and how people live.
"I think the point of espousing a theory is to say, `Look,
if you're really going to be serious about ethics, well, here's
a proposal as to how far you ought to go.  Now, tell me why that's
wrong,''' he said.  "And if someone answers, `Well, nobody's
going to do it,' I don't think that's an answer at all."
On the other hand, Singer tries not to be "rabbinical'' about
his beliefs.  He no longer minds having dinner with people who
order steak, and when I asked his thoughts about a recent operation
in which surgeons implanted the aorta of a cow in a thirteen-month-old
boy he said that if it was genuinely a choice between the cow
and the boy they should save the boy.  "If they are killing
a million cows a day for dinner," he said dryly, "it's
hard to make the case that we shouldn't use one to save a young
boy's life."  

     This past year, Singer published "Ethics Into Action," which is 
in many ways his most personal book.  It is a biography of the 
American animal-rights activist Henry Spira, who was extraordinarily
effective because he never let himself behave so radically that
people could dismiss him as a kook.  Almost single-handedly, Spira
brought an end to the barbaric practice of testing cosmetics by
blinding live rabbits.  He was a great friend of Singer's, and
he was Singer's hero--in part because Spira demonstrated that
the world is not simply divided into saints and sinners, and that
some ethics are better than none.  One of Singer's daughters told
me that when Spira died it was the first time she had ever seen
her father so upset.

      Still, many of Singer's critics dismiss him as a secular puritan
so inflamed by his idea of rectitude that he can't even recognize
his own contradictions.  Singer feels that this is unfair, and
he may have a point: although he fails to live up to the rigid
rules he has put down on paper, he probably comes as close to
doing so as anyone could.  He gives away twenty per cent of his
annual income, including all royalties from "Practical Ethics."
He lives comfortably but frugally.  He doesn't eat meat or fish,
or wear leather.  Yet Singer's writing is so high-handed that any
inconsistency between his life and his work is hard to dismiss.
Singer has certainly done nothing to impoverish himself, for instance,
and his daughters also live comfortably, aided by the income of
a trust set up by his father which--he would have to agree--none
of them need.  

8.

     Some opponents of utilitarianism say that when you turn 
human values into a series of preferences and run them all 
through a continuous personal calculator you risk dissolving the 
notion of human character completely.  They call it moral economics.  
Others, who rely on rationality just as much as Singer does, would 
say that Singer's views are not as rational as he thinks they are.
"He's always so damn logical,'' Bernard Williams told me.
"But Singer leaves out an entire dimension of value.  After
all, who says his way is the right way to live?  Every moral theory
is based on somebody's intuition.  He simply has the intuition
that intuitions don't make sense.  But how did he get there?"
In Singer's eyes, however, philosophers like Williams rely too
heavily on emotion to make good judgment possible.  Singer 
feels that "intuitions" are vague, misleading, and unlikely ever to 
solve complicated problems.  "Lay off with the `You reason, so 
you don't feel stuff,' please,'' he wrote recently in a short, 
quasi-fictional essay that was included in J.  M.  Coetzee's
book "The Lives of Animals."  "I feel, but I also think about 
what I feel.  When people say we should only feel...I am 
reminded of Göring, who said, `I think with my blood.' See 
where it led him."

9.

      Anne McDonald lives in an airy Federal-style home in one of
Melbourne's many suburban neighborhoods.  The building, which still
has its turnof-the-century pressed-zinc ceilings, is shrouded
in vines and surrounded by cypresses.  When I went to visit her
there one crisp afternoon, it took five minutes for her to answer
the door.

     McDonald has athetoid cerebral palsy.  She is bound to a 
wheelchair--literally strapped in with a seat belt--and she wears 
an alphabet board around her neck like a lobster bib.  An elaborate 
computerized device sits on her lap, and this is what permitted her 
to say hello to me, in a recorded voice message that had been created
from the several thousand utterances programmed into the machine.
McDonald has long brown hair, and her eyes are an electric blue.
They play an especially important role in her life, because she
uses them to say yes and no: squeezed shut for yes, wide open
for no.

      She is exactly what Peter Singer had in mind when he wrote,
in "Practical Ethics," "It may still be objected that to replace either 
a fetus or a newborn infant is wrong because it suggests to 
disabled people living today that their lives are less worth living 
than the lives of people who are not disabled. Yet it is surely 
flying in the face of reality to deny that, on average, this is so."  
McDonald, who has known Singer for more than fifteen years, 
agrees with much he has to say and is glad he has the nerve to 
say it.  "There was a point when I should have been killed,'' she 
told me, referring to the years when she was treated as human 
refuse on the wards of Melbourne's St.  Nicholas Hospital.  "I 
often prayed for it.  But now I am alive,'' she said, tapping out 
her messages in phonetic code on her alphabet board, "and I 
enjoy my life very much."

     McDonald is thirty-eight years old.  She was a breech baby,
and that placed an abnormal amount of pressure on the base of
her brain as she passed through her mother's cervix.  The result
was a subdural hemorrhage, and she suffered massive--but very
localized--brain damage.  Athetosis makes her body quiver and quake.
Spasmodically unable to command her muscles or vocal cords, she
often sounds like a bird.  But McDonald can think as clearly as
any "normal" person.  

      Rosemary Crossley found McDonald in 1974, locked away in St.
Nicholas, where she had been since she was three.  Crossley runs
the Deal Communication Center, which provides services for people
who can't talk as a result of conditions such as cerebral palsy,
Down's syndrome, and strokes.  In 1977, when McDonald was sixteen
years old and weighed twenty-eight pounds, Crossley took her home
for the weekend because she thought that the girl was about to
die.  That Sunday, Crossley and the man she lives with wanted to
visit an art gallery, and they brought McDonald along in a baby
stroller, which was the perfect size for her shrunken teen-age
body.  "She started smiling at the paintings," Crossley told me.  
"She was looking at the Matisses, and she was transfixed by them.  
We could tell there was something there, and we decided to help 
her get it out."  

     McDonald demonstrates as forcefully as anyone could that it
is impossible to know what is going on inside the brain of a person
who is unable to communicate.  After a long struggle, McDonald
learned to read and write.  She studied philosophy of science at
Deakin University and fine art at the University of Melbourne,
has published a book, travels around the world, and pays her taxes
with at least as much pleasure as any citizen of Australia.  In
1982, she and Crossley considered writing a book, "Care,
Cure, or Kill," about the fate of disabled infants.  They
eventually decided against it, but in the course of their research
they went to interview Peter Singer.

      It was the start of a strangely warm relationship.  Singer's
sister is a lawyer, who has been active in supporting the disabled,
and she and Singer have become the Deal Communication Center's
biggest benefactors.  Singer likes McDonald, and he would never
say that she should die, while McDonald is clearly fond of Singer.
Their principal conflict concerns how to determine what it is
possible for a disabled person to achieve.  "It is always
a question of whether the future will be as bad as it looks,"
McDonald told me.  If you know that it is going to be impossibly
bleak and filled with suffering, she said, then Singer's view
has more validity.  But who, exactly, can know the future?  "We
can always be sure of one thing," McDonald said.  "The
dead have no regrets.  Peter thinks that way.  He knows me.  But
he doesn't think about individuals.  We are all just a category
to him."

     Advocacy groups for the disabled say that one reason Singer
writes them off is that he places too much trust in the prognoses
of doctors.  The medical profession does tend to rate the quality
of life for children with disabilities less highly than their
parents do.  But parents almost always follow medical advice on
what to do about an infant with suspected or known disabilities.
If the doctors say that the kindest thing would be to let the
child die, most parents acquiesce.  If, on the other hand, they
say, "Let's give the child a chance," that's what the
parents will usually do.

      Oddly, by arguing that disabled children should sometimes
be killed, Singer seems, if anything, to be worrying too much
about their pain.  He is so devoted to the prevention of suffering--in
a hen, a cow, or a human infant--that he dismisses the possibility
that there might be more than that to many people's lives.  "Most
of us live through our own experiences," Rosemary Crossley
told me.  "So Peter assumes that people would be happy if
they had the experiences that he had.  For most of us, it is hard
to live without reading, if you are a reader, or having sex, or
jogging, or eating Chinese food.  Whatever makes you happy, if
you see people who cannot experience those things, you assume
they cannot be happy.  But that is not necessarily the case, and
I don't think Peter has ever fully come to grips with that."

     "Peter is a perfectly sincere man,'' McDonald told me.  "But he 
thinks real life is not as important as intellectual life.  So he can be 
very compelling when he talks about the intelligence and feelings of 
a pig.  But he is somehow not as quick to understand what our 
problems and possibilities might be.  He has all these big ideas, 
but he has never really gotten his hands dirty.  Peter needs to get 
a little more involved in life if he wants to understand it."

10.

     The Peter Singer who has just moved to America is not the 
unyielding radical who wrote "Animal Liberation" twenty-five years
ago.  In a sad fulfillment of Anne McDonald's wish, Singer has
been dealt a bitter dose of real life.  His mother, Cora, who was
once an intellectually active and vibrant woman, has fallen ill
with Alzheimer's disease.  She no longer recognizes Singer or his
sister or any of her grandchildren.  She is in a state that Helga
Kuhse, who is her medical executor as well as her son's closest
academic collaborator, described to me as one in which she would
clearly not want to be alive any longer: "She always said,
`When I can't tie my shoes and I can't read, I don't want to be
here.'Those were her criteria, physical and mental.  And she knew
what she was saying--she was a doctor.  We don't have active 
euthanasia in this country, but she certainly would not want drugs 
to treat an infection or anything else that could prolong her life."

      Singer would never kill his mother, even if he thought it was 
what she wanted.  He told me that he believes in Jack Kevorkian's
attempts to help people die, but he also said that such a system
works only when a patient is still able to express her wishes.
Cora Singer never had that chance; like so many others, she slipped
too quickly into the vague region between life and death.  

     When Singer's mother became too ill to live alone, Singer and
his sister hired a team of home health-care aides to look after
her.  Singer's mother has lost her ability to reason, to be a person,
as he defines the term.  So I asked him how a man who has written
that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity
or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands
of dollars a year on private care for his mother.  He replied that
it was "probably not the best use you could make of my money.
That is true.  But it does provide employment for a number of people
who find something worthwhile in what they're doing.''

      This is a noble sentiment, but it hardly fits with Peter Singer's
rules for living an ethical life.  He once told me that he has no 
respect for people who donate funds for research on breast
cancer or heart disease in the hope that it might indirectly save
them or members of their family from illness, since they could
be using that money to save the lives of the poor.  ("That
is not charity,'' he said.  "It's self- interest.") Singer has 
responded to his mother's illness the way most caring people
would.  The irony is that his humane actions clash so profoundly
with the chords of his utilitarian ethic.

      That doesn't surprise Bernard Williams.  "You can't make
these calculations and comparisons in real life.  It's bluff,''
Williams told me.  "One of the reasons his approach is so
popular is that it reduces all moral puzzlement to a formula.
You remove puzzlement and doubt and conflict of values, and it's
in the scientific spirit.  People seem to think it will all add
up, but it never does, because humans never do.''

     Singer may be learning that.  We were sitting in his living
room one day, and the trolley traffic was noisy on the street
outside his window.  Singer has spent his career trying to lay
down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion
and intuition.  His is a world that makes no provision for private
aides to look after addled, dying old women.  Yet he can't help
himself.  "I think this has made me see how the issues of
someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,''
he said quietly.  "Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought
before, because it is different when it's your mother."