Your lesson assignment, students:
Two hundred pigs and a human infant are trapped in a fire. Which should you rescue?
Here’s some provocative guidance from Princeton’s Prof. Peter Singer: “At a certain point, the animals’ suffering becomes so great that one should choose to save the animals over the child.”
The professor expatiates: “Whether this point occurs at 200 or 2 million animals, I don’t know. But one cannot let an infinite number of animals burn to save the life of one child.”
Hey, after all, what if there’s a talented porker among the swine, like Orwell’s Napoleon the Pig? What if the infant is just another, uh, humdrum human?
Singer is attached to Princeton’s Center for Human Values. No irony apparently intended in that arrangement. Old Nassau doesn’t have a Center for Porcine Values.
The professor is said to be the father of the animal rights movement. Sex with animals is not necessarily proscribed in his book, he says, leaving one to wonder about the four-legged set’s ability to give informed consent. (Maybe the professor should get to work updating persnickety campus sexual-conduct codes to accommodate the concerns of the quadruped community.)
Singer exemplifies Princeton’s notion of “diversity” on a largely lockstep “progressive” campus, not unlike most other campuses with their Taliban-ish rules forbidding “hate speech,” controversy-scrubbed “comfort zones,” restricted free-speech areas, carefully purged rosters of commencement speakers and occasional outbursts of student Sauberungenen (cleansings, 1930s Germany-style) condemning texts and curricula as patriarchal, sexist, racist, Eurocentric, environmentally detrimental, economically unjust, socially insensitive, insufficiently LGBT-inclusive, etc.
The professor has riled up the hellions of the hoi polloi before with his ruminations. For example, with his view that parents should have a few weeks to think it over whether they really want to keep a handicapped infant or dispose of the thing. One’s imagination may not readily conjure choruses of “Sich Heils” ringing out against a backdrop of ivy-draped Collegiate Gothic architecture. And yet….
Now Singer’s revised “Animal Farm” cry of “Four legs good, two legs not necessarily so!” has prodded pressure groups for the handicapped to take up full-throated protest.
So much so that Prof. Robert P. George, Princeton’s token, show-window conservative academic, has felt compelled to rally to Singer’s defense. George is a scholarly gentleman and – please, no booing from the hard-core secular-humanist section when this is mentioned – he’s a Christian.
To those who wish Singer sacked, Prof. George points out that academic freedom is not just for those whose viewpoints we find congenial. (Gosh, it isn’t? Could have fooled us.)
Furthermore, says Prof. George, it’s not as if Singer is propounding his points with Nazi-style rants before assembled, goose-stepping multitudes at the Luitpoldarena. Why, Singer doesn’t even stand on a soapbox on Princeton’s Palmer Square. He states his positions with soft-spoken clarity and rational argumentation, and he deserves to be responded to with civil discourse, lectures George.
Okay. Yeah. Fine. But …May a student at least wonder: Is it permissible to harbor qualms over the creepy similarities – including likely ultimate outcomes – between Prof. Singer’s “utilitarian” philosophy and Nazi thinking on the untermenschen (disposable inferiors)?
Or would such an inquiring student be told – in a case-closed, imperious manner – that she’s indulging in an invidious comparison, one overladen with emotional content, light on analytical perspicacity?
What if the vaguely troubled student noted that the Baltic German philosopher, Alfred Ernst Rosenberg, Ph.D., mentor of der Fuhrer’s racial views, got his program rolling without demagogic orations on the Nuremberg parade ground?
What if the annoying student persisted in pointing out that Herr Hitler loved dogs and much less so Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, Bolsheviks, homosexuals and various other untermenschen, including – note this well – the non-utilitarian handicapped?
Would the student then be counselled that she should perhaps consider transferring to some less high-minded academic milieu, maybe Rutgers or The College of New Jersey?
By this point it’s not entirely unlikely the student will have been hectored into compliance. But we – you and I – needn’t be. We may wonder: How would Prof. Singer be faring if, rather than merely advocating infanticide, he were opposing, say, the Israel-disinvestment demands now the fashion rage on campuses? Or questioning same-sex marriage or abortion?
Or taking other positions virtually anathema in academia? Advocating such shocking positions as, say, enforcement of immigration law? Or spending restraints to whittle down an $18,152,814,974,589 (and counting) national debt?
Herewith a wild speculation: In such scenarios, the celebrated Peter Singer, pampered Princeton pedagogue, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, would find out what it’s truly like to be a controversial figure and persona non grata.
– Dave Neese may be contacted at davidneese@verizon.net.
