An article in the March 10 Chronicle of Higher Education takes THE WEEKLY STANDARD to task for our Nov. 1 editorial that suggested Princeton University professor Peter Singer was suffering from "megalomania" for holding "a vision of himself in which the gigantic figure of Peter Singer sits across from the pope at the chessboard of humankind, locked in a grim battle for the future of all us little folk."
You remember Singer, of course. He's the Australian animal-rights activist who proclaims that a baby is of less value than a pig and who advocates a 28-day trial period before accepting newborns into the human race. He holds a chair at Princeton's curiously named "Center for Human Values," from which he pronounces that utilitarian ethical theory gives you the necessity to legalize euthanasia -- which gives you, in turn, the requirement to practice infanticide, which gives you the moral correctness of vegetarianism, which gives you, well, an ideal world of hungry utilitarians who'd kill their elderly mothers and baby daughters at the drop of a hat.
But it turns out, the Chronicle assures its readers in a glowing sketch of Singer, that everybody has the man wrong. All that "the world's most reviled philosopher" really wants is "more happiness for everyone." He has his opponents, of course, but they're just "conservatives" -- killjoys who want more unhappiness for everyone. Some of them belong to "a group of disabled-rights activists called Not Dead Yet," and some to "a group called the Roman Catholic Church." And anyway, all Singer is doing is applying in a rigorous way Jeremy Bentham's unexceptionable principle of utilitarianism: "Each to count for one and none for more than one" -- except if you happen to be one of the ones who don't count: the weak, the lame, the young, the old, and so on.
It even turns out that Singer can't be a megalomaniac, because he doesn't see himself as locked in a titanic battle with the pope. He sees himself instead as locked in a titanic battle with Jesus Christ. His latest book, A Darwinian Left, he reports, "amounts to nothing less than an experimental refutation of Jesus' celebrated teaching about turning the other cheek." The Chronicle's reporter adds, "The idea excites him. In fact, it seems almost too good to be true." Well, no, in fact it seems almost too bad to be true. "I reject the view that says let justice be done though the heavens fall," Singer explains. "I think if the heavens fall, then the result is likely to be unjust for everyone." Except, of course, that if we reject the ideal of justice, then we become like Peter Singer -- unable to understand what a word like "justice" or a word like "mercy" means.