The political philosopher

Some years ago, the appointment of a brilliant philosophy professor at a notable university caused a great stir of controversy from critics who deplored the man’s departure from traditional notions of ethics and the sanctity of life.

The year was 1940, and the man Bertrand Russell. New York City’s Board of Higher Education had voted unanimously to appoint the UCLA professor to the faculty of the City College of New York. Religious opponents opposed the move feverishly and prevented the appointment to “protect the morality” of the “youth.”

Many have compared this controversy to that of Princeton’s own Peter Singer. Upon his appointment, protesters from organizations like Not Dead Yet, a disabled advocacy group, flocked to campus to oppose the professor’s openness to euthanasia for disabled infants. Steven Forbes ’70, presidential candidate and key donor to Forbes residential college, withdrew all future donations, saying Singer’s appointment “deeply troubles me, just as it would if such an honor were bestowed upon an anti-Semite or a racist.” Singer, like Russell, has been opposed by a coalition of religious opponents.

Yet how similar are the facts of the two cases? Compare Singer’s view of euthanasia to Russell’s atheism. “I never know whether I should say ‘agnostic’ or whether I should say ‘atheist’, ” Russell said in 1947. “If I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience, I should say that I ought to describe myself as an agnostic because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one can prove that there is not a God.”

Notice the distinction. Russell didn’t hold a priori beliefs about marriage or contraception, but rather a disbelief in those based on the Bible. It wasn’t any of Russell’s assumptions or conclusions that riled his religious opponents, but rather his disbelief in theirs.

Singer’s ethical views, on the other hand, are the product of far greater assertion. Hume noted that in order to claim that all swans are white, one would have to observe every swan, while all it takes is one black swan to prove the opposite. Similarly in philosophy, some propositions require less rigorous justifications. Russell’s atheism, based in doubt, is such a case. Singer’s is not.

It is one thing, for example, to say that if we are unsure of the moral status of animals and can subsist without eating them it makes sense to abstain. To say, however, that “suffering is the vital characteristic that gives a being the right to equal consideration,” making infants the equals of many animals, is to assert a priori that every other characteristic is not worth considering.

Yet Singer rarely differentiates between these two types of justifications, championing philosophically uncontroversial positions like donation to charity and sustainable agriculture based unnecessarily on an incredibly crude utilitarianism.

Princeton’s search for a bioethics professor had nearly reached a decade when Singer was appointed in 1998. Yet Singer’s particular brand of “applied ethics” didn’t quite fit the bill. In the end, Singer got the job but was appointed to neither the philosophy nor biology departments, only to the Center for Human Values, which he now chairs. This was the correct decision, and the number of students who think the Center’s certificate is in “philosophy” should give the actual philosophy department pause.

Singer was at Oxford when the war in Vietnam and the American civil rights movement, he has said, made academic philosophy seem antiquated. He has locked himself in a cage in Melbourne to publicize the abuse of hens and was once arrested trying to photograph sows owned by the Australian prime minister. “In many ways, I think Singer is more of a politician than a philosopher,” Colin McGinn, a noted philosophy professor at Rutgers, said. “He is a practical man, not a theorist.”

At the start of this year, campus was emblazoned with fliers for a talk entitled Rationing Health Care, where fliers asked questions like “How many infants are worth an adult life?” or “We should spend $___ of public funds to save a life.” Singer is called “relevant” for tackling such questions, but other ethical theorists avoid them because they are philosophically intractable. It’s a shame that so many Princeton students take Singer’s CHV 310: Practical Ethics as their first philosophy course, because many walk away with the idea that philosophic theories are to be chosen arbitrarily and confirmed through induction by testing intuitions with thought experiments.

Singer’s advocates believe that his rejection of grand philosophical theory for more “applied” ethics is praiseworthy. A consequentialist might credit Singer with any increase in charity or vegetarianism his theories produce, regardless of their veracity. “The man who has no tincture of philosophy,” Russell warned, “goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason.” True philosophic inquiry of this sort, a freedom from unjustified convictions, not acquisition of new ones, is a dangerous thing to dispose of in the name of pragmatism or flashy headlines.