"Dr. Death" on the Ethics of President Bush

April 19, 2004

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.

Brent Morrison