The most influential philosopher alive [Infanticide Advocate Peter Singer]

PRINCETON, N.J. -- Republicans are winning elections, but the long-term problem of the left dominance within academia remains. Consider, for example, the influence of Princeton professor Peter Singer.

Many readers may be saying, "Peter who?" -- but The New York Times, explaining how his views trickle down through media and academia to the general populace, noted that "No other living philosopher has had this kind of influence." The New England Journal of Medicine said he has had "more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior" than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the "most influential" philosopher alive.

Don't expect Singer to be quoted heavily on the issue that roiled the Nov. 2 election, same-sex marriage. That for him is intellectual child's play, already logically decided, and it's time to move on to polyamory. While politicians debate the definition of marriage between two people, Singer argues that any kind of "fully consensual" sexual behavior involving two people or 200 is ethically fine.

For example, when I asked him recently about necrophilia (what if two people make an agreement that whoever lives longest can have sexual relations with the corpse of the person who dies first?), he said, "There's no moral problem with that." Concerning bestiality -- should people have sex with animals, seen as willing participants? -- he responded, "I would ask, 'What's holding you back from a more fulfilling relationship?' (but) it's not wrong inherently in a moral sense."

If the 21st century becomes a Singer century, we will also see legal infanticide of born children who are ill or who have ill older siblings in need of their body parts.

Question: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs and transplant them into their ill older children? Singer: "It's difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, (but) they're not doing something really wrong in itself." Is anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale? "No."

When we had lunch after our initial interview and I read back his answers to him, he said he would be "concerned about a society where the role of some women was to breed children for that purpose," but he stood by his statements. He also reaffirmed that it would be ethically OK to kill 1-year-olds with physical or mental disabilities, although ideally the question of infanticide would be "raised as soon as possible after birth."

These proposals are biblically and historically monstrous, but Singer is a soft-spoken Princeton professor. Whittaker Chambers a half-century ago wrote that, "Man without God is a beast, and never more beastly than when he is most intelligent about his beastliness," but part of Singer's effectiveness in teaching "Practical Ethics" to Princeton undergraduates is that he does not come across personally as beastly.

C.S. Lewis 61 years ago wrote "That Hideous Strength," a novel with villainous materialists employed by N.I.C.E. (the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments). Their offices were to be in a building that "would make quite a noticeable addition to the skyline of New York." But Singer sits in an unostentatious office at Princeton's Center for Human Values, which is housed in a small and homey grayish-green building with a front yard that slopes down the street. The center even has a pastoral-sounding address: 5 Ivy Lane.

C.S. Lewis's N.I.C.E. leaders are totalitarian. They use media control and a police force to push opponents into submission. Singer says he's not totalitarian because he accepts debate and says that "people can draw the line anywhere." But, within Singerism, should they? He scorns attempts to set up standards of good and evil that go beyond utilitarianism, and hopes to convince people willingly to do it his way.

The challenge for conservatives during the next several decades will be not only to win elections, but to win the intellectual battles.

"Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" is a principle that can be derived through reason.

Did Christ need to use reason to derive it? I don't know. If you believe that Christ and God are one, then, why would He need reason? He is already the answer.

My point is that God is the destination, and reason is the pathway to get there. Faith is the condition of possibility for reason, because without it, you can't even begin the journey, because there would be no purpose for it.

That's just how I see it. I see faith and reason as dialectically related. They need each other.

Christ didn't need reason, because he was already the answer to the question. He didn't need faith, because he already knew the Truth.

Faith is for those who are mortal. Faith is for us humans in our finitude. Reason is God's humble gift to us, to find the way to his Truth. Faith is the belief that there is Truth, but it doesn't provide the way to the Truth; it provides the motive for seeking it.

Woe to those who call evil good and call good evil; who make darkness into light and light into darkness; they make the bitter sweet and the sweet bitter. Isaiah 5:20.

People reject G-D as the only source of morality will ultimately have no morals at all.

A statement that appears to be contradictory is usually either an error, due to a trick of language (and thus not a problem in the first place), or resolves itself at a higher level of understanding. The concept of the trinity could be any of the above. If you have read Aquinas and agree with him, you might agree that the concept of the trinity is not contradictory when understood properly through careful reasoning. I'm inclined, through reason, to have a Natural Theological perspective. I realize there are other perspectives. Sounds to me like you are coming from a perspective more similar to Luther and Calvin than Aquinas.

I recently read a book called "Aristotle's Children" that talked about the influence Aristotle had in early and later Church theology. Aristotle thought that everything could be known through reason and that a life of reason is a good life without reference to any religious beliefs. This was controversial to early Churchmen, and in the second and third centuries A.D., Christian scholars suppressed Aristotle's teachings, believing that his emphasis on reason and the physical world challenged their doctrines of faith.

Through a slow revolution in the Church, however, the views of folks like Aquinas, a follower of Aristotle, became ascendant. The criticism remains, however, that reason is not the only path to knowledge and that faith can lead followers to knowledge, too. As I believe one medieval critic of Aristotle said, "Reason argues, faith believes."

I understand there is criticism of Aristotle's influence in the Church. I don't think it is a valid criticism, but I am certainly open to a reasoned argument to the contrary.

I don't think faith is enough. It is too easy to have faith in foolish things. Faith without reason is a recipe for suicide bombers and witch burnings.

BikerNYC, I was just struck by a thought that I wanted to share with you.

I am saying that I have faith in reason. That's what I mean when I say that faith is the condition of possibility for reason.

How can you critique my faith in reason based on an appeal to faith? It is not in fact a refutation of my faith in reaason, but validates it.

If you believe faith is the ultimate arbiter of truth, then how can you criticize my faith in reason? Isn't faith, according to you, the only legitimate path to the truth?

The only way you could refute my faith in reason is through reason. But it would not make sense to critique my faith in reason through the use of reason, because it would, by default, validate my faith in reason. It would mean you have an implicit faith in reason, or else why would you use it as the means for criticism?

I'm not criticising your faith in reason. I think we may be using "reason" differently. When I say "reason," I mean an appeal to our senses, physical evidence, and logical arguments based upon that evidence.

Aristotle certainly believed that this kind of reason was sufficient to know everything that is knowable and employing this kind of reason would lead to a happy and fulfilling life.

Critics of Aristotle within the Church, however, believed that this was far too limiting and that there are some fundamental spiritual truths than could only be gleaned and known through faith; that an appeal to the senses or to physical evidence was just not enough.

For example, that the Bible is the divinely inspired word of God appears to be a proposition that is outside the sphere of our senses. I don't know what kind of evidence someone could produce that would establish that the proposition is true. Yet, many people know it to be true through faith.

Let's assume for a moment that we are using the term "reason" in the same way. (I think so).

I don't think reason, in the sense you have defined it, can stand on its own, as I stated in the beginning. The use of empirical reasoning -- logic and observation -- cannot verify itself. It would be like trying to lift yourself up by your own bootstraps.

However, I have faith that God gave humans the gift of reason for a purpose and that that purpose is to understand the Truth. I don't think He would have given us the ability to reason if this were not so. Like many things (i.e., procreation, aggression), it can be used in accordance with His will or not. How we use reason is up to us. But I think if we use it properly, for the higher Good, then it will lead us to where it needs to lead us -- the Truth it was intended to have as its end.

On the other hand, I think faith alone -- that is, faith without reason -- is a dangerous prospect. One could see the rejection of reason as tantamount to rejecting God's gift, and that rejection could be construed as a kind of hubris. I think God intended us to work for our insights; maybe sometimes they are handed to us, but I don't think that happens very often.

I think God does work miracles, but I think those miracles very often happen through the vehicle of reason, e.g., science and technology.

How can logic and reason help establish that God is made up of three parts: the father, the son and the holy spirit?

If logic and reason can't stand on its own, if it cannot verify itself, does that mean that we undertake its mission based upon faith that it will work out in the end? Aren't you proving my point that there are some things that we know without the use of logic and reason? Namely, the utility of usuing logic and reason?

Yes, that's my point. Our perspectives are not as opposed as they may at first seem.

I have not said that faith is surbordinate to reason, nor have I said that reason has all the answers or can otherwise stand alone.

My point was that faith and reason stand in a dialectical relationship. One without the other will lead us astray. We need both.

I really don't know what to say about the issue of the trinity, accept that, personally, I don't find it to be a particulary important "truth." I don't understand why people were tortured in executions over minor details of Christology. It seems absurd to me. It seems to me a violation of reason -- in fact, a good example of how faith can go astray without being grounded in reason.

Who really knows whether the trinity is true or not? It is not given to reason to answer, and frankly I'm not sure why it should matter to faith either. What difference does it make? I'm not being flippant; it's a sincere question.

It isn't necessarily a bad thing to make college students read Singer's books. I went from pro-choice to pro-life after taking a philosophy course structured around Singer's "Practical Ethics."

He made the case that infanticide was no different from abortion. His argument was in favor of abortion and infanticide, but it convinced me to oppose abortion.

No, I don't think religious doctrine can be subject to strictly the scientific method, for a couple reasons. One, there isn't really one scientific method, per se, but a variety of methods, all grounded in certain principles of empirical reasoning. But, more importantly, the empirical reasoning that characterizes the physical sciences, and most social sciences today, are very limited in terms of their purpose. They are only designed to determine the efficient cause of something, not any of the other three causes identified by Aristotle (material, formal and final).

Religious doctrine is usually concerned with the final cause. The physical sciences tell us how things happen (whether or not A causes B, for example), but they do not tell us why they happen (their purpose in the larger scheme of things).

So, reason in the Aristotelean sense is broader than what we understand to be empirical reasoning today in the physical sciences.

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