This makes me gnash my teeth: Would any respectable magazine ask the racist David Duke to be part of a benign feature story, say, “What are Your Five Favorite Animals?” Of course not. But Forbes —a money magazine—decided to give Peter Singer the forum to answer that very question.
Peter Singer believes it is acceptable to murder babies if they don’t suit the utilitarian interests of the family. (As far as I know, the odious Duke never advocated that anybody be killed.) Singer usually uses babies with Down syndrome or other disabilities as examples of the killable—although in his view, it is the purported non-personhood of the baby that makes him or her disposable without moral qualm. Thus, a girl who gives birth and stuffs the baby in the toilet did nothing wrong so long as she painlessly killed the child beforehand, and a mother who can’t stand the idea of raising a child with developmental disabilities can snuff him instead.
But this is how the Forbes writer, Courtney Boyd Myers, sanitized Singer’s views:
He has drawn critical attention for his secular, utilitarian views on bioethics, such as his belief that in some cases, malformed infants should receive euthanasia. But he is also known for his tolerance toward ideas that differ greatly from his own.
Unlike those nasty absolutists who think baby killing is wrong. They are so intolerant!
Steve Forbes stopped giving money to Princeton when that university besmirched itself by giving Singer a prestigious chair. And now his magazine (I think he is still publisher) provides him with a pulpit to appear cuddly, burnishing Singer’s claim to respectability. No wonder Peter Singer’s values are triumphing . Unbelievable.
