Peter Singer is a contemporary philosopher and Bioethics Professor at Princeton University. He is from Australia, where his parents fled from Vienna when the the Nazis annexed Austria to avoid concentration camps.

He is most well known as an advocate of "animal liberation" (see his book with the same title) who for example promotes vegetarian diet in order to diminish animal suffering. Singer decries the injustice of living in affluence while others are starving ( see "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", and his main work "Practical Ethics" includes a chapter arguing for the redistribution of wealth to ameliorate absolute poverty), he writes about compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships (see his publication in Greater Good magazine).

Yet he proposes to kill infants with serious sicknesses among other forms of euthanasia (in his view babies are non-persons so eliminating them is not like killing a human person). How is Peter Singer able to arrive to this pont in his strongly utilitarian ethics?

I have come accross this article in the Christian Bioethics journal that called my attention to this controversial person - and also the significance of his position in teaching bioethics in Princeton:

"Euthanasia and John Paul II’s ‘Silent Language of Profound Sharing of Affection:’ Why Christians Should Care About Peter Singer," Christian Bioethics, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2001): 359-378 by Derek S. Jeffreys  who writes so in the abstract :

"Peter Singer's recent appointment to Princeton University created considerable controversy, most of it focused on his proposal for active euthanasia of disabled infants. Singer articulates utilitarian ideas that often appear in public discussions of euthanasia. Drawing on Pope John Paul II's work on ethics and suffering, I argue that Singer's utilitarian theory of value is impoverished. After introducing the Pope's ethic based on the imago dei, I discuss love as self-gift. I show how this concept supports a theory of value in which spiritual goods are preeminent over material goods. I then describe how suffering reveals spiritual goods, discussing how participation in Christ's suffering can alter our perception of value. I also consider how communal responses to suffering provide opportunities for self-giving. Third, I consider Singer's proposal for killing infants with hemophilia, arguing that it arbitrarily ignores spiritual goods. I then discuss proposals to kill anencephalic infants, discussing how parental response to their suffering can demonstrate an extraordinary love in seemingly hopeless circumstances. I conclude by calling for a more sustained social response to euthanasia initiatives."

(Source:

http://cb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/7/3/359 to read the entire article you need to register).

Here is his personal website: www.princeton.edu/~psinger/ 

What do you think of this 'phenomenon'? Any ideas, opinions?