If there is such a thing as a ‘wrong’, then there are also ‘unforgivable wrongs’. Peter Singer is one of Australia’s deepest thinkers and foremost living philosophers. His books on animal rights and altruistic giving have changed thousands of minds and saved millions of lives. But in 1993/94 he published a series of essays about the ethical basis of killing infants and the disabled. His argument was that in some cases it could be justified – from a logical standpoint.
He’s said (most recently in 2023) that generally people who took offence hadn’t actually read what he said about it. So I re-read it. It’s true that he carefully looks at things from all sides and hedges his opinions. But then at the end, it seems he can’t resist getting off the fence and saying he’s on the side of logic, and logic says it’s OK in many cases – more than we might imagine. Like a lot of extremely intelligent people he seems to have fallen into the trap of believing that saying, “I don’t know.”, or, “This is unknowable.” isn’t an option.
This is the first (of two) reasons why I think this is unforgivable. It’s not that he doesn’t condemn infanticide or homicide. It’s that he fails to sufficiently acknowledge that it’s not possible to talk about these things without taking into account not just logic, but also our qualities of compassion and humanity – and of fear and hate.
In his essay, ‘Euthanasia: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow’ (1994) it’s clear he was aware of Aktion T4, the systematic killing of infants and the disabled beginning in 1939 in NAZI Germany that led directly to the murder of 11 million people in the Holocaust. His own Grandfather was murdered. Singer acknowledged the danger that the termination of lives in exceptional cases might be the thin edge of the wedge that made it OK later on to kill all of those who didn’t ‘measure up’. But Singer says that the ‘thin edge of the wedge’ is not a risk any more. The world has matured and left behind these horrific impulses, that the NAZI’s were a ‘one off’ that would never be repeated.
Perhaps he wasn’t a particularly good student of history prior to writing that essay. But since 1994 we’ve had bloody mayhem in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Syria, Chechnya, East Timor, Burma and Gaza. Perhaps he wasn’t paying attention, but WE know that what happened before can happen again. And that’s the second reason I won’t forgive him – he’s had many chances to say he was wrong back then, but he won’t admit it. Even now in a world rapidly spiralling into totalitarianism.
We’ve got two of his books at the library at Blazing Swan in 2025. One is, ‘The Life You Can Save’, and the other is ‘Writings on an Ethical Life’ which includes extracts from his earlier works, including those referenced above. If I ever met him I’d refuse to shake his hand (not that he’d give a shit), but I won’t ban his books from our library. My view is that we let his own words condemn him.
