Professor Death

Princeton hires a pro-death ethicist vilified by the rest of the world | Gene Edward Veith

Australian ethicist Peter Singer at least minces no words when he argues that the disabled and the unwanted should be killed. Not just passive euthanasia, but active, eugenic euthanasia for infants, the sick, and the elderly-everyone, to use his words, whose "life is not worth living."

No wonder he is so controversial in Europe and his home country that his speaking appearances are accompanied by angry protests from those he thinks are better off dead and those who care about them. In Austria, a major philosophy conference had to be canceled due to protests and threats from disabled groups. In Germany, he is compared to Hitler's theorist Martin Bormann. In Australia, he has been called the country's "most notorious messenger of death." Wherever Mr. Singer speaks, protesters in wheelchairs chain themselves to the barricades that have to be erected around his lecture sites.