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Rethinking Peter Singer Gordon Preece, Editor Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2002 ISBN 0-8308-2682-3; 180 pages, paperback, $18.00
Peter Singer is the bete noire of contemporary ethics, particularly so for those of us who hold to traditional understandings of moral values. It is safe to say that Singer takes what readers of this journal would consider the wrong view on every substantive issue in bioethics today, and he does so to an increasingly wide audience in society. The Australian thinker has been well known to philosophers for decades for his work in ethical theory and applied ethics but became known to the public only after his American appointment as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. Singer powerfully contends for controversial positions, including his support for abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, and infanticide, and his opposition to the position he has dubbed "speciesism," which is the preference for the interests of humans above those of animals. Singer is an outspoken critic of virtually every position that Christians and other traditionalists defend in the area of bioethics, and vigorously assaults what he considers the hypocrisy of those traditional values. Singer simply must be addressed forcefully, clearly, fairly, and effectively by those who wish to defend human dignity.
In this book, Singer is engaged by a capable group of Australian theologians associated with Ridley College, Australia, an evangelical Anglican theological college in Melbourne. Singer, whom Preece calls "probably the world's most famous or infamous contemporary philosopher," has as yet provoked little sustained response from either philosophers or specifically Christian scholars. This book will be a valuable resource to those who want to understand Singer from a Christian perspective, joining the secular philosophical anthology, the much more affirming Singer and His Critics, edited by Dale Jamieson (Blackwell, 1999).
Preece, along with Ridley colleagues Graham Cole (now at Trinity International University in the United States),...