KILLING BABIES AND SAVING HALIBUT

...He has written several books, including Practical Ethics, a standard text in many college philosophy departments...

...Of disabled babies, for example, he wrote in his 1994 volume Rethinking Life and Death, We may not want a child to start on life's uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded...

...All this makes Singer a very busy man...

...He became an enthusiastic Trotskyite at an early age, which alienated him from his stern businessman father...

...This view is a direct and acute threat to vulnerable and defenseless human lives...

...Most insidiously, Singer argues that membership in the human race alone is insufficient grounds for possession of what are commonly known as rights—most notably the right to live...

...Thus, when Singer took the time and effort to write a book-length biography of the late animal-rights agitator Henry Spira, it seemed reasonable to assume that there must be something special about Spira: his personal qualities and his ability to inspire others, perhaps, or the lasting significance of his work...

...So Spira hid his actual radical agenda...

...Singer's mistake is to attempt to elevate them to heroic pro-portions—which has the unintended effect of making Spira's animal-rights career seem like much ado about relatively little...

...But among academics and members of the intelligentsia, he is equally famous for being a stark utilitarian, one of the premier voices calling for the destruction of the traditional Western ethic that views all human life as having inherently equal moral worth...

...He incorporated Animal Rights International as his nonprofit alter-ego...

...It had never occurred to me that when we say that all humans are equal, we do more than include all human beings within the sphere of moral equality...

...To Singer's applause, he selected as his first protest a campaign in 1975 to stop the American Museum of Natural History in New York from conducting experiments on cats...

...Spira's most notable success was his participation in the creation of the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing, a corporate-funded nonprofit organization at Johns Hopkins University that researches alternatives to the animal testing of cosmetics and cleansers...

...He has outrageously compared the killing of billions of animals for food with the Holocaust...

...Armed with considerable foundation money, Spira spent the rest of his life leading grass-roots campaigns and protests, some successful and some not, the rather repetitive tales of which make up the bulk of Ethics Into Action...

...He publishes frequent articles, both in academic journals and the middlebrow press...

...Spira then joined the Socialist Workers party and wrote for the Militant, the party's newspaper...

...Singer's animal rights activism has led directly to his becoming one of the world's foremost proponents of infanticide...

...Next July, Singer will leave Australia for Princeton, where for many years to come, he will teach some of the country's best and brightest students—the future physicians, theologians, business executives, and politicians—that infants are the moral equivalent of halibut and that some animals have greater moral worth than some humans...

...Who knows how many like Henry Spira—and worse than Henry Spira—he will find among them...

...The Australian moral philosopher is probably best known as the ideological father of the modern movement for animal rights...

...He knew that the Singer version of animal rights would not go down well with people who confuse animal rights with concepts of animal welfare...

...He is a philosophy professor...

...Long before the last page of Ethics Into Action is turned, the reader realizes that Spira's animal-rights career is insufficiently substantial or noteworthy to carry the weight of two-hundred pages of biography...

...Indeed, the lessons Spira allegedly bestowed upon future radical leaders on how to "make a differ-ence"—"keep in touch with reality," "select a target on the basis of vulnerabilities to public opinion," "set goals that are achievable," "position issues as problems with solutions"—are utterly banal...

...Spira might have been a hopeless radical, but he was no dummy...

...His name made the news most recently when the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers howled in outrage at the appointment this summer of Singer—author, for instance, of a notorious 1995 London Spectator article entitled "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong"—to a prestigious chair of bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values...

...Spira's pre-animal-rights life is nearly a caricature of the radical left of his generation and fills only one chapter of Singer's book...

...Finally, he became an English teacher at Haaren High School on New York's Upper West Side...

...So, he hit upon a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing strategy: Motivate people who have great affection for cats, paint himself to the gullible media as a benevolent figure interested in preventing cruelty to pets, and disguise his true radicalism behind the benign façade of animal welfare, a concept that he actually disdained...

...Ethically, in Henry's view, it does not make any difference whether an experiment is done on a cat, a hamster, or a rat: They are all sensitive creatures capable of feeling pain...

...Then, Spira read "Animal Liberation," and his life was changed forever...

...Quite what it means to speak of an animal as a bearer of rights has never been clear, but there is at least one dark consequence of animal rights that Singer actively promotes: In order to elevate the moral worth of animals, he must cheapen the moral worth of humans...

...Indeed, for more than twenty years, his international influence steadily growing, Singer has equated discrimination based on species ("speciesism") with bigotry based on race and gender...

...The campaign against the museum eventually succeeded (with the aid of then-congressman Ed Koch...

...Tiring of that, and with the blacklist at an end, Spira returned to sea for several years...

...Rather, according to Singer, a "being" must earn the right to live by possessing the "relevant characteristics" of a "person...

...Of Spira's plans, Singer declares: The fact that the experimental subjects were cats was significant...

...As envisioned by Singer and embraced by Spira, "animal rights" is not synonymous with "animal wel-fare"—the idea that humans have an obligation to avoid inflicting gratuitous suffering on animals and have a responsibility as stewards over the non-human life on the planet...

...Spira rejected religious Judaism when quite young and embraced atheism...

...Perhaps that is precisely why his disciple Henry Spira, who had a lifelong antipathy toward traditional values, was so strongly attracted to the philosophy...

...Spira became something of a name in the New York media and among animal-rights and welfare activists...

...Born into a Belgian Jewish family in 1927, he arrived in the United States in 1940, his family in full flight from the Nazi onslaught...

...Singer rather desperately tries to ennoble Spira during these years by linking him to the civil-rights movement of the 1950s, but all Spira really did was cover some demonstrations as a reporter for the Militant...

...Before accepting the idea of animal rights, he writes, I took it for granted that all human beings were equal, but I hadn't thought very hard about what this meant...

...There is no denying that Spira's several protest successes, ironically on behalf of animal welfare instead of animal rights, were genuine if modest accomplishments of grass-roots activism...

...He became devoted to animal rights—so much so that at the age of fifty-five he took an early retirement from teaching to pursue the cause full time...

...We also exclude nonhuman animals from that sphere, thereby granting every member of our own species—psychopaths, infants, and the profoundly intellectually disabled included—a moral status superior to that of dogs, pigs, chimpanzees, and dolphins...

...Singer also sees no substantive difference between human slavery and animal ranching...

...After Castro came to power, Spira joined the Fair Play for Cuba Committee...

...He was drafted into the Army, but was soon ejected as a security risk...

...Spira was scattered in his approach to his work...

...Singer's philosophy is fouled by a deep misanthropy...

...The same cannot be said about the career of Peter Singer...

...In other words, Spira knew that a campaign to stop the use of rats in medical experiments would be a protest to which nobody came...

...Rejecting animal welfare because it implies that humans may use animals for medical research, clothing, and food, Singer's disciples instead insist upon speaking of "rights," because the term allows them to claim animal life as the moral equivalent of human life...

...According to Singer, these requirements exclude all human infants and people who are cognitively dis-abled—whose moral value he compares directly to fish and chickens— but include "nonhuman animals" such as dogs, pigs, elephants, cattle, sheep, indeed, perhaps all mammals...

...Singer describes in Ethics Into Action Spira's conversion...

...Singer chortles that this allowed him to receive grant money from such traditional animal-welfare organizations as the ASPCA, the Humane Society of the United States, and the Massachusetts SPCA, and it "made Henry look like more than a one-man outfit...

...He joined the Merchant Marine toward the end of World War II, but was blacklisted from the fleet during the McCarthy era because of his overt Communist sympathies...

...Instead of going forward and putting all our efforts into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning...

...Instead, despite the author's obvious affection for the man, Spira comes across in Ethics Into Action as a lonely misanthrope whose burning passion for the rights of animals (ignited by Singer's own 1973 essay "Animal Liberation," published in the New York Review of Books) proves only a rather sad substitute for the human intimacy he seemed to lack...

...Singer would have us believe that the rest is a history worth telling...

...For it is here, deep within the darkest anti-humanlife attitudes of contemporary radicalism, that the ex-Trotskyite finally found a movement to which he committed himself permanently and wholeheartedly until his death from cancer earlier this year...

...Singer's animal-rights attitudes and his support for infanticide and involuntary euthanasia of cognitively disabled people are symbiotically intertwined...

...The term "start again" is Singer's euphemism for murdering the baby, an option, Singer believes, parents should have for the first twenty-eight days of a newborn's life...

...In order to qualify for that status, "an entity" must be able to reason and be self-aware...

...He moved from protesting experiments on animals to protesting the sale of pound animals to medical laboratories, to protesting the use of animals in product testing, to protesting methods of slaughtering animals for food, to creating ads critical of fast-food chains (such as one that ran in March 1998, depicting a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket as a toilet bowl...

...When this can be known at a very early stage of the voyage we may be able to make a fresh start...

...He lectures throughout the world...

...But he knew that it would be easier to arouse members of the public to protest against experiments on animals to which they could easily relate...

...Wesley J. Smith is attorney for the International Anti-Euthanasia Taskforce and author of Forced Exit: The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder...