I know Dr. Singer has some pretty strong ideas (that are mostly outside the mainstream) about animals and animal rights, but does he really endorse people having sex with animals? Or is Ann Coulter incorrect?
Also, I believe he does support the right of parents (and the state?) to terminate a baby after birth due to defects. Can anybody confirm this?
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=42259
I found this says he does support terminating babies in some cases:
Nothing about humans and animals having sex though.
It sounds like absolute garbage for two reasons, with the first being because of who has said it, and the second being because what I have read of Peter Singer’s does involve discussion of both these topics, but anyone with a shred of intelligence would not draw the same conclusions Coulter has.
The use of the word “endorse” has very different connotations to the points I think Singer was trying to make.
Peter Singer is a very misunderstood philosopher. He merely points out that our standards towards such things as beastiality and infantcide are, at best, grossly inconsistant and illogical and anthropocentric.
His main points is that our ethical practises are more governed by gut feeling that any real concern over the overall welfare of the people involved.
In my experience, almost anything you hear about Peter Singer is going to be hugely exaggerated, though sometimes not without a chewy nougatty center of truth. Like TastesLikeBurning and Shalmanese said.
The quote in the OP contains something of an ad hominem argument (maybe it’s something else also). Whatever Peter Singer believes on some hot-button issue makes no difference to the validity of an unrelated statement, regardless of whether it’s fact or opinion. In this quote, a claim about an issue of fact is attributed to Singer, so the only thing that matters is whether the statement is true – whether America’s foreign aid contributions are really the world’s lowest. (Ideally, it should be specified how the contributions are to be compared – is it absolute contributions in dollars, or is it relative to population or GDP? Maybe this is mentioned in the original source, though.)
Compare the quote in the OP with these:
“In 1948, Josef Stalin, who was a Communist and a dictator responsible for many deaths, claimed that the Soviet Union was the world’s largest country.”
And one with irony quotes: “Vincent van Gogh, the mentally ill Dutch “painter” who cut off part of his ear and later committed suicide, was influenced by the impressionists.”
Basically, the OP paints Singer as liberal scum, then provides a quote that is unrelated to his stance on animal rights or euthanasia. Readers are expected to assume he is wrong because of the views he supposedly holds, not because of the factual accuracy of the statement. (I read Practical Ethics in a first-year course, but I don’t remember much about his standpoint on either of those issues, and I don’t think the issue of bestiality was discussed in that book.)
I misread the name in the thread title as Pete Seeger. Boy did that ever conjure up some strange images!