Livestock Exchange
Mark D. Linville on Peter Singer’s Bestial Loss of Moral Reasoning
Paul’s discussion in the first chapter of Romans reads like the script for a tragedy, but a tragedy on a grand scale, telling of the ruination not of one man, but of an entire race of men. The fatal flaw is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge the Creator and a propensity to worship created things instead. If the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom, the rejection of God is the source of folly. A fool and his money may soon be parted, but his dignity is not far behind.
Scripture records several boneheaded business transactions in which fools swapped the priceless for the worthless. Esau exchanged his birthright for a bowl of soup. The people of Israel bypassed an artesian spring, choosing instead to sop up what stagnant water remained in their broken cisterns. And the idolaters Paul describes in Romans exchanged the glory of the Creator for mere likenesses of mere creatures. It is as if the prisoners in Plato’s cave, having been brought outside to see a colored and textured world and offered their freedom, opted to return to the world of pale shadows on the fire-lit wall.
The analogy is a fair one because those idolaters were also captives held in dark places. Their rejection of God resulted in a darkening of their intellect—including a loss of moral discernment—and an enslavement to degrading passions. When God is eclipsed by either an idol or an idea, moral vision grows dim. When the divine nature is denied, human nature is diminished.
The “degrading” and “shameful” deeds that Paul describes are today not merely practiced but celebrated. As C. S. Lewis observed, our collective instincts are all askew on sexual matters. Malcolm Muggeridge once observed that the motto of Western society was copulo ergo sum. This could wind up on the dollar.
Still Shocking Singer
Paul might have told us that such practices are just business as usual in a society that has cast off any ties to the Creator and been set adrift. But even a divinely inspired apostle might have been surprised by the direction in which we may be headed.
Consider Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton University. He is perhaps best known for his 1975 book, Animal Liberation, in which he argues that the interests of sentient animals count equally with those of individual humans.
In that book, Singer compares chicken magnate Frank Perdue to Adolph Hitler, as each is responsible for his respective “holocaust.” In one essay, he balances the interests of children who are bitten by rats against those of the rats themselves and asks if we are morally justified in exterminating the rats for the sake of the children’s health. For him, this is a genuine moral dilemma because the rats enjoy moral standing equal to that of the children.
The dilemma might be relaxed (in favor of the rats) if the waifs are below a certain age. According to Singer, there is no good sense in which we may say that infants have any rights, such as a right to life. “Killing a disabled infant is sometimes not wrong, given that the infant, like any infant, is not a person as I see it,” he told CBS News. (Are you keeping score? So far we have “Save the chickens! Kill the babies!”) One might think that there is little else that Singer could say that would shock.
But then I happened upon a more recent article by Singer. “Heavy Petting” is his defense of the permissibility of bestiality: sex with animals. Reading this reminded me of a Weird Al skit in which he plays a talk-show host. “Sex with furniture: What do you think?” he asks an audience member.
Mark D. Linville is Professor of Philosophy at Atlanta Christian College and author of Is Everything Permitted? Moral Values in a World Without God (RZIM Critical Questions Series). He and his wife Lynn have four grown children and four grandchildren, and live in Fayetteville, Georgia, where they attend the Christian Church.
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