Books, Arts & Manners

scholarly journals. Nearly everyone has heard about Jack Kevorkian’s serialkilling of people whose main problems were depression and bad pain control, just as nearly everyone has heard about Peter Singer’s appointment to a chair at Princeton University as a reward for proclaiming that a baby is of less value than a pig. But the shocking thing that Smith reveals is just how casually approved is the theory that justifies Kevorkian and Singer in places like Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, the Hastings Center, and the New England Journal of Medicine—the institutions to which American medicine looks for ethical guidance.

It’s not the cranks with mimeograph machines in their basements who want to kill you. The philosophers who assume that some lives are not worth living, the activists who believe that the infirm have a duty to die, the doctors who study the mechanics of killing their patients: They are now the threat, and they are establishment in America today. Of course, the irrepressible Peter Singer is in the lead. There’s a chapter in his latest book, Writings on an Ethical Life, called “Euthanasia: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow,” which may make you wonder how far we are from a Princeton professor writing “Anti-Semitism: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow.” But Singer is, in fact, merely less circumspect than his colleagues. Wesley Smith reveals a world of well-rewarded establishment figures who “reject what until now has been the core value of Western civilization: that all human beings possess equal moral worth.”

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Georgetown University

scholarly journals. Nearly everyone has heard about Jack Kevorkian’s serialkilling of people whose main problems were depression and bad pain control, just as nearly everyone has heard about Peter Singer’s appointment to a chair at Princeton University as a reward for proclaiming that a baby is of less value than a pig. But the shocking thing that Smith reveals is just how casually approved is the theory that justifies Kevorkian and Singer in places like Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute of Ethics, the Hastings Center, and the New England Journal of Medicine—the institutions to which American medicine looks for ethical guidance.

It’s not the cranks with mimeograph machines in their basements who want to kill you. The philosophers who assume that some lives are not worth living, the activists who believe that the infirm have a duty to die, the doctors who study the mechanics of killing their patients: They are now the threat, and they are establishment in America today. Of course, the irrepressible Peter Singer is in the lead. There’s a chapter in his latest book, Writings on an Ethical Life, called “Euthanasia: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow,” which may make you wonder how far we are from a Princeton professor writing “Anti-Semitism: Emerging from Hitler’s Shadow.” But Singer is, in fact, merely less circumspect than his colleagues. Wesley Smith reveals a world of well-rewarded establishment figures who “reject what until now has been the core value of Western civilization: that all human beings possess equal moral worth.”