The Chronicle: Colloquy: Responses

While reading your article, "Why Are We Afraid of Peter Singer?" the movie "Silence of the Lambs" came to mind. That movie was deeply disturbing to many people, not for what it said or showed, but for what it implied. Hannibal Lector was a monster, not because he was willfully evil or perverted, but because he was missing some chemical or neurological component that the rest of us have. The implication: free will is an illusion and our actions are more a matter of chemistry and biology than they are of choice. If this is so it reaches into every level of human activity; it even calls into question what it means to be human.

In the same way, Peter Singer's conclusions take us to where we do not want to go. The fact that he takes our everyday rationalizations to their logical conclusions only makes the emotional reaction that much stronger. People don't think about what Singer has to say as much as they react to him. I'll wager that most of those who protest him have never read a thing he's written.

In spite of our capacity for logic, humans do not live logical lives. Even in academia -- perhaps even more so in academia -- people resist logical conclusions that threaten their beliefs. And the greater the threat, the more vehement the emotional reaction.

We would all benefit by examining Mr. Singer's views dispassionately. The human world is changing swiftly and radically. It is we who are changing it. If we don't have the intellectual honesty to evaluate those changes frankly, we will suffer. It takes courage to stand against the emotional current. Mr. Singer has that courage.

: -- Ronald Brown, Editor, LSU University Relations (posted 3/8, 3:27 p.m., E.S.T.)

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