Sunday, August 01, 2004

The June/July First Things
is online.
I'm particularly fond of this article by R.R. Reno. However, I simply must quote this short piece by Fr. Neuhaus.

It’s been a while since I’ve had occasion to remark on Peter Singer of Princeton University, the ageing bad boy of moral philosophy. But now Gerald Nora, a second-year medical student, sends me the dust jacket of the 1996 edition of Singer’s Rethinking Life and Death. Mr. Nora is right in suspecting that the blurbs “praising” the book might have been chosen by Professor Singer’s enemies. For instance, there is this from the Washington Post: “Far from pointing a way out of today’s moral dilemmas, Singer’s book is a road map for driving down the darkest of moral blind alleys. . . . Read it to remind yourself of the enormities of which putatively civilized beings are capable.” Precisely. If you want a roadmap for driving down blind alleys, this is it. Then there is this from the publisher: “A profound and provocative work in the tradition of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” Precisely again. Even more precisely, it is in the tradition of thinking that Huxley so powerfully warned us against.


(BTW, I'll admit that the topic alone isn't why I quoted this in full. The other reason is that I happen to know Jerry Nora, and felt I should blog this mention of him. )


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