Al Daily link to an interview with philosopher Peter Singer. The tone of it is well exemplified by this (NR is the interviewer Noel Rooney – any relation to Wayne, I wonder? – while PS is the great man himself):
NR: I heard Chomsky speaking recently about the elision of moral truisms as a kind of political strategy, and the refusal of universalism in US foreign policy. Do you see the President of Good and Evil as operating in the same sort of assumptive arena?
PS: Well, Bush is morally a universalist. For instance, he says the freedom is good, the same thing is good, all over the world. So in that sense he’s a universalist.
NR: Do you think he believes it?
PS: Oh, I think so.
NR: What do you think happens when the practicalities fall very short of that? Say the American refusal to count civilian casualties?
PS: What you could say, and what I do argue in the book, is that he doesn’t have as much concern for the lives of Iraqis as he does for the lives of Americans, or even frozen American embryos; I think that’s certainly true, but in that I think he’s simply focusing elsewhere, not looking at that and saying ‘how can I justify my support for human life against what I do in Iraq’; he rather takes a view that’s relatively widely held – he simply says we didn’t intend these deaths, so therefore they somehow don’t count.
NR: Yes, you sometimes get a sense they’re somehow less fatal, those deaths.
PS: Yes that’s right; the people are sort of less dead.
Fascinating. Bush is accused of regarding Iraqi lives as being worth less than American lives. But they’re talking here only of Iraqi deaths caused by the US. For them Iraqis killed by other Iraqis just don’t figure in the equation at all. The mass graves, the torture chambers, the bombs now aimed at ordinary Iraqis in the street by Islamic terror groups…they don’t just count for less; they don’t count at all.
Moral philosophers, eh…where would we be without them?
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