The John Stuart Mill of Our Time?

(RNS, Princeton, N.J.)--Ethicists aren't rock stars or politicians. Outside academia, they rarely arouse much passion. But this decidedly isn't the case with Peter Singer, the 53-year-old DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University's Center for Human Values.

Singer, best known as an animal-rights advocate, questions the widely held precept that human life is sacred. His views outrage some religious leaders. Demonstrators in wheelchairs protested his appointment to Princeton, where he began teaching last fall. Editorial writers have said he's Nazi-like. Yet Singer is a natural hero to followers of

, the animal-rights group, and many ethicists--even some who disagree with him--say that he's a moral man.

Singer reaches a popular audience through his books, among them "Animal Liberation" and "Rethinking Life and Death." His most contentious views, however, center on euthanasia. He believes that euthanasia should be an option for terminally ill people and supports it, in some instances, for severely disabled infants.

The Judeo-Christian belief in the "sanctity of human life," he says, is a "medieval" concept. He questions whether life is necessarily of value just because it's human in an age when technology can keep people alive after they've irrevocably lost consciousness. To him, an animal life could be just as valuable as that of a human being.

During an interview at his Princeton office, Singer was soft-spoken and courteous. A native of Melbourne, he is the child of Viennese Jews who fled Austria in 1938. Three of his four grandparents died in the Holocaust. He studied philosophy at Melbourne University and later at Oxford University in England.

Like many students in the late 1960s, Singer didn't want learning to be merely academic. "I was influenced by the Vietnam War, which spurred student activism," he said, adding that at Oxford, "students challenged me to justify what I was eating. I found I couldn't do it."

The experience, he said, convinced him that ethics must relate to practical issues, like poverty, animal rights, or bioethics. Most philosophers didn't share Singer's view of ethics at the time he entered the field. "By the mid-20th century, philosophers had lost track of issues which people think are important," said Dale Jamieson, a professor of philosophy at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and the editor of "Singer and His Critics." "With the coming of age of the baby boomers, there was a shift in philosophy toward moral issues like civil rights."

Singer was instrumental in creating the shift, said Jamieson, who compared him with the 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill. "Mill wrote on issues affecting society, like the subjugation of women," Jamieson said. "Peter is the Mill of our time. Peter is revered for his role in founding practical ethics."

Singer holds a view of ethics known as preference utilitarianism, an ethic that judges right or wrong by the long-term consequences of actions. "What I think ought to be maximized is the preferences of all those beings who are affected by your actions," he said. "What I think ought to be minimized is the frustrations of those preferences. I have an interest in trying to change situations that cause needless suffering where no one benefits from it."

Euthanasia in the case of terminally ill people "seemed to be one of these situations," he said. "They're in pain. They don't want to go on living for whatever time's left to them. So why do they have to?"

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