Thursday, December 9, 1999 BIOETHICS & SCIENCE PETER SINGER: Committed to Stance on Abortion, Infanticide       The campus of Princeton University, where bioethicist and philosopher Peter Singer teaches a seminar called "Questions of Life and Death," has quieted down significantly since last April, when his appointment drew protests from disability and antiabortion advocates. But Singer, who supports infanticide in certain cases, says that he remains vigilant, aware that his views have cast him as "a sort of icon, a target, a demon ... for people to attack." A profile of the Australian philosopher in today's Washington Post chronicles the evolution of Singer's controversial beliefs, to which he has remained committed for more than 25 years. He is a product of the "practical ethics" school, a 1960s philosophical movement that "emerged to tackle ... everything from civil disobedience to suicide," the Post reports. Relying on the utilitarian principle that "it is ethical to maximize pleasure in the world, and to minimize pain; to honor preferences rather than thwart them" and his belief that a person must be conscious of self, capable of rationality and "able to conceive of itself as an entity existing over time," Singer came to the "startling" conclusion that infants are not people and "painlessly" killing them -- in the case of disabled newborns predicted to have a "dismal" quality of life -- is acceptable. Arguing that "[s]ociety already supports the right of parents and doctors to decide ... that a fetus should be aborted" due to disability or handicap, he asks, "Why should that right end at birth?" He said, "There is no ethical gain simply by not operating on those you've decided should die, waiting for them to get some infection ... so they die over a period of months." The 'Whipping Boy'       Predictably, antiabortion and disabled advocates have decried Singer's teachings. According to University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan, Singer has become "the whipping boy for a nutty-academia-out-of-control and the ongoing debate about abortion. ... [He] was turned into a political cause." But activists say it's difficult not to react. "If he were a madman raving on the corner, you could ignore him. But he's a sanctioned academic, and that's scary," Nancy Weiss, executive director of the disable advocacy group TASH, said. Some, however, defend Singer and support his Princeton appointment. "Where else but at a university can people express morally serious views that are deeply challenging to many of our presuppositions?" Center for Human Values Director Amy Gutmann said. Singer, for his part, remains undeterred by his detractors, although he does admit he may have underestimated the extent to which religious beliefs "dominat[e] public rhetoric" (Span, Washington Post, 12/9). Kaiser Daily Reproductive Health Report