A Princeton University ethics professor has pronounced that taking a job in Donald Trump’s impending presidential administration is ethically permissible — even for people who privately oppose Trump.
The professor, Peter Singer, is famous because he laments the societal stigma against humans having sex with animals.
The website Quartz interviewed Singer, a bioethics professor at Princeton’s University Center for Human Values, about working for Trump on Friday.
“My view is that you ought to accept the position,” Singer told Quartz. “You ought to go into it with an open mind. You ought to go in thinking you’ll be able to make a difference.”
The fancypants college professor also suggested that people who take one of the 4,000 or so positions Trump is expected to fill should be prepared to quit if they later come to believe that their own ethics are being compromised.
“If you get to the point where you think there’s nothing you can do, you should be prepared to leave,” he said.
Singer is a utilitarian philosopher, which means that he thinks the consequences of actions determine their morality. In laymen’s terms: The ends justify the means.
He has long criticized laws and taboos against having sex with animals.
In a 2001 essay — entitled “Heavy Petting” — Singer wrote that “sex across the species barrier,” while not normal, “ceases to be an offence [sic] to our status and dignity as human beings.”
“Occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop” when humans have sex with their pets, he also claimed. (RELATED: Cops Say They Have Photos Of Maryland Teacher Doing It With Family Dog)
In addition to supporting bestiality, Singer has also advocated euthanizing the mentally ill and aborting disabled infants on utilitarian grounds.
In a 1993 essay — called “Taking Life” — Singer wrote that “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person.”
“Very often it is not wrong at all,” he declared in the essay, noting that newborns should not be considered people until approximately a month after their birth.
The section of the essay in which Singer boldly called for baby-killing is called “Justifying Infanticide and Non-Voluntary Euthanasia.”
Both Singer and his supporters maintain that ethics experts must often confront taboo topics to arrive at greater philosophical truths.
Time magazine, which still exists, has called the Australian philosopher “one of the world’s 100 most influential people.” Time praised Singer’s 1975 book, “Animal Liberation,” as a “seminal” work which argues the case for “giving moral standing to animals on the basis of their capacity to suffer.”
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