If you'd like an indication of how much the currency of big time academia has been devalued, you need look no further than the case of Peter Singer.

A few months ago, Singer, formerly the director of the Center of Human Bioethics at Monash University in Australia, and also an internationally know animal rights advocate, was hired by Princeton University to become the Ira W. Decamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values. In a nutshell, he advocates infanticide under certain circumstances. Moreover, being a philosophical descendant of Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), and calculating the value of a life strictly on a pleasure/pain basis, he would promote general euthanasia, as well.

To be sure, this has caused controversy. Princeton grad and deep pockets donor Steve Forbes has flatly stated that he will not give another dime to his alma mater unless they fire Singer. Meanwhile, the crowned heads at Princeton defend their decision on the basis of academic freedom.

Since Singer is always whining about being misquoted in public, let's pull a direct passage from his book "Practical Ethics":

"Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist over time. They are not persons." But animals are self- aware, and therefore, "the life of a newborn is of less value than the life of a pig, dog, or a chimpanzee."

And, from "Should the Baby Live?": "It does not seem wise to add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled children."

You get the picture. As a practitioner of the philosophy of Utilitarianism, he purports to take into account all of the good and bad produced by an act whether arising after the act has been performed, or during its performance. Thus, an action is right if it tends to promote happiness and wrong if it tends to produce the reverse of happiness--not just the happiness of the performer of the action, but also that of everyone affected by it. Such a theory is in opposition to Egoism, which states that a person should pursue his own self-interest, even at the expense of others.

Of course, in practice, so-called Utilitarianism often becomes Egoism!

Slavery was always justified in that the Black was said to be inferior, and would be far happier living in a controlled work environment, with his every need provided by the owner. The owner, of course, was happy that he got slave labor. As for the slave, his opinion was never solicited on the matter.

Similarly, many people might be happier if a "defective" infant is terminated, but I'm confident that the infant is not happy being killed.

In any case, most reasonable people would hold that the value of life is more than a simple balance of pleasure over pain. And that statement doesn't even consider how we might define those terms. But even if one accepts this hedonistic philosophy, he would surely want to make his own decisions of what constitutes pleasure or pain!

If Utilitarianism sounds like the pontifications of someone with his head in the sand (or up his ass), go to the head of the class.

What we have, then, is nothing more than garbage philosophy, which cannot even stand my five paragraph scrutiny. That Utilitarianism still exists as a philosophy is bad enough, but appointing one of its top current proponents to the bully pulpit of an Ivy League university is a serious violation of common sense, to say nothing of scholarship.

For his part, Singer is a vegetarian, and gives one-fifth of his annual income to famine relief agencies. This, combined with a prodigious amount of publishing and publicity was apparently enough to convince the Princeton search committee that, in the words of committee member Amy Gutmann, "..there was nobody in the world better than Singer."

Lest we give Singer, Bentham, or even John Stuart Mill too much credit, we must remember that these men are (or were) deep thinkers, not men of direct action. The masters of the practical application of Utilitarianism were, of course, the Nazis.

Everyone's happiness would be much greater under the Third Reich, and as for that very long list of "defectives," they would also be happier, laboring for the Fatherland in the country club like setting of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, and many other such facilities.

So here we come to the greatest evil in all of this:

Despite losing three grandparents in the concentration camps, Singer has pretty much embraced the Nazis' system of ethics. That his biggest defender at Princeton, college president Harold T. Shapiro, is also Jewish, goes way beyond irony, into the surreal.

It is only among the intellectual establishment of the late 20th century that the surreal becomes reality. Any philosophy which supports their prevailing ethos of abortion and atheism must be heard.