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Bush blasted as a
moral failure who sees a black and white world
President George Bush wants to be seen as a good Christian leader but, according to a new book by an Australian, Peter Singer, he has the moral development of a 13-year-old boy. Singer, a professor at Princeton University, who was recently described in New Yorker magazine as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers alive, says Bush sees the world "very simply, in black and white, as good versus evil, and he thinks that America is the good guy, and therefore whatever America does is right". "That's incredibly dangerous, when you are the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth." His book, The President of Good and Evil: the Ethics of George W. Bush, does not conclude that Bush is evil "because that's not a word I throw around too much". Nor does he go so far "as to say that Bush is stupid, which a lot of other people might say". "But I do think he's a moral failure, in his own terms, and in any terms." It should be said that it is likely that Mr Bush has the same view of Singer.
After all, the prominent ethicist's own morality has been the subject of much
debate. Singer believes that parents should be able to kill their disabled
children; that animal lives have the same value as human lives; and that adult
children should, in some circumstances, be able to decide when to end the lives
of their demented parents. "Bush claims to believe that human life is sacred. So my book asks whether his statements about human life, and his willingness to go to war in Iraq are actually consistent, or is it evidence of muddled thinking?" Singer says Mr Bush was wrong to go to war in Afghanistan (he suggests that a truly Christian leader would have turned the other cheek after September 11) because it led to the loss of innocent life, and "it is part of my belief that it is wrong to kill innocent humans who wish to go on living". Bush was also wrong to go to war in Iraq, since Saddam Hussein posed no threat to the US, Singer says. He says Bush "allowed himself to be persuaded [of the existence of weapons of mass destruction] without checking how good the evidence was. And if you are about to go to war, it's not good enough to say, 'Yeah, well, it looks like there is evidence.' You have a responsibility to scrutinise this, and say, 'How well do we know this?' And if he'd done that, he would have seen the evidence was tenuous." Singer's book, which is hovering at about 25 on The New York Times bestseller list, has not yet generated the controversy of his earlier writings. Singer attacks Mr Bush for saying he opposes research on human embryos because he believes human life is sacred, yet is an active supporter of the death penalty. Mr Bush has argued that there is a difference: death row inmates are not "innocent" like embryos, but are violent criminals. Singer concedes that all presidents have moral failings, but says that in Mr Bush's case the failing is more serious because of his power. "[Clinton] lied about having sex with Monica Lewinsky, which didn't really harm anyone, and was no-one's business but Hillary's and his own. Bush has misled, if not lied to the nation in a way that led to a war that has cost thousands of lives and cost billions of dollars, and that is very much more serious." Singer, who was educated at Scotch College in Melbourne and at Oxford, has been a professor of bioethics at Princeton since 1998. When his position was announced, he received death threats, his mail was scanned for bombs, and guards protected him during his lectures. Despite this, and his anger with US foreign policy, he says he likes living in the US, and plans to stay. "It's a lively place, with a lot of debate on a lot of issues. I feel more at the centre of what's really happening." The Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy" Groupe de communication Mulindwas "avec Yoweri Museveni, l'Ouganda est dans l'anarchie" |
