The Moral Mentor

Anders Chen '01 kept forgetting. He knew that people were starving in places around the world, that they lived without houses or clothes or doctors or books and that children died in swaths every day from malnutrition.

He knew this. But he could not see them. And so, mental images were replaced by what was in front of him: papers, professors, Princeton. He forgot.

When Peter Singer arrived on campus in September, Chen attended a lecture the controversial professor gave during hunger week. Chen sat, listened and was ashamed. Then he forgot again.

But Chen enrolled in Singer's philosophy class, CHV 310/PHI 385: Practical Ethics, and after hearing the messages in lecture and absorbing them daily in readings and conversations with classmates, he began donating $30 per month — one-tenth of his monthly income — to Oxfam. Constant exposure to Singer made it impossible to forget.

"It's something that I just hadn't done because, like most people in America, it's something easily forgotten," Chen said. "The effects of it are never seen, especially in an academic center like a college. The reason I hadn't done it before was out of ignorance, weakness, forgetfulness."

Singer's arrival at the University sparked furious reactions from a range of groups. But months later, students sat in class and peered up at a mild-mannered man with scraggly hair, who offered a quiet yet compelling analysis of issues ranging from obligations to the poor to ethical treatment of animals to abortion.

"I wasn't sure what sort of image people had of me," Singer said in an interview in March. "Maybe they had a sort of southern preacher image — that I was going to be declaiming their sin and their sinful lives as an abomination, or something like that. I think some of what I see is pretty bad, actually. But I don't think it would do any good to take that kind of denunciatory stance, and it isn't really my temperament."

Singer cringes after hearing students talking about dining out in expensive restaurants or seeing them parading around campus in high-fashion clothing. He walks by and says nothing. But despite the ethicist's understated presentation, he has captured some students' attention.

"Every topic that we've covered, I think that I've had to reevaluate my stance," said Justin Goldberg '02, who no longer eats meat because of Singer's influence. "It's a lot different from any other class I've taken here because the things we're debating in precept are not an aspect of literature or some remote belief. It's pretty controversial stuff. And people are, I think, genuinely grappling with the material."

While watching a debate between Singer and prominent bioethicist Adrienne Asch last fall, Jordan Rettig '01 became intrigued by Singer's ideas. When she saw he was teaching a course in the spring, she jumped at the chance to explore his views first hand.

"I've certainly changed the way I approach questions of ethics and moral consideration," Rettig said. "Now when you come up with a hard decision, like aborting a baby, you have some more tools to make that decision. You don't have to rely on how you feel that day, or how you feel when you walk into the room."

Singer said he takes his role as a moral authority at the University very seriously.

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"It makes me feel that I have a very difficult responsibility to put things in a way that is fair, honest and accurate and on the one hand not putting a burden of guilt on [the students], but gently steering them in the right direction," Singer said.