Author: Peter Singer

Last May, a team of scientists led by Craig Venter announced that they had created a synthetic form of life: a bacterium with a genome designed and created from chemicals in a laboratory. They thus brought us a step closer to an ancient alchemists’ dream: the artificial creation of life. The new bacterium, nicknamed “Synthia,” …

Last year, we published a syndicated column on the development of robots and raised the question of whether robots could be conscious and, if so, whether they would have rights. The topic is evidently a sensitive one with some Christians because it seems to threaten the unique status of human beings. We will here review …

The July 2009 arrest in New York of Izhak Rosenbaum, a gray-haired Brooklyn businessman whom police allege tried to act as a broker in a deal to buy a kidney for $160,000, coincided with the passage of a law in Singapore that some say will open the way for organ trading there. In 2008, Singapore …

When I published The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty earlier this year, I was frequently asked if this isn’t the wrong time to ask affluent people to increase their efforts to end poverty in other countries. Emphatically not, I reply. There is no doubt that the world’s economy is in …

Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned thirty in 2008. The birth of a “test-tube baby,” as the headlines described in vitro fertilization, was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk of …

When people say “Money is the root of all evil,” they don’t usually mean that it is money itself that is the root of evil. Like Paul, from whom the quote comes, they have in mind the love of money. Could money itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, be a problem? Karl …

The conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza is on a mission to debate atheists on the topic of the existence of God. Challenging all the prominent ones he can find, he has debated Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer. I accepted his invitation, and the debate took place at Biola University. The name “Biola” comes from …

  Pneumonia used to be called “the old man’s friend,” because it often brought a swift and relatively painless end to a life that was already of poor quality and would otherwise have continued to decline. Now a study of severely demented patients in U.S. nursing homes in the Boston, Massachusetts, area shows that the …

Although the Japanese have called off plans to kill fifty humpback whales (at least for a year or two), their whaling fleet will still kill nearly one thousand whales of other species this year. In response to international protests, the Japanese have responded that the West is trying to impose its values on other countries. …

In modern liberal democracies in which freedom of inquiry and discussion is widely respected, one issue is still difficult to discuss freely. Long after it has become commonplace to discuss previously taboo topics like the existence of God or sex outside marriage, the intersection of genetics and intelligence remains an intellectual minefield. Though I would …

As modern cultures become more secular, celebrities seem to fill the roles once occupied by the gods of old. Sometimes the differences between the two start to blur. Some people insist Elvis never died. Or was that Jim Morrison? The recent tributes to Princess Diana ten years after her death show that she is starting …

Can a public figure have a private life? In the United States, it seems the answer is no. But not all countries answer the question in the same way. In the French presidential run-off election last May, both candidates successfully kept their domestic lives separate from their appeals for votes. Although Ségolène Royal lost, no one …

“I should like particularly, to underline how the administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act.”1 Those are the words of Pope John Paul II, speaking in March 2004 to an international congress held in Rome. The conference was on …

In bioethics as in other areas of ethical debate, arguments very often circle back to our intuitions—those almost automatic responses we have to whether something “feels” right or wrong. But where do these intuitions come from, and how much reliance should we place on them? Some unusual recent research has cast new light on the …

I have just published a book about my maternal grandfather, David Oppenheim. A Viennese of Jewish descent, he was a member first of Sigmund Freud’s circle and later of that of Alfred Adler. But despite his abiding interest in exploring human psychology, he underestimated the Nazi threat and did not leave quickly enough after the …

In his book A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush writes of his decision to “recommit my heart to Jesus Christ.” He traces it to a walk along the beach in Maine with the Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Conversing with Graham, Bush was “humbled to learn that God had sent His Son to die for …