Reply to Singer's “Blind Hostility”

Abstract

We were not surprised by the tone of Peter Singer's response to our commentary but we admit to astonishment at the minor points of criticism that he selected to attempt to rebut. To paraphrase part of his reply to our first, abbreviated critique (1) of his chapter (2), we conclude that his failure to respond to our disclosure of his numerous distortions and selective quotations, or to our discussion of the flimsy basis for his philosophical arguments, or to our conclusion that his position reflects misanthropic and anti-science sentiments, constitutes his reluctant endorsement of the validity of these points in our critique.

The Non-Issue

We readily admit that we were in error in originally suggesting that Singer had fabricated a quotation. We are puzzled, however, that Singer is making such an issue of an error that we corrected before publication. The reason that Singer received a second revised manuscript for his comments in January of 1995 was that the manuscript was critiqued by two outside reviewers, the four members of the Publication Committee, and the Editor-in-Chief, many of whom made individual comments and suggestions for minor revisions, primarily in the tone of certain wording. This process took several months. We readily agreed to the proposed changes because none of them was substantive, and none pertained to any of the material Singer brought up for discussion in his original response. (We had deleted a reference to our erroneous allegation which was inadvertently left in our first revision, and to which Singer objected, before we even received his initial commentary.) When some 8 months passed without a reply from Singer, we assumed that he was using the time to prepare a more thorough rebuttal to our major criticisms. To our surprise, his response when finally received was almost identical to his first one.