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In a recent article, I argued why the arguments Cory Bernardi made over fourteen years ago against same-sex marriage were not only valid then but remain valid today. As history has since shown, a veritable Pandora’s box of ethical taboos has opened up.

None of this should come as a surprise, though, since once a society rejects the divine revelation of God’s Word, then we are left to do whatever our sinful human hearts think is best. The ethicist Peter Singer—whom Bernardi quoted in parliament—and co-founder of the Australian Greens, believed that bestiality and homosexuality are not only both valid sexual options, but so too is ‘intergenerational’ sex.

As the formerly left-leaning academic Clive Hamilton wrote in a 2012 article for The Conversation, with the title, “Cory Bernardi is right, in Peter Singer’s anti-human world.” As Hamilton explained:

In defending “consensual” sex between humans and animals, Singer is concerned only with whether the sexual contact is “mutually satisfying”. What it means for an animal to give consent to sex with a human is unclear. Wag your tail three times for a yes, Fido? 

And the same criterion of mutual satisfaction could be used to justify sex between adults and children. Indeed, paedophiles have been known to deploy just that argument.

If such a moral universe were to pertain, Bernardi would be quite right to claim that we are on a slippery slope to having sex with animals, a slope on which gay marriage is but a way station. Yet Bernardi is excommunicated for articulating a slippery slope argument, while Singer is given its highest honour for celebrating it.

Peter Singer’s Moral Framework Exposed

Hamilton went even further than Bernardi, arguing that if the logic of Singer’s philosophical position was consistently pursued, then there would be nothing preventing not only bestiality or even ‘intergenerational’ sexual activity between an adult and a ten-year-old child from being immoral. Shockingly, as the following interview demonstrates, this is also what Singer believes!

Note in particular the following exchange between the interviewer and Singer, especially from the three-minute mark in the interview:

Interviewer:   Again, I can anticipate someone saying that the logic of that might take you to places that you really ought to struggle with philosophically and morally…

Peter Singer: Such as?

Interviewer:    For example, one might say just as interspecies sexuality has been frowned on in the past, but there may not be a moral objection to it, intergenerational sexuality has been frowned on in the past, and indeed in the present, so perhaps there should be no moral objection to paedophilia or to adults engaging in sexual contact with ten-year olds who appear to give some recognition and consent.

Peter Singer: Well, I think the issue here is, “Well, does this harm the ten-year-old and will harm them in their sexual lives later on?”

Interviewer:    There are sexual campaign groups who say there is no lasting harm.

Peter Singer: Well, obviously, you need to look at the evidence as to whether or not that’s true.

Interviewer:    If there is no lasting harm psychologically, would that kind of sexual encounter be justified?

Peter Singer: I mean… well, look, I’m not going to answer that question because I think you have to really consider that question more thoroughly, and I don’t think there is any kind of evidence about that, and I don’t want to say things that some people will regard as justifying paedophilia when clearly there isn’t a…

Interviewer:   Isn’t that the logic of your position, though? As long as the child is not in the long term harmed, you can’t rule out the moral permissibility of that behaviour?

Peter Singer: I guess that the logic of my position is that, as elsewhere, I’m a consequentialist. I am concerned about preventing harm of various kinds. I don’t have kind of intrinsic moral taboos if that’s your point. Yes, I don’t have intrinsic moral taboos…

Interviewer:    So you can’t rule it out as a morally legitimate action?

Peter Singer: If you think that actions are right or wrong depending on their consequences, you can’t rule anything out until you know something about the consequences.

Interviewer:    It’s just wrong, though, isn’t it?!

Peter Singer: No, I don’t see that you can say that. That’s not my view, right? My view is not that anything is just wrong, full stop. You’re trying to put words in my mouth. You may think that, but I would say, “Why do you say that?” I mean, maybe you have evolved as a being that has certain deep intuitions. Your intuitions are given by evolution. Certain kinds of sexual relationships do not lead to reproduction. We have evolved to have negative attitudes to those kinds of sexual relations.

Interviewer:    In a sense, we’re having a disagreement about what seems obvious. Someone would say to you, ‘This is a moral failing on your part if you don’t admit that it’s just wrong.”

Peter Singer: You haven’t let me finish what I’m saying. We have these moral intuitions, which we can explain in terms of evolution as to why we have them, and they would include a moral intuition against sexual relations between people of the same sex. And we know there is a long history of persecution of people who have been homosexual, and we have now fortunately started to rethink our intuition, whereas, as a lot of people would have said, just as you said a moment ago, it’s just wrong. Can’t you just see that it’s wrong? It’s a moral failing on your part if you can’t see that for two men to have sex is just wrong. Now, I don’t think that it is, and as I say, many people have come to say that it isn’t. So I just don’t think that this moral method of saying it’s just wrong is a method we should rely on either in this case, nor in the others.

Instead of the media being upset with the comments of Cory Bernardi, they should instead be scrutinising the ethical position of Peter Singer. Truth has a way of always rising to the surface, and as we’re quickly seeing, it is Bernardi rather than Singer who is on the right side of history. As Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, then everything is permitted”.

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