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Peter Singer's ideas are offensive. Perhaps we should be grateful for his brutal honesty.

Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against, killing it. …

A woman may plan to have two children. If one dies while she is of childbearing age, she may conceive another in its place. Suppose a woman planning to have two children has one normal child, and then gives birth to a hemophiliac child. The burden of caring for that child may make it impossible for her to cope with a third child; but if the disabled child were to die, she would have another. It is also plausible to suppose that the prospects of a happy life are better for a normal child than for a hemophiliac. …

When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. … It may still be objected that to replace either a fetus or a newborn infant is wrong because it suggests to disabled people living today that their lives are less worth living than the lives of people who are not disabled. Yet it is surely flying in the face of reality to deny that, on average, this is so. -Peter Singer, Practical Ethics

Are some ideas so offensive that they shouldn't be engaged with? That question occupies scholars a lot these days, and tends to generate a predictably polarized set of responses - from those who opine that snowflake millennials are destroying free speech to those who call for the retraction of journal articles for ideological (among other) reasons. Meanwhile, I find myself lost somewhere in the middle, attempting to understand my own decisions.

I think about this issue a lot, in no small part because of the amount of time I've spent engaging with the work of the Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. If you're an academic who works on disability, the name "Peter Singer" immediately resonates, and immediately signals contention. Singer thinks that the lives of people like me are ("on average") less valuable than the lives of nondisabled people. He thinks it would have been permissible for my parents to have had me killed as an infant, and better ("on average") if they could have replaced me with a nondisabled alternative. I find all this offensive, to say the least. Yet unlike those who think that Singer ought to be treated as a pariah, I engage with him and his work on a regular basis. Yet I struggle to explain why.

When I talk about engaging with ideas, I mean taking ideas seriously - discussing and citing them, having them presented at conferences, responding to them in print or at symposia, and so on. There are separate questions that arise, such as whether academic freedom should protect them (surely it should), or whether they should be taught in the classroom (surely that depends on all sorts of complicated factors, including the size and level of the class, the students enrolled, your pedagogical aims, and your teaching style). And there's also the issue of how non-academics respond to scholars who defend controversial ideas. (Disability-rights organizations regularly protest Singer's public lectures, for example.) Here, though, I want to focus specifically on how scholars interact with ideas that many consider harmful or demeaning.

An idealistic model of academic liberalism says that we should engage with all ideas, no matter what. Truth is its own defense! We have nothing to fear from ideas, even those we find offensive! And so on. I would love it if this were true, but it has always seemed like nonsense to me.

People who deal with the everyday reality of disability really do have reason to fear the claim - especially when it's defended by one of the most influential public intellectuals in the world - that disabled lives are less valuable than nondisabled ones. Likewise, queer people really do have reason to fear arguments against marriage equality, and Muslims really do have reason to fear claims that Islam is fundamentally illiberal. To pretend otherwise is to discount the power of ideas. It's also to discount the practical experience of the people involved in these conversations.

Nearly all the academics I know who work on disability have been touched by it personally. They've kept overnight vigils by their brother's hospital bed because they didn't trust doctors not to remove his life support out of "mercy." They've fought to get their son access to the education he's legally entitled to, impeded by local officials who seem to believe that his education doesn't matter. They've stayed up all night watching a Senate vote to learn whether they'll still be able to pay for their daughter's assistive care. There is no point in telling these people that they have nothing to fear from an open and frank discussion of the value of disabled lives. They know otherwise.

It's also worth considering the emotional toll of engaging with offensive ideas. Most disabled people have, at some point, dealt with a deep sense of shame and inadequacy. Many have wondered, in their darker moments, if their parents really wanted them. Most caregivers have experienced the pain of subtle but never-ending suggestions that their loved one is somehow less valuable. These are unpleasant feelings, the kind of thing you'd ideally talk about only with your therapist or your punching bag or your dog.

在会议、研讨会、读书会等场合，当你只是想成为一个专业人士，做好自己的工作时，听到礼貌而冷静地讨论这些问题是多么糟糕，这是很难表达的。当职业规范要求你安静地坐着听别人说你的生命不值钱了，或者你孩子的生命不值钱了，这是很难的。它不会让我们精致的雪花去承认困难和痛苦。所以，与自由主义的理想相反，我认为我们对某些思想的公开讨论确实有一些恐惧。我们害怕的并不是“冒犯”，而是伤害。

更重要的是，我认为有些想法是不应该参与的。如果一个哲学家告诉我，他们有一个关于强奸的道德美德的论点，我根本不想听。我不会去参加那个演讲，我不会邀请那个人参加我的会议，我不会读那篇论文。我认为这个论点不值得关注。

然而，说出原因却很棘手。这不仅仅是我确信结论是错误的。我是一个哲学家——我花了很多时间来娱乐我确信是错误的想法，这是我学科精神的一部分，这是一项有价值的活动。这也不是说我认为这个结论在道德上是错误的或者可能产生道德上不好的后果。这对于许多显然值得参与的想法来说都是如此。例如，在我看来，广泛采用自由意志主义会带来可怕的后果，但这并不意味着不值得认真对待自由意志主义思想。

支持强奸的论点是不同的，因为我看不出讨论它的利大于弊。也许这个论点是聪明的或有独创性的，但让我们诚实地说——任何一个论点的智力价值都是有限的。如果我想提出一个具有挑战性和有趣的论点，我可以从成千上万个其他具有挑战性和有趣的论点中选择一个。所以支持强奸的论点的好处微乎其微。

然而，危害却没有。认真对待为强奸辩护的论点，可能会给强奸受害者造成强烈的痛苦，更不用说可能会促进强奸。引用观点，讨论它们，回应它们是一种学术货币。这是学术signal-boosting。在有关性道德的辩论中，支持强奸的论点并不是一个重要的“摆在桌面上的选项”，除非(通过反复讨论和引用)我们让它成为一个。因此，认真对待它的唯一原因是纯粹的学术兴趣。但是，无论在为强奸辩护的过程中有什么微不足道的智力价值，都不值得对真实的人的真实痛苦无动于衷。

那么和彼得·辛格有什么不同呢?至少在我看来，他的观点和支持强奸的观点一样令人反感。然而，他给我的印象很不同，原因很简单，在描述许多人的想法或许多人的日常观点暗示时，辛格没有错。

Most people would, of course, be far too polite to say what Singer says. But Singer's claims about the comparative value of disabled lives follow naturally from the casual remarks that disabled people and caregivers hear all the time. They're implicit in the grave "I'm so sorry" quietly whispered to my friend after colleagues meet her beautiful, smiling daughter for the first time. They're the unspoken message when another friend is reassured, just after her son is born: "But you can have another child." They're the natural conclusion of a well-meaning doctor remarking to me, on learning that I don't have children: "Oh, that's probably for the best - your children might've inherited [your condition]."

我非常怀疑那些说这些话的善意的人会支持辛格的结论。但辛格是对的，他的结论直接来源于这些常见的态度。出于这个原因，我奇怪地发现自己对彼得·辛格的残酷诚实心存感激。别人含蓄地示意，他却明确地表达出来。

人们担心，与攻击性观点搏斗会使这些观点具有不适当的合法性。但对于像辛格这样的人来说，不管我是否选择与他们接触，这些观点都是合理的。显而易见的是，普林斯顿大学生命伦理学教授Ira W. DeCamp的观点对我是否关注它们至关重要。但更重要的是，辛格的观点已经有了合法性，因为人们将继续以与他的观点直接相关的方式来思考残疾问题，而不管进步学者是否认为这些观点过于冒犯而不值得讨论。(毕竟，就像辛格自己讽刺的那样，只要有人呼吁他的演讲“没有平台”，《实用伦理学》的销量就会增加。)就连辛格对婴儿安乐死的看法也不是反乌托邦式的思想实验。至少有一个欧洲主要国家(荷兰)公开在某些残疾案例中实施杀婴。

Another reason sometimes given for not engaging with views like Singer's is that doing so creates inequality in academic spaces. If we openly debate the value of disabled lives, for example, it creates a burden for disabled and caregiver academics that simply doesn't exist for academics unaffected by disability. This worry strikes me only partly correct. Yes, debating the value of disabled lives does make things harder for disabled and caregiver academics, and that inequality isn't fair. But it's not quite right to blame Peter Singer. The idea that disabled people are lesser or defective is part of everyday reality for disabled people and caregivers - often under the surface, often cloaked in politeness and smiles - whether or not Peter Singer discusses it openly.

It's true, though, that within academe we have the ability, much more than most, to shield ourselves from uncomfortable and prejudiced ideas. We can create contexts in which no one has to be directly confronted with the claim that they matter less, or that they are less valuable. I think such contexts can be enriching and important. But - and here I speak only for myself, since much of this is dependent on personal and professional circumstances - I think they shouldn't be the only professional contexts I work in. As a full professor, I have a remarkable amount of social privilege compared with most disabled people (large percentages of whom are unemployed and live below the poverty line). I have about as much job security as a person can have, I make a good salary, I have great benefits. As academics, we tend to justify this cushy social position by appeal to our social value - we aren't just educators, we're people who think hard thoughts and try to change minds and change culture.

Given all this, it's hard for me to justify the idea that I shouldn't engage with Peter Singer. Do Singer's views make me uncomfortable? Yes, deeply so. But probably not as uncomfortable as they make people living with spina bifida in the Netherlands, given the Netherlands' policy on infant euthanasia in cases of severe disability.

And unlike others more directly affected, it is literally my job to think and talk about difficult ideas. The discomfort and hurt when dealing with views like Singer's are real. But if I'm unwilling to take on a measure of discomfort, given how much privilege I have and how little I have to lose, then I'm not sure I'm using the privilege of an academic life the way I ought to be.

与辛格的想法作斗争的价值并不能抵消实际和材料成本，但它确实抵消了这些成本。在辛格本人赞同的功利主义推理中，我认为这种取舍是值得的。偏见往往被巧妙地、含蓄地、或不加思索地持有。像辛格这样的思想家通过给我们提供清晰、定义明确的论点，为许多人持有的观点提供了论据。一旦这个案例被提出，那么开始指出它的缺陷就容易得多了。

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By Elizabeth Barnes

Elizabeth Barnes, a professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability (Oxford University Press, 2016).