>CONTROVERSIAL WORDS

Philosopher Peter Singer is blunt and clear, insisting he’s guided by reason alone. Here are five moments when his statements unleashed a storm:

In his 1979 book Practical Ethics, Singer suggested people were morally deficient if they ate meat.

In 1993, Singer suggested that babies not be declared persons until they were 30 days old and that, in some cases of severe disabilities, infanticide up until then might be appropriate.

In a 2004 interview, Singer compared children to apes: “Look: pain and suffering are bad and should be prevented or minimized, regardless of the race, sex or species of the being that suffers,” he said. “It’s a simple fact that a 3-year-old human has pretty much the same selfawareness, rationality and capacity to feel pain as an adult ape. So they should be given equal moral consideration.”

In a 2012 article, Singer defended the “Ashley treatment” — using hormones and surgery to keep a child with a profound intellectual disability small as she aged, so her parents could more easily move her around, and to spare her the discomfort of menstrual cramps.

In May 2015, Singer said on an Australian talk show that he believed guide dogs were a waste of money, and that it would be much more cost-efficient to spend money preventing blindness in the Third World. “In the United States, it costs about $40,000 to train a dog and to train the blind person so that they can work together and the dog can be helpful to the blind person . . . What’s better, to prevent someone becoming blind or to give a blind person a guide dog? I think it’s clearly better to prevent someone becoming blind, plus it costs only $100, so you can calculate for $40,000 how many people you can prevent being blind.”