Singer‘s moral imbecility, which demonstrates how liberalism can be responsible for results with which the Nazis would be familiar, may be viewed in various perspectives, but all of them in the end are a function of the liberal-left’s ongoing ‘Enlightenment’-inspired project to replace the traditional and the human with ‘reason’. But in ethics, this attempt must fail, because the business of ethics is to humanise. It should go without saying that one cannot humanise and encourage human flourishing by trying to crush human love as a well-spring of moral value, but with liberals like Singer around, it seems it must be said. In any case Singer’s reliance on reason is misplaced and contradictory. He tells us that human beings are not unique, but human reason is unique. It is of a different order from that of animals, and does indeed set us apart. Singer recognises this implicitly, because he thinks human beings, uniquely, can ignore their genetic impulses in favour of their reason.

Traditionalists do not deny reason, but have a healthy distrust of it, recognising that how we use it depends on our pre-existing emotional state, and that this fact is not often recognised by those who assert the supremacy of reason. Reason as the slave of the passions, as the philosopher David Hume put it, has been responsible for some of the most horrendous inhumanity in history. Traditionalists respect the wisdom of the ages, suitably amended to account for different conditions, which has its own ‘reasoning’: the selection of ideas and attitudes in an evolutionary process of adaption [sic] and survival in a process over time infinitely more refined, powerful, and in the end reasonable, than anything the liberal left is ever going to come up with.

(Colin Broughton, “The Moral Imbecility of Liberalism,” The Salisbury Review 25 [winter 2006]: 10-2, at 12 [italics in original])