Archives

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2001/06/25/singer/index.html

"Professor Death"
By Viktor Frolke  SALON
June 25, 2001

Controversial bioethicist Peter Singer talks about the difference between
humans and animals (none), the virtues of euthanasia (many) and why some
babies are better off dead. 

June 25, 2001 | Peter Singer talks about a lot of awful things in an awfully
nice way. With a slight Australian accent, he discusses "babies without
brains" and "patients in a permanent vegetative state" like a weatherman
would discuss scattered showers and afternoon storms. Only rarely, when
pushed to the limits of his own argument, or just beyond, does he raise his
voice. A little. 

Singer's appointment as Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton
University's Center for Human Values in 1999 didn't go unnoticed. There were
major protests from pro-lifers, from people with disabilities, even from
ex-presidential hopeful Steve Forbes, of all people, who threatened to stop
making donations to his former alma mater. Now, all the protesters are gone.
The lectures by "Professor Death," as his critics like to call him, are not
disrupted anymore. Actually, at a "practical ethics" class on a Monday
morning not long ago, his students barely made a sound. 

His ideas, however -- readily available to friends and enemies in the new
anthology "Writings on an Ethical Life" -- have pretty much stayed the same.
His central argument is elegant and simple; a child might have come up with
it. Humans are animals, therefore animals are in the same league as humans,
and should be treated as such. By attacking what he calls "speciesism,"
racism based on species instead of skin color, Singer raises the status of
animals. (He is generally considered to be the founding father of the animal
liberation movement and has turned quite a few meat eaters into vegetarians.)
 But, and this is the more controversial part, in raising the
status of animals -- or nonhuman animals, as he calls them -- he effectively
lowers the status of human beings, just as Charles Darwin did when he showed
that all living beings are biologically related. 

Moreover, Singer's utilitarian worldview, which defines good or bad by the
pleasure or suffering it causes, leads him to believe that the life of a
human being is not always sacred or worth living. Death is sometimes
preferable to life. The 54-year-old philosopher from Melbourne maintains that
the life of an infant is not automatically more valuable than the life of a
higher animal, say a pig, especially not when that infant has all kinds of
"defects." Parents should be allowed to have the life of a severely disabled
baby ended, according to Singer, just as a pregnant woman is allowed to have
an abortion when she discovers her embryo will become a disabled child. 

Not even the Netherlands, the first country in the world to have officially
legalized euthanasia, goes this far. According to Dutch law, the patient
always has to be able to give informed consent to the active ending of his or
her life. Infants (and "patients in a permanent vegetative state" or people
with advanced Alzheimer's, among others) cannot give such consent. So helping
them to die is murder. 

As three of Singer's Jewish grandparents were killed by the Nazis when they
were living in Austria (his parents fled to Australia in time), it is ironic,
to put it mildly, that some of his fiercest critics in the U.S. and in Europe
call him a Nazi. They think that when you accept Singer's views, the
euthanasia program of the Third Reich, in which thousands of unwanted human
beings were put to death, can't be far away. Salon interviewed Singer at
Princeton University. 

[question by interviewer] Most proponents of the right to die would agree
with your ideas about euthanasia. But you lose them when you suggest that
it's OK to kill a baby before it's 28 days old, because until that time, it
is not self-aware and  "doesn't have the same right to life as others." 

I wrote that in 1995. I have changed my position. Now I believe you should
look at every individual case. 

Have you ever held a newborn baby? 

I have had three children. They're grown-ups now. They live in Australia. 

Some people think your theory about infants is too clinical, as if having a
baby is like buying a new car. 

No, I don't write like that at all, I think. 

But people who say "Never hurt a baby because a baby is sacred" are being
sentimental? 

Listen, if you have a newborn baby and the baby has emerged reasonably
healthy and normal, of course you wanted to have a child, so you love and
cherish that baby. But I've had letters from people who say: "When our baby
was born something was wrong with it. The doctor wanted to operate, and now,
three years later, the baby has constant seizures, is unable to walk or
talk." It's a disaster. It would have been better if the baby had died.
There's nothing clinical about those letters; they're tragic. But they are
saying: Not all human life is sacred. Sometimes it's better if the baby
dies. 

The U.S. doesn't allow infanticide or euthanasia. Isn't it happening anyway? 

I don't know. But I would suspect there is actually even more ending of
patients' lives without their consent in this country than there is in
Holland.  We did an anonymous survey in Australia, and found that a lot of
doctors were ending people's lives. Sometimes they would say, "I'm giving
morphine; I know it will shorten the patient's life, but I'm treating the
patient's pain." Sort of a double effect. Many were prepared to admit to us
that the primary intention of what they were doing was to end a patient's
life. There was another, smaller survey in California with similar results,
and one
in Belgium. It's not totally surprising, because if it's illegal to actively
end someone's life, it's hard to openly discuss it with him or her. 

When a baby is born without a brain, the quality of life for that baby won't
be very high and killing it makes sense to a lot of people. But what if the
definition of quality of life changes, and only the life of babies with blond
hair and blue eyes is considered worth living? 

In the case of a newborn baby without a brain, you could say the quality of
life is zero, because there will be no consciousness. But you could keep the
baby alive -- although that doesn't happen very often. So doctors are already
making decisions based upon the quality of life. There's a continuum here:
Some babies are born with a little brain, there are premature babies with
massive brain hemorrhages and so on. So everyone who agrees that not all
human life must be preserved at all costs just
because it's human and because it's biologically alive is going to have to
get into the rather tricky and gray area of just what quality of life is
enough. 

So maybe in 10 years a potential I.Q. of at least 100 would be added to the
list of what makes life worth living? 

That's possible. What we need to have is an ongoing debate about these
things. Not just scream at each other. 

What to do with all the knowledge -- which is becoming available earlier and
earlier these days -- about the future of a newborn? 

In the case of in vitro fertilization, for instance, you could study the
embryos beforehand and see what qualities that baby will or will not have and
decide which embryo to implant in the uterus. That's an issue we need to have
a serious debate on. Because if we don't ... it's not that it's going to go
away. If we do nothing about it, some people will provide it. Some people
will be willing to pay for it. Then we will have a market for genetic
solutions. That doesn't seem ideal to me. 

Money already plays a role in decisions about life and death. Parents of a
disabled newborn might say they can't afford the extra costs of raising it.
Is that a good argument for infanticide? 

When do they know it's disabled? 

According to your theory that doesn't matter. There's no crucial difference
between abortion and infanticide, because neither the fetus nor the newborn  
is a "person." 

It doesn't make any difference to the inherent right to life of the being,
no.  But it does make a difference in that if the child is born with a
disability that would not make its life miserable, but the parents can't pay
for the extra care, they could put the child up for adoption. If the
disability is a mild one, that's what I think they should do. If the
condition is detected during pregnancy, the woman can't give up the child
unless she goes through with the whole thing until birth, which is asking a
lot more than simply saying, "I don't think you can rear this child; here's
another couple that could." 

If you make the criteria so flexible, if you make matters of life and death
negotiable, don't you think babies will become a commodity? 

That may be happening anyway, in terms of selecting the children we have
before birth. 

You don't think this is a problem? 

It would be a problem if you have a society divided along genetic lines,
where the rich can buy the genes they want and the poor can't. I don't think
that's the society that would be best in promoting the happiness of most of
its members. But I'm not convinced it would be a problem if these services
were available to everyone. It's an open question that is worth thinking
about. 

From your utilitarian philosophy you couldn't argue against it. 

Some people might want to select according to characteristics that are in the
interests of themselves and their children, but are not in the interests of
society as a whole. 

Like what? 

Well, one thing that could easily happen under a laissez faire system is that
people would select for height. You already see ads asking for eggs from
girls who are over 5 feet 8 inches tall. The reason is that parents want
their child to be slightly taller than average. There is some evidence that
taller than average people do significantly better. But of course if everyone
selects on that criterion, you get a race to the ceiling and that's not good
for anyone. Because we need more resources and so forth. 

What if parents don't want an ugly child? 

If everyone had the opportunity to avoid having an ugly child, I don't think
I would have a problem. 

Is ugliness a good enough reason to kill a baby? 

I don't think there are parents who would be prepared to go through another
pregnancy just because they thought their child was not going to be all that
beautiful. 

Parents would never refuse to take responsibility for their baby for
frivolous reasons? 

Most parents are not going to do that. Most parents who go through pregnancy,
and childbirth, are going to love and cherish that child. 

But it does happen with abortion. A pregnant woman just may not feel like
being a mother yet and have the fetus taken away. 

If she has had that idea for a month, I think that's a perfectly good reason
for an abortion. 

What would not be a perfectly good reason for an abortion? 

There's a difference between early and late abortions. If you have a late
abortion, where the fetus might feel pain, then I think you should have a
good reason. Because then you're inflicting pain. As you go through the third
trimester, you need to have more serious reasons to end a pregnancy.  For
instance, I would not support ending a pregnancy only because you want a boy
and you're going to get a girl, because it would reinforce sex
discrimination. But if you already have two boys and you want a girl, that
could be enough reason for abortion. 

Do you have grandchildren? 

No. 

What would you have done if one of your children had had Down syndrome?

If [the fetus] had a blockage of the intestines, which is a common
complication, I would have refused permission for the operation. If it did
not have blockage or some other complication, but we knew a couple who would
want to raise the child, we would put up the child for adoption. 

Doesn't it follow from your utilitarian viewpoint that people who want to
have children should always first try to adopt, to alleviate the suffering of
existing children? 

I'm not sure if that follows. You could debate that. 

Who should decide if the parents' reasons for infanticide are good enough? 

The doctor is the initial filter. If the doctor is in doubt about the quality
of the reasons, he should consult a colleague or an ethics committee. 

Do you think the doctor should be able to override the parents? 

If the doctor feels that the parents' decision is being made in a
unreasonable manner, he should be able to go to some other body with the
authority to override the parents. I don't think it should be just the
doctor. A hospital ethics committee is better than a court, but a court is
also a possibility. 

What do you say to people with certain disabilities who claim that you're
lowering their quality of life? Are they just not getting it? 

I don't think I've met someone who said that I'm personally lowering their
quality of life. 

Some say you're making them feel dispensable. 

When I'm talking to them, they're not dispensable, are they? The only sense
[in which] they could say that is if their mothers had listened to my views
when they were born, they wouldn't be here. So what? That's not really
relevant. The same could be said by a third child to someone advocating zero
population growth. 

Maybe you're not saying that the lives of disabled people are not worth
living, but on a scale they're closer to that point than you are. 

There are so many more factors important to the quality of life. Maybe the
life of a disabled person is much more worth living than mine. All I'm saying
is that at birth you can't tell that. It's reasonable to say that a life with
a serious disability has the expectation of turning out less well than a life
without disabilities. And I'm not talking about intellectual disabilities. I
can imagine that parents of a newborn that is paralyzed, that's always going
to be in a wheelchair, might decide that they don't want that child and that
they are going to have another one. That's a decision I can understand....

About the writer Viktor Frolke is a freelance journalist from Amsterdam. He
lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. 

***********************************************

Media Coverage 
St. George Pro-Life | Parkview Christian Church