Lethal prescriptions: Peter Singer's flawed Ethics.

A recent issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly focused on "Exploring Ethics" and featured a profile of Peter Singer, who holds the university's Ira W. DeCamp Chair in Bioethics. The general tone of the piece was quite positive. According to the students interviewed, Singer has challenged them to question conventional wisdom on several controversial life-and-death issues: the moral status of animals, the traditional distinctions between killing and letting die, the acceptability of infanticide for severely disabled newborns, and voluntary euthanasia for adults.

The article described Singer as "by an order of magnitude the most famous professor" at Princeton's Center for Human Values. Yet if the laudatory comments of Singer's students are true, they suggest a fairness in his classroom manner often absent in his writing. Singer is the author or editor of more than thirty books. Unlike the works of most academic philosophers, his books are widely read. Three are particularly popular: Animal Liberation (1975), kick-started the animal-rights movement. There, Singer decries what he calls speciesism: because animals can experience pain and suffering, their interests may well outweigh the proclaimed benefits to humans on such matters as eating meat or animal experimentation. In Practical Ethics (1979), Singer elaborates the "preference" version of utilitarianism that informs his worldview: simply put, moral actions are those that satisfy the most intense preferences of the greatest number of sentient beings. As is true with most utilitarians though, Singer doesn't specify how he measures the intensity of such preferences.

But it is Singer's 1996 Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics that has triggered the most controversy. In it, singer throws down the gauntlet to all who proscribe the direct killing of innocent people. As a "new commandment," he asks us to "recognize that the worth of human life varies." Actual persons, in contrast to merely biological members of the human species, are distinguished, he says, by their capacities for rationality, self-awareness, and social relations. On that basis, Singer denies personhood to fetuses, newborns, and severely disabled adults. Parents should be able, therefore, to euthanize a "seriously" handicapped newborn. In the book, Singer sets the limit for such parental decisions at twenty-eight days after birth, but more recently he has recommended extending that cutoff point "somewhat short of one year."

What, for Singer, qualifies as a serious defect? He mentions spina bifida, hemophilia, and Down syndrome as conditions that, at the parents' discretion, warrant lethal prescriptions. As a good utilitarian, Singer pledges primary allegiance to the reduction of suffering, but, in the case of Down syndrome, such "logic" hardly seems applicable to the infant itself. Singer focuses, instead, on the parents. As actual persons, unlike their newborn, their dashed hopes should suffice to justify euthanasia. This conclusion amounts to a "replacement" thesis. The defective infant, as a nonperson, may be replaced by a healthier brother or sister born at some later date, with a net positive value to the parents in the satisfaction of their preferences.

Singer's fans celebrate his ability to approach controversial issues afresh, letting the chips of traditional appeals fall where they may in following his utilitarianism to often startling conclusions. I am unpersuaded that he deserves such kudos. He tends to assert, rather than argue for, the merits of his method, and he is often shrill in dismissing opposing views, especially religious ones. Nowhere are such traits more evident than in Singer's dismissal of what he calls sanctity-of-life arguments. He rejects that rubric as the vestige of an outmoded, primarily Christian, worldview. Strictly speaking, he's wrong on this point. "Sanctity of life" is not, in explicit terms, a traditional principle in moral theology. Instead, it is a broad theme (fairly modern in its origins and usage) that links both religious and secular arguments for rights to life, liberty, and security of a person--based on human dignity.

A much larger irony emerges, though, in the case Singer makes for infanticide. In his musings, Singer must rely on the very virtues and values nurtured by the traditions he criticizes. After all, his defense of infanticide, based on the priority of parental preferences, would justify many more instances of the practice beyond those suggested by his focus on disabled newborns. Yet parents' desires are hardly the last word on the way that infants should be treated. We have come a long way from viewing children, of whatever age, as chattel, and Singer knows that. More tellingly, socially sanctioned killing is--by definition--never merely a private act. Judgments about which lives are worth living have a bloody history, which Singer also knows. But Singer's own criteria for who "qualify" as persons cannot replicate or justify the hard-won protections nurtured by the very "sanctity of life" perspectives he dismisses. In judging Singer's philosophy--despite his claim to be doing "practical ethics"--Whitehead's dictum comes to mind: "Seek simplicity, and distrust it."