Dangerous mind?
Aussie philosopher’s polarizing views under the microscope,
If you are an animal, Peter Singer might be the closest thing you have to Moses. If you are a severely disabled human baby — or a disability activist — he’s more akin to the Angel of Death.
This week, the 69-year-old Australian philosopher is being celebrated at Western University in London, Ont. In lectures and conversations, the power of his logic, the force of his world view and the startling and sometimes unexpected conclusions to his arguments will be on full display.
Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University, is a utilitarian who wants to maximize happiness and minimize pain. He isn’t so much concerned with rescue animals as with industrial agriculture. Stop the mass production and slaughter of chickens, he argues, and you will maximize happiness much more than if you rescue an abandoned pit bull.
He is also a consequentialist: the outcome of your actions matters much more than the principle you act on. Forget about donating money to a museum or opera company; instead, contribute to saving lives in the Third World. The difference in impact will be measurable and remarkable.
Singer is a master of practical ethics and at the forefront of debates involving health care, euthanasia and assisted suicide. Just after the publication this spring of his latest book, The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically, he gave interviews reiterating his views on rationing health care. Singer believes health care is by definition a scare resource, and scare resources need rationing. This logic leads him to argue that some severely disabled infants should be killed after birth to minimize their pain and that of their parents, as well as to save health-care dollars.
To his supporters, Singer is an essential thinker. Western University philosophy professor Anthony Skelton, one of the organizers of this week’s celebration, explains, “Everyone in philosophy who writes on these topics deals with Singer’s views.”
Amy Hasbrouck, a Montreal lawyer and chair of Not Dead Yet, a North American disability rights group, agrees completely, but with a twist. “Given the prestige of his position, Singer gives legitimacy not only to eugenicist views, but also to the related and commonly held view that life with a disability is a fate worse than death,” she said in an interview. “This view is what drives the current push toward legalization of assisted suicide.”
The tribute at Western’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy takes place on the 40th anniversary of Singer’s book Animal Liberation. Skelton thinks the celebration is appropriate because it is, he says, “one of the few books in philosophy that have served as the intellectual basis for social change.
“The book’s main message, that our treatment of non-human animals is speciesist, has generated a large and influential following both within and without philosophy, which is not to say that it is not hotly contested,” Skelton adds. “Some think Singer has gone too far and some think that he has not gone far enough.”
It is the success of Animal Liberation that has many in the disabled community concerned about their own status in a world guided by Singer-influenced ethical thinking.
Ryerson University professor emerita Catherine Frazee, a leading disability studies scholar and a member of the federal panel studying the implementation of the Supreme Court’s decision on assisted suicide, believes it’s the power of Singer’s reasoning that causes such angst among disa- bled people. “The logic of his approach is, by many accounts, impeccable and eerily seductive,” she says. “But is logic the single most important tool when we contemplate the large important questions of life? I would argue that it is not. Logic can be helpful, but when it takes us to conclusions that do not accord with our moral intuitions, we had best not be enslaved to its reasoning.”
This fear of a world enthralled with the reasoning of Peter Singer, especially his thinking about severely disabled people, lies behind the most contentious and problematic moments in his career.
In the wake of comments he made about health care and euthanasia upon the publication of The Most Good You Can Do, he was disinvited from a philosophy conference in Cologne, Germany, where he was scheduled to be a keynote speaker. In the United States, there were demonstrations at Princeton University and an online petition.
The demands of the petition, organized by Not Dead Yet, are straightforward: Princeton should fire Singer because his views “both devalue the lives of people with disabilities and advocate public policies that would end those lives through denial of health care.” Skelton has some sympathy for the reaction to Singer’s views. “The disabled community does have a point,” he says, “since a lot of the debate often turns on impoverished views about how well the disabled fare and about what kinds of lives are worth living. But it is a discussion worth having.”
Having a discussion and calling for an academic to be fired for the positions he holds are two very different things, and the blowback against the latter has been fierce. Academics around the world have taken to social media and blogs to denounce the protesters or, in rare instances where they have sympathy for the protesters’ perspective, to suggest they should calm down and be reasonable.
Russell Blackford, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle in Australia, isn’t worried that Singer is in any professional danger, but thinks the protesters’ demands that he be fired will have an effect on “younger academics who’ve faced real problems because of their controversial opinions about decisions at the beginning and end of life.
“And that shows the wider danger,” Black- ford continues. “While Singer himself will survive the campaign against him, others who can see what’s happening are likely to be intimidated.”
Elizabeth Barnes, a philosopher at the University of Virginia and the author of an upcoming book on disability, thinks defenders of Singer should try to see the situation from the perspective of disabled people. “Academic freedom should allow Peter Singer to say what he thinks,” she argues, “but it shouldn’t protect him from the consequences, including public outrage.
“He has a habit of saying things that are extremely offensive to disabled people. Disabled people are going to get up in arms about that, especially since they deal with the very real, very rational fear that the views of thinkers like Singer will have influence both on public policy and on wider public perceptions about the quality of life of people with what Singer calls ‘severe’ disabilities.”
Context matters, and while the occasion for the Western University tribute to Singer is a significant anniversary, the context for Canadian disability activists is the ongoing discussion of assisted suicide and euthanasia. Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, thinks the impact Singer has had on that debate is undeniable.
“Singer’s views on euthanasia are already being implemented in Belgium and the Netherlands,” he argues. “In fact, the Canadian Supreme Court Carter decision would allow, if approved by the government, euthanasia for chronic pain as well as for people with psychological pain. This means that Peter Singer’s views may have already been approved, for the most part, in several jurisdictions.”
Canvassing views on Peter Singer leads to the contradictory notions that he’s the greatest thinker of our time and the most dangerous man alive. “He could be both,” says Skelton. “Anyone who argues that many of our prevailing ethical attitudes are unsustainable is likely to be considered both formidable and dangerous. He could be a great thinker in that he has challenged many of our ideas with compelling argument and be dangerous because of the effect he might have on various vested interests in society.”
Vested interests can be a loaded term. For some it summons up images of industrial farming; for others it means who decides who lives or dies.