Peter Singer: Infanticide, Yes; Kangaroo Cull, No
Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer is famous for two primary reasons: First, he jump started the animal rights/liberation movement with his 1975 book Animal Liberation. Second, he is the world's foremost proponent of the legitimacy of infanticide. Thus, writing on page 186 in Practical Ethics, he supported the right of parents to kill a newborn with hemophilia in order to make life easier for a hypothetical, yet-to-be-born sibling:
When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be higher if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.It should be noted that the disability of the infant isn't why he can be killed, but rather, his view that infants are not persons.
Cut to Australia where an overpopulation of kangaroos threatens the animals with starvation. The government is proposing a cull. But Singer opposes. From the story:
Professor Singer has urged the Australian Defence Force to use kangaroo contraceptives instead of guns to control numbers. Defence has applied to kill up to 3200 kangaroos at two of its sites around Canberra. The animals risk starvation and are damaging the environment, Defence says.
Professor Singer, whose 1975 book Animal Liberation spawned the modern animal rights movement, is one of the world's best-known and most controversial thinkers on animal rights. He said the cull did not seem to be necessary. "We need some form of fertility control to deal with these situations," the Princeton University bioethics professor told the Canberra TimesThe thing is, Singer doesn't believe in either human rights or animal rights. He is a utilitarian who believes what should and should not be done must be based on whether the outcome would promote satisfaction of preferences or interests, or be detrimental to those goals. He broke out of the crowd because he asserted that in taking such utilitarian measurements, the interests of animals deserve equal consideration with the interests of people.
With the kangaroos, Singer apparently weighed the suffering in the animals that would be caused by the cull and that of potential starvation, and believed the cull would cause more suffering and hence should not be done. But if the happiness were increased with the cull, he would support it--as he did experimenting on monkeys last year.
You see, for Singer, principles of right and wrong make no sense. We follow Peter Singer at great peril to human rights and the well being of the weak and vulnerable among us.
Labels: Peter Singer. Utilitarianism.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 8:57 AM
9 Comments
9 Comments:
That last sentence isn't exactly right, Wes. There is a principle of right and wrong for Singer. If an action promotes the most happiness then it is the right one and vice versa.
The interesting part of this post to me is that he is caught in a rough spot. Lots of 'roos being shot or lots of them starving each produce lots of disutility. There might be good reasons to think that the govt would not be as good at killing off just the right amount of 'roos as nature would, so maybe he's right.
I'm not sure what that has to do with infanticide though...
Hi, matteson: Well, if it is a principle, it is a non principle, because the right and wrong determinations will vary with each situation. The point is that one day, you may be deemed to have preferences or interests worth honoring in the overall utilitarian scheme of things, but the next, under a changed fact scenario, you could become expendable if your life conflicted with the preferences or interests of those deemed to have greater value than you, perhaps even of animals, e.g., personhood theory, quality of life ethic, etc.
While that's true it does not change the process by which the determinations of "right" and "wrong" are made. How is that a non-principle?
Because it is purely relativistic. It is process oriented. I don't see a process as a principle. I say you have a right to life merely because of your humanity. That is a principle. Singer says don't have a right to life based on your humanity and indeed, your continuing existence depends on how you far in a utilitarian analysis, which could change tomorrow if your circumstances change, or indeed, if the ones with the power to decide, change. That is process, not principle.
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That is good response to a good question, thanks.
And off-topic, but I wanted you to know that I got a response from someone from Cures Without Cloning, the Missouri group trying to change the definition of "cloning" in their Constitution. A Cures Without Cloning volunteer named Chelsea, who has a nice blog of her own called Reflections of a Paralytic", posted this comment on my blog:
"The ballot language is not yet set in stone. Scientific and legal experts are still reviewing the language so I have forwarded these concerns on to those in charge and they will be taking a look at it."
So there is a good chance they could fix the language so that it doesn't open up a giant loophole that only requires engineering a small change into a human genome before creating a human embryo and doing whatever with it, including destroying it and implanting it and giving birth to it. Hopefully you will agree we need to stop the creation of such embryos, because otherwise you will be between a rock and a hard place like Peter Singer is with the Kangaroos, having to choose between human exceptionalism that says that those GE'd clones have a right to life, and being against entering the Brave New World. The way out of that dilemma is to make sure that no such embryos are allowed to be created!
Another inconsistency in Singer’s logic is that he says the future happiness of a healthy infant is greater in moral importance than the happiness of the hemophiliac infant. This statement rests on the notion that the future happiness of healthy infants in general is of great moral importance. Yet in other texts (”Rethinking Life and Death”), Prof. Singer says that future happiness for the unborn does not matter, since they presently are not persons and have no consciousness, and he quotes John Locke’s definition of a person (one whose life matters) as one who is presently aware of themselves as themselves in different times and places. This contradicts in principle the notion underlying his above argument. As well, Prof. Singer states that abortion on healthy infants should be legal if they are unwanted by their biological parents. i.e., abortion should be legal on demand. The reality of loving adoptive parents cancels any reduction of future happiness for these infants. So Prof. Singer can’t use utilitarianism with respect to the future happiness per se of adopted children to justify abortion. At the same time, in the above example from “Practical Ethics” he has committed himself to the notion that in general the future happiness of healthy unborn children is of great moral importance. So he is contradicting himself in principle if he continues to support abortion on demand merely because the unborn presently lack the quality (happiness, which presupposes self-awareness) that Prof. Singer contends gives great moral importance to the life of the healthy unborn infant over the life of the hemophiliac infant in Singer’s example above.
The good Prof. also fails to explicitly state when "personhood" comes into effect, because his definition is (loosly translated by Tabitha) that a person is a person when he or she has cognative resoning capacity. So babies and little kids aren't people but older kids are. But that leaves a problem - if he's willing to say that a baby's life depends on its future happiness vs. the future happiness of another, as yet unborn sibling, they why isn't he willing to say that personhood is relative to a child's future cognition? We can say right now Johnny, the baby, is not a person but we know that he will eventually attain personhood because he will grow into cognition. We don't know that there will *be* another sibling, so how do we know that hemophilia in Johnny isn't going to be overcome by his future happiness and that there won't be a baby brother to have even more happiness? What if Mom is steril after her first birth? Or what if the future sibling is miscarried?
They're all ridiculous statements but that's what I think of Singer's comparative morality - it's silly, or it would be if it weren't so terrifying.
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