Singer is invited to present at seminars, symposia, and philosophy association conventions throughout the world. His 1979 book, Practical Ethics, which unabashedly advocates infanticide and euthanasia, and also decries “discrimination” based on species (a bizarre notion Singer labels “speciesism”), has become a standard text in many college philosophy departments. Singer is so mainstream that he even wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica. Most disturbingly, in 1999, he became a permanent member of the Princeton University faculty, where he is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, a prestigious, tenured academic chair at the university’s Center for Human Values.
The person/nonperson moral distinction is generally accepted throughout bioethics and increasingly applied to animals, as Singer has advocated. Writing in the influential Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, British academic John Harris, the Sir David Alliance Professor of Bioethics and Director of the Institute of Medicine, Law, and Bioethics at the University of Manchester, England, defines a person as “a creature capable of valuing its own existence,” which he opines could include people, animals, extraterrestrials, and machines but does not include some humans, including infants “during the neonatal period.” To Harris, only the lives of persons are morally important. It is not wrong to kill nonpersons or fail to save their lives:
[T]o kill or to fail to sustain the life of a person is to deprive that individual of something that they value. On the other hand, to kill or to fail to sustain the life of a nonperson, in that it cannot deprive that individual of anything that he, she, or it could conceivably value, does that individual no harm. It takes from such individuals nothing that they would prefer not to have taken from them. . . . Nonpersons and potential persons cannot be wronged in this way [killing them against their will] because death would not deprive them of anything they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.55
Similarly, Georgetown University’s Tom L. Beauchamp, co-author of The Principles of Bioethics, similarly asserts in the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal that personhood and nonpersonhood designations may soon inform us whether we can use people as objects of exploitation in the ways that are presently restricted to our treatment of animals: “Because many humans lack properties of personhood or are less than full persons, they are thereby rendered equal or inferior in moral standing to some nonhumans. If this conclusion is defensible”—and Beauchamp clearly thinks it is—“we will need to rethink our traditional view that these unlucky humans cannot be treated in the same ways we treat relevantly similar nonhumans. For example, they might be aggressively used as human research subjects and sources of organs.”56
Making instrumental use of humans denigrated as having lesser value based on their capacities is definitely on the bioethics table. In 2010, British bioethicist Alasdair Cochrane eloquently identified the stakes in the debate over whether “intrinsic dignity” is an inherent human characteristic: “Under this conception, the possession of dignity by humans signifies that they have an inherent moral worth. In other words, because human beings possess dignity we cannot do what we like to them, but instead have direct moral obligations toward them. Indeed, this understanding of dignity is also usually considered to serve as the grounding of human rights. As Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’”57 He also stated: “If all individual human beings possess dignity, then they should not be viewed simply as resources that we can treat however we please. To take an example, it may be that we could achieve rapid and significant progress in medical science if we were to conduct wide-ranging experiments on groups of human beings. However, because human beings have dignity, so it is argued, this means that they possess a particular quality that grounds certain obligations and rights.”58
Despite understanding the stakes, Cochrane took the familiar bioethics line, calling for an “undignified bioethics” that views humanhood per se as morally irrelevant and arguing that the ways we treat our fellow humans should depend on each individual’s perceived “moral status”—such as personhood. “Simply stipulating that all and only human beings possess this inherent moral worth because they have dignity is arbitrary and unhelpful,” he wrote.59 Hardly arbitrary, given the stakes and the deep traditions behind this view. Unhelpful, perhaps—it impedes using vulnerable humans as lab rats, prevents raising fetuses for harvest, and argues against other utilitarian horrors—real and proposed—that are the subject of this book.
Not all bioethicists are as candid as Fletcher, Singer, Harris, Beauchamp, and Cochrane. The late Ronald Dworkin, an influential law professor and author whose effect on the Montana Supreme Court I mentioned earlier, argued in his book Life’s Dominion that killing the weak and helpless can actually be a method of upholding the inherent value of human life.60 Dworkin claimed that the argument between those who support abortion or euthanasia and those who oppose these practices isn’t even an argument about whether the sanctity of life is a sound principle. Everyone agrees that it is, he claims: “We disagree so deeply because we all take so seriously a value that unites us as human beings—the sanctity or inviolability of every stage of every human life. Our sharp divisions signal the complexity of the value and markedly different ways that different cultures, different groups, and different people, equally committed to it, interpret its meaning.”61
Yet, in Dworkin’s hands, the meaning of the “sanctity of life” is left to each person to determine individually. Thus, Dworkin says, having an abortion is not denying life’s sanctity to the human fetus but upholding life’s sanctity for the woman who doesn’t want a baby. “It may be more frustrating to life’s miracle when an adult’s ambitions, talents, training and expectations are wasted because of an unforeseen or unwanted pregnancy than when a fetus dies before any significant investment of that kind has been made.”62 Regardless of where one stands in the great pro-life/pro-choice cultural divide, to assert that having an abortion is somehow to embrace “the inviolability of every stage of every human life,” as Dworkin does, is simply ludicrous.
Dworkin similarly asserts that euthanasia isn’t actually a rejection of the sanctity of life but an embracing of it: “People who want an early, peaceful death for themselves are not rejecting or denigrating the sanctity of life. On the contrary, they believe that a quicker death shows more respect for life than a protracted one.” Active killing of people promoted, without a hint of irony, as an embrace of life’s sanctity is to suck all meaning from language. For Dworkin, the “sanctity of life” is not a principle but a mere contingency, defined essentially by where a person stands in his or her life at any given moment. Such a porous concept is incapable of protecting the weak and vulnerable from medical discrimination or killing, and that—as with the distinction between human beings based on personhood criteria—is exactly the point.
Dworkin repeatedly confused feelings with morality, arguing that since the deaths of some people cause more grief and sense of tragedy than do the deaths of other people, it is somehow justifiable to view the inviolability of individual human lives in relative terms: “Most people’s sense of that [death-caused] tragedy, if it were rendered as a graph relating the degree of tragedy to the age at which death occurs, would slope upward from birth to some point in late childhood or early adolescence, then follow a flat line until at least very early middle age, and then slope down again toward extreme old age. . . . [Thus] The death of an adolescent girl is worse than the death of an infant girl because the adolescent’s death frustrates the investments she and others have made in her life.”63
Determining the value of life with such an emotional yardstick is a quixotic enterprise. One could just as easily argue that the newborn’s life is more valuable because it is all potential—a blank slate—while the adolescent has already acquired a character and experiences that limit her range. Such opinions are at best an underwriter’s version of morality and not worth the time it takes to make them.
EUTHANIZING HIPPOCRATES
“To
