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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David
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Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
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Philosophy Bites is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
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the philosopher Peter Singer has controversial views about ending human lives. As a utilitarian, his main focus is on capacities for consciousness and for feeling pain. Here he discusses the ethics of abortion, voluntary euthanasia, and even of controlled infanticide in highly selective cases. Not surprisingly, his views have come under attack from those who think he goes too far. Some listeners may find parts of this interview disturbing.
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Peter Singer, welcome to Philosophy Bites.
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Thank you, David. I'm delighted to be with you.
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Today we're going to be discussing ending innocent lives. What is an innocent life? What do you mean by innocent?
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C
Oh, well, I'm using that expression, really just to say that I'm not planning to talk about issues like capital punishment, and I'm not planning to talk about killing in war, though of course, many of the people who are killed in war are innocents. But I'm focusing rather on those issues where we're talking about fetuses, babies, people who are terminally ill and want to die, or people who want to die although they're not terminally ill. So that's why I put innocent in there as the topic I want to talk about.
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Okay, so we'll get to some of those examples in a moment. This might sound like a stupid question, but if somebody takes a life, an ordinary life, kills a person, for example, we'd all condemn that person for doing that. But how do we understand the wrong of taking a life? What's wrong with taking an ordinary life?
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C
There are many ways of understanding that. Of course, the simplest and perhaps the one that I place most obvious weight on is you prevent that person living the rest of their life, however long they would have lived, and they would have had positive experiences, and you've prevented them having those positive experiences. Plus, we are social mammals. We often have families, loved ones, close friends. So you cause grief and loss to them. And thirdly, you also cause fear in others who want to go on living and fear that they may be killed. And obviously that will depend on the circumstances of the killing. But that's one of the reasons, I think, why we're sort of fixated on reading about murders that are committed in our community because we are trying to gauge the danger and. And if we think the danger is high, we might restrict our movements. We might not go to certain places at night, for example, or not go to certain places at all. And we just generally don't feel so secure in our lives. As we would if those people were not killed.
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So obviously if I was killed, I hope my friends and family would be upset. But when it comes to my moral status, is it my consciousness that confers that status?
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C
Well, I think moral status at its most basic level is just the fact that you're conscious and can experience pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, and that's enough to give you moral status. But the fact that you can plan forward, that I think it was James, Rachel said you have a biographical life rather than just a biological life does, I think, mean that there is something extra in the wrongness of ending your life. And it perhaps relates to the, again, things that I was saying about your desire to feel secure, that you can plan your life.
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So let's get to some of your examples. Abortion is an obvious one. Now, some people might say that life begins at conception. Killing a fetus is equivalent to murder. Religious believers in particular might make that claim. So how would you respond to that?
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I think it's true that life begins at conception or a human life begins at conception. I don't think we should challenge that claim. I think we're on weak ground if we do. There are certain things that change in that life after conception, and they're very important things. And I just mentioned consciousness, for example, capacity to feel pain or pleasure. That doesn't happen at conception. There is no developed nervous system. There's no brain. That happens quite late in pregnancy. So that might be one relevant thing. And of course, what I just talked about about living your life biographically, making plans for the future, worrying about whether you'll be able to carry out those plans, that doesn't happen until much later. So there are important differences. But to argue that life doesn't begin until sometime like birth seems to me to be just not a plausible ground to take your stance on if you're trying to defend abortion.
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So religious believers think that it's the fact that it's life that confers moral status upon it. The other factors you mentioned, the ability to feel pain, the ability to make plans for the future, and so on, those are irrelevant. Do you accept that your arguments are not going to convince a religious believer?
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C
Well, I accept that what I've said so far is not going to convince a religious believer. But let's look at things that religious believers. Of course, there's a variety of religious believers, and we're making a huge generalization. Let's say we're thinking specifically of Roman Catholic teachings about life, because that at least in Western societies or societies where There's a large number of Roman Catholics is probably the center of the opposition to abortion. They say that life begins at conception, and as I said, I can agree with that. Then they make the further claim that it's always wrong to take an innocent human life. Yet they often act in ways that effectively condone the ending of innocent human life. For example, they have the view that suppose a baby is born very prematurely, and suppose also that they've had a massive brain hemorrhage, so that you can see that much of the brain has been destroyed, and they will have a very limited life. It's very unlikely that they'll be able to look after themselves, to become independent. Possibly even though they'll never be able to feed themselves, they won't recognize their parents and be able to smile at them. Well, it's Roman Catholic doctrine that you don't have to put them on a respirator. That that's. Sometimes the term extraordinary is used more often now, a disproportionate means of life support, and that you can allow that child to die. And I've been in Roman Catholic hospitals and hospitals where there was a Roman Catholic chaplain canceling Roman Catholic parents, saying there is no obligation to keep your child alive. If you don't put the child on a respirator because this child is so premature, they won't be able to breathe. They may hand the child back to the parents, who may hold the child while the child gasps for breath, sometimes for some hours, and then the child dies. So they're not really saying that you ought to preserve a human life, even if you can. They often say something like, every human life is equally precious or every human life has the same value, but they don't actually act in accordance with that. So once they recognize that, then I think we start to say why. And clearly, in the case that I described, it is because of the very limited quality of life that the child will have. That they think that it's okay not to put the child on the respirator.
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But that's obviously an atypical case. The Church might respond that in normal circumstances, when the foetus is developing normally, it would be wrong to take the life of the foetus.
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Yes. No, they're a bit reluctant to actually say that because that would kind of imply that if you know through prenatal diagnosis that your child has got an abnormality that is not going to be compatible with the typical life, that then it's all right to terminate the pregnancy and they generally don't want to say that they rather want to say you have to go through the pregnancy, but then maybe if the child needs a respirator, let's say, to live, then you don't have to put the child on the respirator. That really doesn't make much sense to me. If you know in advance that the child's condition is going to be so bad that you'll be able to end their life by withholding medical treatment.
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And is it your position that the foetus has no moral claims, or is it that the foetus's claims can be overridden by the preferences of others?
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It's my position that the early fetus, the embryo and the early fetus, at the time when they have no capacity for consciousness, when their nervous system and their brain are not sufficiently developed to make it plausible that they can feel pain, has no moral status. There's nothing really to be overridden then any more than that there's something to be overridden. If parents were to say, yes, we could have a child, we could give that child a good start in life, the child would probably be healthy, would grow up in a comfortable situation, but let's not do it. Let's enjoy our own lives without the trouble of bringing up children. Now, there's an argument against that. This gets into these population issues that Derek Parfit famously talked about. You know, it would be good if there were more people living happy lives. So there is an argument against it. I accept that. And similarly, there would be an argument against terminating the pregnancy of a normal, healthy fetus for no pressing reason. But actually, the Church doesn't want to equate those arguments at all. And most people actually who think about abortion won't equate those arguments. They will say there's absolutely nothing wrong with a healthy, fertile couple with adequate means of support deciding not to have children. That's perfectly fine. And in my view, if the same couple actually get pregnant and then decide before the fetus is capable of feeling pain that they don't want to have the pregnancy anymore, that's really identical because there's no being who's harmed or is conscious by that decision. That's why I don't think it really matters that there is a living human being. Yes, there is. But there isn't a being who is harmed by the abortion equally. There isn't a being that's harmed by the decision not to conceive.
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So obviously there's no strict cutoff point. But the fetus is developing, and at seven or eight months Its nervous system is developing, its capacity for pain is developing at that stage. Do you believe that it has a moral status but the foetus preferences can be overridden?
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Well, I don't know that it had. Yeah, it has preferences not to feel pain. I think at that stage the fetus is capable of feeling pain, in a sense, you could say prefers not to feel pain or has anyway unpleasant conscious experiences which are a bad thing. So there is something to be overridden at that point. But how much is difficult to say. And it may depend on how the termination of pregnancy is carried out. Is the foetus going lot of pain or is there a way of carrying it out where the foetus doesn't feel significant pain or feels it only very fleetingly? Those things also would make a difference in my view at that stage.
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Let's turn to voluntary euthanasia. Obviously a very different case, because here there's somebody who wants to die and asks for assistance. Under what circumstances do you think that assistance should be offered?
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Yes, there's a couple of things to think about here. The clearest case and the one that has most commonly been legislated for now, and I should say this is an area in which significant progress has been made in my own active lifetime working on the issue. Because when I started writing about this in the 1970s and 1980, there was no country that had legal voluntary euthanasia or voluntary assisted dying. Now there are many. Most of them, as I was saying, require that the person asking for this have either a terminal or an incurable condition, an incurable condition that they find unbearable. And most of them, in fact, require terminal illness, which is then sometimes defined as the patient is expected to die within six months or sometimes within 12 months. A few of them, I think, like the Benelux countries, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, allow incurable illness. I think I would certainly allow all of those cases where somebody is terminally ill, where they're competent, where they've been advised by doctors on their prospects, where they've had time to reflect and think about this issue. If they decide that they don't want to go on living to the end of the terminal illness, or if they decide that the incurable illness is so severe that they would rather not live further with it. I think we ought to respect that decision. The more difficult decisions are, I think, the ones of people who are not terminally ill but are simply tired of living. And that's something that is being discussed again in the Netherlands and Belgium. And sometimes voluntary euthanasia is provided or Alternatively, if people have the means, they can go to Switzerland, where it's not a crime to assist somebody commit suicide unless you do it for selfish reasons like monetary gain. And I don't oppose that, really. I think, again, it's good to make sure that there's been time for reflection that they've thought about this. They have reasonable grounds. I don't want the lovesick teenager whose girlfriend or boyfriend has just left them and they feel like life is not going to be worth living without the person they love. I don't want them to be assisted because I think we all know that they're likely to get over that and be glad that they continue to live.
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Most people who object to voluntary euthanasia will do so because they think the consequences of allowing it will be very bad. It might reduce spending on palliative care. It might change the whole nature of the medical profession or health system, which focuses on saving life. There might be a slippery slope, and so voluntary euthanasia becomes more socially acceptable in ways that we think are currently undesirable. Do you accept that there is an empirical debate to be had about this?
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C
Well, you can certainly have an empirical debate. And as I said, when I started writing about this topic and there was no country that had legalized voluntary euthanasia or assisted dying, then there was a real debate that you could have as to what the consequences would be. There was a line quoted by somebody who had studied the Holocaust or something like that who suggested that once you start legalizing this, once you start allowing people to take innocent lives, we end up with the Holocaust. But we've now had something close to 40 years of openly practiced voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, although it wasn't actually fully legalized until, I think, 2000. But as a result of some court decisions, doctors could openly practice it if they complied with guidelines that the Royal Dutch Medical association had laid down. So we've had 40 years of it, and there is no sign that the Netherlands is sliding down a slope towards the Holocaust or towards anything of that sort of. There have been debates, as I say, about the limits of voluntary euthanasia and whether, say, very elderly people who are just tired of life but otherwise not ill should be able to have it. But nothing that really ought to cause the kind of alarm that we're doing something really dangerous. And that's true everywhere. Right. You say you could go to the United States and look at Oregon, which legalized voluntary assisted dying in 1997. So we've had almost 30 years of that there's really no evidence that Oregon has started killing people who didn't want to be killed. And it's in so many countries now, because they have observed this, that I think that debate should be over. I agree it's an empirical question, but I don't think there's much evidence in favor of those who claim that it's a dangerous practice.
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The numbers taking advantage of voluntary euthanasia laws in the countries you mentioned has been increasing, though. I mean, I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, but the numbers do seem to be going up.
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Yes, but as you say, I don't see that that's a bad thing. After all, we're all going to die. Many past generations, if people think about their parents, for example, how they died, many of them died in circumstances that we would not want to die. And so more people are now asking for assistance in dying. But the numbers are not very large anywhere really. It's still a small minority of all deaths. And I don't see that it's damaged medical practice or the doctor patient relationships. I think, in fact it's almost the opposite, that this is the last way in which doctors can help you. And when they do so compassionately, I think the family appreciate it. You know, I've seen this with my wife's brother who had voluntary assistant dying here in Melbourne a few years ago. And the family was around the hospital made a room available for them. The family said their farewells. He was greatly relieved for some days beforehand that he was going to be able to have this because he didn't want the cancer to go to its last resort. And they also could see no point in him continuing to suffer beyond that point. So they were relieved that they didn't have to watch him suffer.
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That's voluntary euthanasia. But you've got into trouble for suggesting that euthanasia might be acceptable sometimes for those who for various reasons can't give consent. What kind of cases do you have in mind?
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Well, the clearest cases are those of infants with conditions that are incompatible with what we might judge. And of course it's the parents judgment in the case of infants that is absolutely critical. Are not compatible with a life that's worth living. Sometimes they're not compatible with a long life. You know, sometimes might be a child who has Tay Sachs disease, which is likely to lead to death by the age of 3 or 4 or 5 at the moment and is quite distressing. It might be a painful condition. There's a condition called epidermolysis bullosa, in which the baby's skin keeps breaking so they're bleeding. And if you try to dress the wounds, then the skin breaks under the dressings. There's various forms it can take, but in the extreme form, it's a very painful condition. So I think there are those sorts of circumstances where parents are right to say, we would like you to give the baby a humane death rather than continue to live. And let me go back to what I was saying before about the premature infants, who, even, according to Roman Catholic doctrine, don't have to be put on the respirator. There's a New York Times opinion piece by the philosopher Gary Comstock, who had a child who was not expected to live very long and was given the child to hold while the child essentially gasped for breath and then died after some hours. And he wrote in the column that he should not have allowed his child to die in that way. He should have done something that would kill the child more quickly.
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Suppose it was a life that might have been going to be short, but was not going to be a life full of pain, but nonetheless would be an enormous burden on others.
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Well, I think that would be up to the parents, if they felt, for example, perhaps they had already had a family, that the existence of their child would be a great burden on them and they would not be able to give sufficient loving care and attention to their children. And given that this life was going to be a short one, that the child was not going to grow up to have the sorts of experiences that we might really value in human lives, I think that would be a decision that I would allow the parents to make if they so chose.
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So I think the vast majority of people would think that crosses a moral line. Do you think I'm right about that intuition about most people's intuition?
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C
I don't really know. I think if the case were described to them well, and they saw the difficulties, the burden that the short life of this child was imposing on the family, they might put themselves in that situation and they would think they would rather themselves be able to take the best possible care for their existing children rather than for this one. I honestly just don't know the answer. But I think the more you told people about the situation, you more got them to understand what the problems were, the more likely they would be to come around to my view, even if their initial intuition was something quite different.
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Presumably we're talking about a tiny, tiny, tiny number of babies, and you face demonstrations and protests when you've talked about this. And I wonder whether, just purely on consequentialist terms, it's worth getting into this argument because it might undermine all the arguments you're making in other areas.
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C
Yes, I think that's a valid consideration for me personally to think about, because I think the other areas that I work in, like trying to help people in extreme poverty and trying to reduce the suffering of billions of animals in factory farms, I think they're much more important than the treatment of this tiny number of infants that we're discussing. If I were convinced that it was in some way going to undermine the effectiveness and the reach of the work that I'm doing in those areas, then that would be a reason for me not to talk about this particular issue. And I think, by the way, it's true that in recent years I've spent much more time talking about global poverty and the treatment of animals and to some extent voluntary euthanasia than I've spent talking about non voluntary euthanasia, which we're talking about now. Perhaps partly because of that argument, but also just because I think these other issues are more important because they affect many more sentient beings.
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A
But you don't regret talking about these issues?
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C
Well, in a way it's too late for regret. There's not much point in regret. I don't know, I think as a philosopher, I guess I've got some obligation to follow arguments to their conclusions. And I take a certain position, as I just described, on abortion, I take a certain position on voluntary euthanasia. I take a certain position on rejecting the idea that there is a sharp difference between the wrongness of killing a human being and the wrongness of killing an animal, simply because the human is a member of the species homo sapien, a member of our species, and the animal is not. So an implication from that is that if we have humans who do not have clearly superior cognitive capacities or will not have superior cognitive capacities to non human animals, we shouldn't think that the killing of one is a very severe moral wrong and the killing of another is completely trivial. I have to have a coherent set of views across these issues. And I think that means that I just would be on thin ground if I were to say, even though a human might have severe and irreparable intellectual disability, that they would never surpass the cognitive capacity of a cow or a pig, but nevertheless it's much worse to kill them. I don't think I would have a career in position to defend at that point.
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Peter Singer, thank you very much indeed.
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Thank you. You're very welcome.
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