When Sarah tossed her black feather boa to the floor and her tiara into the crowd, she was expressing a new version of herself. It must have felt good to dance so freely, after so many years of being constrained by the expectations of others.
People with intellectual disabilities rarely get to tell the rest of us how they see themselves. When they do speak up, parents, teachers, and caregivers often ignore what they say: we’ve already decided who they are, and what’s best for them.
Peter Singer, a bioethicist, believes it would be best if parents of “defective infants” were able to euthanize them in the first weeks of life. Doubting the accuracy of the quote, I looked at his website, where he conceded that he had written, “Killing a defective infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Sometimes it is not wrong at all.” He went on to say that the quote could be misleading if read without the understanding of what he meant by “person.”52 Apparently, Singer had found a way to define “person” in such a way that it’s okay to kill a “defective” one.
After reading the history of the treatment of people with disabilities, I could understand why Hitler would try to kill everyone who was deaf or blind and those with schizophrenia, Huntington’s chorea, or an intellectual disability; Hitler was nuts. His neck veins bulged as he screamed into the microphone and jabbed his fingers into the air.
But what about Singer? He didn’t seem insane. On the contrary, some of his peers called him the most widely read and influential of modern philosophers.53 But how likely is it that his ideas of “life unworthy of living” would really take hold again in popular culture, as they did in the United States and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s?
In 2005, Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In that article, Arthur Caplan, PhD, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania, said, “It is easy to demonize Singer, 58, since his theory points toward conclusions that some find morally repugnant—for example, that euthanasia might be the appropriate response to the intractable suffering of an infant born with a terrible genetic malady. Those who scorn his views can rarely produce an argument about why he is wrong—they simply don’t like his conclusions. But ethics is all about arguments, not moral pronouncements.”54
I knew that I would never win a philosophical debate with Singer: it’s his full-time job, and he’s good at it. But even if I knew I’d lose an argument with him, I thought that I should at least read his books: he was talking about killing people like Sarah.
The title of Practical Ethics is printed in chunky, bold italics. A small paperback, it would be a tight squeeze in the back pocket of a pair of jeans, but could easily get lost in the bottom of a knapsack. Printed by a university press, the book is used in philosophy classes and ethics seminars.
I picked up a copy from a used bookstore. On the facing page of the inside cover, a student had written her name with ballpoint pen in careful, left-slanted cursive. Underneath she had written “Philosophy 100.” Sitting at the kitchen table, I glanced through the marginal notes she had made in her dutiful script, and then looked at the brown and orange cover. I thumbed through the book again, and set it down.
I picked it up, and glanced over the table of contents. What if I failed to frame an adequate argument? Worse still, what if I agreed with some of the things he said?
Singer’s writing was clear and engaging, and the tone conversational. In the first lines, he said that he used the terms “ethics” and “morality” interchangeably. He went on to say that morality was not a “system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people having fun.” Further, ethics was not an “ideal system, which is all very noble in theory, but no good in practice. The reverse of this is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment that is of no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect as well, for the whole point of ethical judgment is to guide practice.”55 Singer wasn’t involved in a theoretical exercise: if I understood him correctly, he wasn’t puritanical, he had no objection to having fun, and he really wanted to kill disabled children.
I read a few chapters, and then put the book down. I knew he was wrong, but didn’t think I’d be able to prove it. I wished I could do what Samuel Johnson did when confronted with a logical argument that was wrong but irrefutable. As Boswell reported in his Life of Samuel Johnson:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—“I refute it thus.” 56
What rock could I kick to prove Singer wrong? Could I place Sarah in front of him, as proof that her life was, in fact, worth living? The thought of his cold stare pausing on the soft contours of Sarah’s face made my stomach queasy. But what if we took a jury of Sarah’s peers with us, to even things up? Let them discuss if his life was worth living. If he should be allowed to live. The only problem with this strategy is that Sarah’s housemates would laugh and say, “Of course he should be allowed to live.” Then they’d invite him back to the group home for dinner.
I picked the book up again, and settled into the job. It was slow work. I made note cards, hoping to find a fault in his logic. At the end of the day, I flipped through the fragments of thoughts:
Snails and newborns have no desires for the future.
Killing robs autonomy.
Some nonhuman animals are persons.
Some members of other species are persons: some members of our own species are not.
We can rank value of different lives.
Killing a chimp is worse than killing a defective person.
I found his conclusions repugnant, but, as Dr. Caplan had predicted, I could find no fault in his logic. I paged back though the book looking for a chink: Singer hammered at “defective persons” and the “severely retarded” and the “mentally defective” over and over, page after page.
His logic was as hard and implacable as the cast-iron linkage of railroad cars. Boxcar by boxcar, he built his argument: if a recently fused sperm and egg are not a “human,” and if a two-day-old blob of cells is not “human,” why is a fetus at twenty weeks a “human,” but not at nineteen weeks? It’s arbitrary, really, when we can or cannot get an abortion. And if it’s okay to get an abortion at twenty weeks, why not at thirty, or forty? And if okay at forty weeks, why not in the first few days, or weeks, of life?
I could not argue with the logic. And I could not deny that Sally and I would have aborted a twelve-week fetus with a genetic disease. I was stuck.
Singer did not shy away from taking every argument to its radical, unsettling conclusion: “Some members of other species are persons: some members of our species are not . . . So it seems that killing, say, a chimpanzee is worse than killing a gravely defective human who is not a person.” He also wrote, “If defective newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth, it would allow us to choose on the basis of a far greater knowledge of the infant’s condition than is possible before birth.”
In spite of myself, I felt a grudging respect for the rigor of his logic and for his intellectual courage. But on further reflection, his intellectual courage seemed nothing more than a pose, an illusion: if he followed the argument all the way to the end, he would tell us what he would propose after killing a “gravely defective human who is not a person.” Would he suggest a funeral service with a casket, cemetery, and gravestone, or would it be a backyard affair with a cardboard box?
At the Hartheim Euthanasia Center in Alkoven, Austria, between 1940 and 1941, the National Socialist Party euthanized 18,269 persons with intellectual disabilities. The staff at the center dealt with the bodies in a straightforward manner: workers walked into the gas chamber, untangled the naked bodies, loaded them into an oven, and then carted the ashes and bits of bone to the Danube River and shoveled them in. The burning of bodies was done during the day. The dumping of ashes was done at night. When they fired up the furnaces, women in the town would rush out and take down any laundry they had out on the line to dry, to keep the ashes that floated down from the black and oily smoke from staining their clothes.57
Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, Singer built the justification for killing “defective humans” and the “mentally retarded” and the “hopelessly retarded.” His logic was blunt and relentless.
What if Singer met an adult who, as an infant, would have met his criteria for infanticide? And what if the person he would have deemed “defective” had grown up and gone to law school? Would Singer say, “Gosh. Maybe I was wrong.”?
Don’t bet on it. As Harriet McBryde Johnson, a disability rights attorney, wrote in the New York Times Magazine, Singer wasn’t swayed:
He insists he doesn’t want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can’t help being dazzled by his verbal facility.58
I remembered a line in the novel Get Shorty, by Elmore Leonard, in which Chili Palmer told Harry, another man with frizzy hair and a bald spot, “You’re trying to tell me how you fucked up without sounding stupid.” Or maybe Dr. Singer really could not see that he had been mistaken, even after his debate with such a vibrant and intelligent woman—a woman he would have killed as an infant.
It must be hard to admit you’ve said something stupid when you’ve become such a celebrity for being so smart.
In his book Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics, Singer discussed Down syndrome. “We cannot expect a child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science fiction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen movie, or to be a respectable athlete, basketball or tennis player.” He goes on to say, “Both for the sake of ‘our children,’ then, and for our own sake, we may not want a child to start on life’s uncertain voyage if the prospects are clouded.”
Woody Allen? This is a make-or-break point that Singer would choose between those who should be allowed to live and those who shouldn’t? My daughter Sarah does, in fact, love to talk about her favorite movies. She’s a bigger fan of Meryl Streep than Woody Allen, but then so am I.
I put Singer’s Practical Ethics down. Dr. Arthur Caplan was right: I could find no weakness in Singer’s argument, no Achilles heel. Then it occurred to me: the flaw wasn’t in what he had put into the book; it was what he had left out. Singer made no reference to the things that most of us associate with humanity. He made no mention of touch. Warmth. Understanding. Humility. No mention of the possibility of being wrong, or of forgiveness. There were no crooked smiles, no sideways glances. No humor. No music. There was no mention of being cherished by a sister or brother, lover, or friend. All of the relationships in Practical Ethics were between ideas, not people.
Sarah and I had no answer to the cold precision of Singer’s logic. It is not surprising; Singer is smarter than Sarah and me put together. And Sarah and I both would rather write a story than build an argument. Sarah doesn’t write as well as I do, but I don’t dance as well as she does.