Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton University, takes the pro-choice view to such an extreme that he even advocates infanticide under certain circumstances. Or does he? Recently he took part in a TV debate in his native Australia. During the debate Prof. Singer (PS) was challenged by a female audience member (AM) on his support for infanticide (the audience member in question very clearly had a physical disability – over the years he has attracted strong opposition from disability rights campaigners). The exchange, which can be found here, is hugely revealing. Here is the text:
(AM) “This is a question for Peter Singer. You advocate infanticide, don’t you? The killing of …”
(PS) “That’s not correct”
(AM) “When did you change your views?”
(PS) “I haven’t changed my mind. What I’ve advocated always is for parents to have the choice of making decisions about their severely disabled infants … what I’m talking about is decisions that are being made all the time in neo-natal intensive care units; parents do get a say if it’s a question of withdrawing treatment, withdrawing life-support from a severely disabled infant. That happens all the time. But if it so happens that the child can breathe on its own then that decision is taken away from the parents.”
If Prof. Singer’s response is taken at face value, then he has indeed changed his mind. In one of his most famous books, Practical Ethics, Singer says the following about infanticide,
“We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant … 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 greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of the 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.”
In this context Singer offered a proposal for a post-birth assessment period of a week or perhaps a month (he isn’t sure which), during which parents, in consultation with their physician, may legally kill their disabled offspring if doing so would increase the total happiness of all interested parties. Even after the publication of Practical Ethics Singer still held tight to his view that newborn children aren’t persons, “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”
So what does he now believe? Does he believe what he wrote in Practical Ethics or the relatively more moderate view he appeared to espouse on that TV show? And if he has moderated his view, why is that?
