Controversial Ideas About Life and Death | Big Think

Controversial Ideas About Life and Death

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The philosopher discusses his controversial ideas about handicapped children.

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Peter Singer:

Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University in the University Center for Human Values and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. He is widely considered to be one of the world’s most influential living philosophers.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What do you believe about the margins of life and death?

Peter Singer: Let me start with why I got interested in writing about it, I was directing a bioethics center in Australia and we were contacted by doctors who had ethical dilemmas, they were working in neonatal intensive care units, intensive care units for very small children and they have conditions, for example, Spina Bifida in which in their view, it was not really a good thing for these babies to survive. The babies, if they did survive would need multiple operations, would be severely disabled in various ways. And often the parents also thought, given the description of the condition, it was not going to be a good thing for the baby to survive.

So these babies were essentially being not treated. And the result of being not treated was that almost all of them died before they were 6 months old. Some of them died in the first week or 2, some of them in the first month or 2 and other gradually throughout that first 6 months.

And this was a very draining experience for the parents, the doctors, the nurses, you had this small babies in the hospital, but not being treated in order to make them live, but nevertheless, living for quite a long time.

And the doctor said, “Are we doing the right thing here? Is this justifiable?” S we, my colleague, Helga Kuhse and I, looked at it and we decided that yes, it’s a reasonable decision for the parents and doctors to make that it was better that infants with this condition should not live, basically the more severe variance of this condition should not live. But we couldn’t defend the idea that the right thing to do then was to let them die, this seems slow and painful and as I said, terribly emotionally draining on their parents and others.

So, we said, “Look, the difficult decision is whether you want this infant to live or not. That should be a decision for the parents and doctors to make on the basis of the fullest possible information about what the condition is. But once you’ve made that decision, it should be permissible to make sure that baby dies swiftly and humanely. If that’s your decision, if your decision is that it’s better that the child should not live. It should be possible to ensure that the child dies swiftly and humanely.”

And so that’s what we proposed.

Now, that’s been picked up by a variety of opponents, both pro-life movement people and people in the militant disability movement, which incidentally didn’t really existed the time we first wrote about this issue. And they have taken us the stalking-horse, the boogeyman, if you like, because we’re up front in saying that we think this is how we should treat these infants.

I can understand to some extent why the pro-life movement takes us that way, but I think the disability movement ought to be just as upset about letting children die because they have a disability, and since that’s a very common practice in many hospitals, I’m not so sure why they’ve gone after us in particular rather than after the doctors who were actually doing it. Because I really don’t see the difference between letting the children the die, and making sure that their death comes swiftly and humanely.

Question: Are the boundaries between life and death flexible?

Peter Singer: So I think that we actually should have a pretty strictly biological view of the difference between life and death. In that sense, I’m actually an opponent of the definition of death in terms of brain death. I don’t think people whose brains have ceased to function, dead. Not dead as organisms anyway.

If their hearts are continuing to beat, their flesh is soft and you know, the blood is circulating, their fingernails are growing and in the case of women who are pregnant maybe either even succeeding in gestating a fetus. I wouldn’t call that dead.

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