Princeton bioethicist Peter Singer has put himself into the media spotlight again. This time, he’s gone to defend the idea that professional judgment and state interests can trump individual autonomy. The “case example” he uses in his latest op-ed is the highly publicized case of Sam Golubchuk, an elderly man whose family has been fighting in the Canadian courts to guarantee he gets appropriate medical treatment when he falls ill.
Writing in the Malta Independent, Singer shows (probably to the shock of many of his fans) how little Utilitarians like Singer actually value autonomy:
Normally, when patients are unable to make decisions about their treatment, the family’s wishes should be given great weight. But a family’s wishes should not override doctors’ ethical responsibilities to act in the best interests of their patients.
Golubchuk’s children argue that he interacts with them. But establishing their father’s awareness could be a double-edged sword, since it could also mean that keeping him alive is pointless torture, and it is in his best interest to be allowed to die peacefully.
The other important issue raised by Golubchuk’s case is how far a publicly-funded health care system, such as Canada’s, has to go to satisfy the family’s wishes. When a family seeks treatment that, in the professional judgment of the physicians, is not in the patient’s best interest, the answer should be: not far at all.
If Golubchuk’s children can convince the court that their father is not suffering, the court might reasonably order the hospital to grant them custody of their father. They can then decide for themselves, at their own expense, how much more treatment he should have. What the court should not do, is order the hospital to continue to care for Golubchuk against the better judgment of its health care professionals. Canada’s tax-payers are not required to support the religious beliefs held by their fellow-citizens.
This puts him in direct contradiction to his stance in an earlier case. However, his apparent aim in the documentary was to show a more varied and humane presentation of his views. Here is an excerpt from a transcription of the documentary “Singer: A Dangerous Mind.” The transcribed segment deals with David Glass, whose parents were convicted on assault charges as a result of having to physically fight medical personnel attempting to give their son drugs that would have killed him:
And what I thought was really wrong about the doctors’ refusal to support David, when he needed life support, was that they were putting themselves above David’s mother in being the judges of whether his life was worth continuing.
He reinforced the point later when he said:
I think for doctors to make those decisions independently of the wishes and views of parents will normally be the wrong thing to do.
Contrary to what both detractors and fans of Singer might think, it’s not all that unusual for Singer to say one thing in a given setting only to modify it or contradict it in another. Most people don’t keep track of the times he’ll concede points in a debate, only to “forget” that he conceded them when in front of another audience. Singer seems to rely on the fact that most people don’t keep track of his contradictions and inconsistencies.
This pattern became evident even as he first came to Princeton. And it came with his conflicting accounts of a situation he faced with his own mother. In 1999, Michael Specter wrote in the New Yorker that Peter Singer spent money to support his mother, who had advanced Alzheimer’s – and the apparent contradiction of him providing that care in the face of Singer’s views on personhood.
Singer’s comments, which became widely circulated in subsequent coverage of him, explained the contradiction this way:
Singer has spent his career trying to lay down rules for human behavior which are divorced from emotion and intuition. His is a world that makes no provision for private aides to look after addled, dying old women. Yet he can’t help himself. “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult,” he said quietly. “Perhaps it is more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it’s your mother.” (emphasis added)
This was a “humanizing” portrait of Singer – although sometimes used to brand him a hypocrite as well.
Whether or not Singer is a hypocrite, it’s clear that he unpacks certain statements, revelations and positions at times that certainly seem aimed to please the audience in front of him. How else to explain the December 2000 interview with Ronald Bailey in Reason Magazine that gave a very different account of why Peter Singer’s mother got the support she needed to live even with advanced dementia:
Rigorous adherence to a single principle has a way of hoisting one by one’s own petard. Singer’s mother suffers from severe Alzheimer’s disease, and so she no longer qualifies as a person by his own standards, yet he spends considerable sums on her care. This apparent contradiction of his principles has not gone unnoticed by the media. When I asked him about it during our interview at his Manhattan apartment in late July, he sighed and explained that he is not the only person who is involved in making decisions about his mother (he has a sister). He did say that if he were solely responsible, his mother might not be alive today. (emphasis added)
(Note: Singer’s sister is Joan Dwyer, a lawyer whose career has involved strident advocacy for people with significant disabilities, some of which she writes about in the Law Review article “Access to Justice for People with Severe Communication Impairment.”
The statements in the Bailey interview did not get circulated in the media – and the earlier story of it “being different when it’s your mother” still plays out in most people’s background knowledge of Singer.
But if you follow his articles and speaking gigs closely, it probably won’t be long until you’ll find your own examples of Singer blithely contradicting himself and hoping the audience has either the ignorance or the good manners not to notice. –Stephen Drake
Good catch, Steve. Perhaps it was a bit of both. On one hand his head wanted her dead. On the other his heart loved her and wanted to take care of her. And he could “blame” the sister.
The point is, of course, that regardless of what he did in his own life his ideas are pernicious, bigoted, and anti-disabled.
Wesley,
None of us can know which of the statements – or combinations of the statements – is true.
To me, what is most illuminating here is that Singer let the first statement stand and become common “background knowledge” for a long time. And it served him well – the statement was often used to either “soften” his persona in articles or to somehow “show” that his principles wouldn’t be readily adapted.
The audience he chose for the second quote is one that would be more or less welcoming of his second version – authors in Reason magazine tend to be very supportive of assisted suicide, euthanasia and infanticide.
To me, he comes across as someone who knows how to unpack his stories pretty strategically. –Stephen
“What the court should not do, is order the hospital to continue to care for Golubchuk against the better judgment of its health care professionals. Canada’s tax-payers are not required to support the religious beliefs held by their fellow-citizens.”
Peter Singer must have contempt for organized religions. What if Golubchuk’s family were atheists and still wanted their family member alive? Why does the “RELIGION” of bioethics trump all other religions?
How would he ever succeed without being able to accuse and blame the right-wing religious conspiracy for all of this pro-life nonsense?
Singer is also a supporter of socialized medicine and high taxes. Since when is Singer worried about Canada’s Tax-paying society and subsidized socialized medicine? That is laughable. And, it just feeds my fear of universal healthcare in the U.S. if bioethic’s folks like Singer will be making decisions about people’s lives.
Kathy MN
Kathy,
You are correct. Singer makes no secret of his contempt for religious views. He also often uses the religious beliefs of others as a “straw man” as he’s done here.
I know many disability activists who fall into the agnostic/atheist category who would be fighting the same kind of battle this family is if they were in similar circumstances. –Stephen
Peter Singer has contempt for all human life, yet he’s the one who started the Animal Rights movement? The man is a certifiable nutjob. However, the gullible public who flock to listen to him, buy his books, the media who fawn over him – they are all foolishly giving him and his ideas some sort of ghoulish “respectability.” Some people will swallow anything spouted off by anyone with a claim to being “intellectual” without considering the ramifications on society at large. Silly, silly people.
Suppose you knew your baby would come out with Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, would spend his life inflicting horrible pain on himself, in all likelihood biting off his own lips, chewing his finger tips, gouging himself in the eye; gout, likely kidney failure, mental deficiency, shortened life expectancy.
Is it not reasonable to at least consider the possibility that such a life is not worth living?
And this example is just the beginning, there are far more debilitated, handicapped people than those with Lesch-Nyhan. People who will never be able to form a word, or chew their own food.
I don’t understand our obsession with avoiding death.
I am very much in favour of your site at views on Singer, but you must be careful about reporting facts fairly. I checked your link about David Glass which did not say that doctors were going to give drugs that would kill him. No doctor who has worked in palliative care believes that morphine given in conventional doses to relieve distress kills their patients. There is a debate about whether or how morphine might appear to shorten life in terminal illness, but there is no evidence I have ever read which supports this conclusion. The pro-euthanasia lobby promote this myth as it suggests we are already killing out patients.
Your report suggests that the mother was fighting doctors who were about to kill her son with morphine. Where did you get that from?!
I recently read Singer’s book on Practical Ethics. It is hard to take a man to advocates alturism yet believes that his own mother should be put to death just because she has alzheimer’s? Yes, social efficiency/ welfare is important. I don’t think this means we should wipe out the entire “defective” population as it was elegantly put by Singer.