LIFE - Peter Singer

Moral philosopher and bioethicist Peter Singer visited Latin today as the keynote speaker for LIFE, Latin's Initiative For Ethics.

Dr. Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics and director of the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University, began his talk on Rethinking Life and Death by introducing a non-controversial topic, brain death. Brain death occurs when the electrical activity in the brain stops permanently.

In the last 30 years, Singer said, every nation has amended its definition of death to include "brain death," not because of any medical breakthrough or scientific discovery, but as an ethical choice that offered a reasonable and practical solution to a problem.

There has been no public outcry about this change in definition, Singer noted, because it benefits all parties: hospitals who can free up beds, recipients of transplanted organs, families of victims who can start the grieving process, and, presumably, the patients themselves, who no longer have anything to lose.

But, Singer said, the result of this ethical choice is that a person on a ventilator who would have been considered alive 30 years ago, "is now considered a good candidate for having his chest cut open to take out a beating heart to give to a total stranger."

Once we allow that it is an ethical choice to consider this person dead, we are on our way to reconsidering the value of life, and what beings we might grant have a right to live. Singer offered that it might be the capacity for consciousness that would confer a right to live, but even that raises additional questions: What kind of consciousness? What else might we require?

"If we look openly to what we are doing, it would lead us to reflect on what we value," Singer opined.

Using values like the capacity for consciousness, being part of a network of loved ones, and the ability to conceive of and plan for the future, Singer helped students explore what duties we owe to non-human animals in terms of treatment and care, whether the deaths of thousands of humans in a tragedy can be compared to the slaughter of millions of animals each day, and what responsibilities we have to severely disabled infants.

It is this last topic--wherein Singer suggests that parents of severely disabled infants under the age of one month ought to have the right, in consultation with their physicians, to terminate their infants' lives--that brings Singer's views up against those of the advocacy group Not Dead Yet, based in Forest Park, Illinois.

LIFE - Stephen Drake

Stephen Drake, a spokesperson and research analyst for Not Dead Yet, shared the stage with Singer to offer his countervailing views on this topic. Drake was born with hydrocephaly and, by his own account, endured painful treatments for this condition. He took issue with the notion that his parents might have been given the option of choosing his death, urging instead that all people deserve human rights, regardless of their status as disabled or non-disabled.

Prior to the keynote address Singer met with LIFE students, parents, faculty, and other interested community members for a luncheon address on global ethics.

As the keynote talk for LIFE's year on bioethics, Singer introduced students to a rigorous way of discussing ethics, matters that might formerly have been thought to be a matter solely of personal opinion.

© 2008 The Latin School of Chicago

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