With Animal Liberation (1973), Peter Singer launched the animal rights movement. Twenty years later, a professor at Princeton and one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Singer continues to play the traditional intellectual in a flagrant, almost obtuse way. He does not miss an opportunity to unsettle our ‘self-evident’ truths and challenge our thought processes. In sum, his writings will not leave you indifferent and I highly recommend them.
On January 26 Singer wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times in favor of medical intervention to keep a severely mentally impaired 9-year old girl, Ashley, from physically developing into a woman. In her parents’ view, this is in Ashley’s best interest; as long as she remains small enough for them to carry her, she can participate in family life and will be more comfortable (avoiding the pain of period cramps, large breasts, puberty, etc.).
Here I wish to develop Singer’s arguments further. He identifies three arguments used by groups opposed to the intervention. The first claims that ‘it is not natural’ to conduct such an operation. A second claim, echoed by some disabled persons and their caretakers, is that such an intervention violates Ashley’s dignity.
While I will not go over the arguments used by Singer and an ethicist involved in the case to counter these arguments, I wish to highlight that both arguments remain surprisingly resilient among the public, even as a variety of ‘unnatural’ medical interventions to stop disease, pain and enhance physical and cognitive properties do not raise an eyebrow. The interesting questions are: how do certain processes or interventions come to be seen as natural and not others? Why are certain processes dignified but not others? Why is it natural to give a child stimulants to treat ADD? Why is growing old at age 9 dignified but not at age 40 or 50?
As reflections of values society finds acceptable, it is logical that the definitions of ‘natural’ and ‘dignified’ are challenged in debates that force us to question exactly what is acceptable in a specific case. As they are being used in the Ashley case, natural and dignified imply a view of humans as apart from the non-human world. This dichotomy is what Singer calls a ‘speciest’ world view or what Bruno Latour may call ‘hybridization’ in the context of actor-network theory. This view has been handed down to us since the enlightenment through modernity: reason and body are two different things, and reason is of a higher order, has authority over, and is unaffected by body. Today, an analogue of this reasoning is to see technology as completely dissociated from the human. However, as technology has become all pervasive, this dichotomy is breaking down and offers increasingly unsatisfactory answers to difficult ethical issues, as the Ashley or Terry Schiavo cases highlight.
In both cases, the most powerful argument has centered on the idea of ‘best interest’. Suffice it to say, in this article, that the ‘best interest’ argument seems to me little more than an effort to rationalize difficult moral questions. Instinctively, as a society we appeal to ideals of reasoned decision-making to decide what is the ‘best thing to do’: in the manner of judicial courts, secret ethical boards are given authority to weight medical evidence to reach an ethical decision. The break-downs of this process are well known: imperfect tribunals, fallible humans, fallible medical/scientific evidence. The challenges faced by this decision-making process are reminiscent of the distinction between 'easy' and 'hard cases' drawn by legal postivism.
I have no answers or solutions, just more questions. As policy students, how can we improve these types of decision-making bodies? How can we better accept our humanity, our ‘hybrid’ identities forged each time we use a device to behave in a way we otherwise would not behave? (how many are different chatting on gmail as opposed to in person?) How can we develop a better understanding of collective values in order to create better channels for discussing and resolving specific cases?
