Academia's "doctor death"

Human Life Review, Fall 1998 by Oderberg, David S

Writing about the French Revolution, Edmund Burke said: "On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings, and which is as void of solid wisdom as it is destitute of all taste and elegance, laws are to be supported only by their own terrors .... In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows."

This is a peculiarly apt way of describing the current state and trend of legislation throughout the world insofar as it touches upon the lives of innocent and vulnerable human beings. In the arena of public policy, many people of good will have for decades been fighting a wearying and depressing battle against the death culture. In the academy, however, the battle has been conspicuous by its absence.

Academics, it seems, have either given up the fight for life or were never convinced of the need for such a fight in the first place. And yet it is the academy which is, as always, the breeding ground of the very ideas which end up as the law of the land. Theories have consequences. Academics have a grave responsibility to uphold public morality and the common good; when they protest that their ideas have no power, they are guilty either of ignorance or false modesty. Which is why the recent appointment of Professor Peter Singer to a prestigious professorship at Princeton University is ground for serious concern.

Singer is currently a professor of philosophy at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, the city from which he hails. He is renowned throughout the philosophical world for being one of the founders of the modern discipline of "practical ethics," in which moral philosophy is applied to concrete contemporary problems such as abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, the environment, rich and poor, war, capital punishment, and so on. Of course, ethics has always been practical-how could it not be?-but what Singer did was to capitalize on the fact that ethics in the academy had for decades been obsessed with high-level theory, whether there really is right and wrong, whether "good" and "bad" are objective or mere reflections of personal opinion, and the like.

Whilst recognizing the importance of philosophizing about ethics, what Singer did was urge philosophers to get back to doing it. Let's bring moral philosophy back to earth, he said. Let's return to doing what ethicists have traditionally done, looking at the real world, the problems of society, and in doing so let us try to apply our conceptual tools for the betterment of mankind. Singer's first application of his method of practical ethics was in the field of animal welfare: his early book Animal Liberation, for which he is best known in the USA, was a best-seller, and put the cause of animals on the map, in particular the question of vegetarianism.

There can be no doubt that in seeking to bring moral philosophers back to doing moral philosophy, Singer performed a valuable service. He certainly brought ethics out of a rut. He spawned a whole new discipline, whose practitioners number in their hundreds and serve on newly-established "ethics committees," write position papers, publish furiously in journals, attend endless conferences, referee each other's typescripts, review each other's books. He helped to create an industry-the bioethics industry. Now, industries are not as such bad things. Even a bioethics industry could, in theory, be a good thing.

But the bioethics industry Singer helped spawn is anything but good, though some of its workers are. The vast majority of bioethicists pursue an anti-life agenda. The vast majority follow Singer's preferred ethical theory, utilitarianism. (His particular brand of utilitarianism will not be expounded here, but explained only where necessary. But note that utilitarianism is a "broad church" that accommodates all sorts of sometimes mutually contradictory theories.)

In other words, practical ethical decisions, even life-or-death ones, come down to a cost-benefit analysis of one kind or another. If the benefits outweigh the costs-if the utilitarian calculation "maximizes happiness," then the act in question is at least allowed, if not a positive duty. Unfortunately, many bioethicists seem not to have disengaged Singer's general project-applying ethics to practical problems-from his particular method-doing it the utilitarian way. The result is that, whatever the differences between anti-life theorists, they tend to draw the same conclusions as Singer: abortion is permissible, so is euthanasia, genetic engineering, embryo experimentation, foetal research, in vitro fertilization, and just about any practice that devalues life and treats the human being as an object, a lump of tissue, a cog in the production process-anything but as a human being.

Professor Singer is, then, an influential man. And a powerful one, who can make or break careers (and has), who can get books published and articles accepted in learned journals; who can get his disciples on the mass media with ease; who established the internationally known and pioneering Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University; whose supporters can be found at every level of policy-making in Australia and throughout the world; who has the ear of judges, lawyers, politicians, doctors and nurses.