Thanks for your thoughtful comments. I agree that Singer’s underlying claim is that infants have no claim to a right to life in general, regardless of any particular putative traits they may display. My argument addresses his own chosen examples of infants with various conditions and ‘disabilities’; I do not substantively address the prior principle that infanticide as such is morally unobjectionable, because I consider it irrelevant to the specific argument at issue. Let’s stipulate that Singer’s basic premise enabling infanticide is ethically sound; its application in specific instances of ostensible disability would still raise the very same questions about eugenicist justifications for choosing which infants live and which die. It is those particular justifications which are my central concern in the article. Best,

Peter Staudenmaier

after having just read “Rethinking Life and Death” I was looking for some different views and found your article (at the new compass, but that doesn’t have comments). I think it is one of the better criticisms of Singer (he tends to draw a lot of shouting from people who have not even read him, I guess).
Also I appreciate your reply here and the reading-suggestions it contains which I will try to seek out.

But I think that one step might be missing from your critique. (Everything I write now should be prefixed by something like “I think it is true that”, because it is of course only my current opinion.)
You say:

“Why, then, does Singer argue that infants born with this condition can justly be killed? Because they are “abnormal” and do not have “good prospects” (Rethinking p. 214).”

The way I understood him he argues that any infant can justly be killed for any valid reason, because the newborn infant “is clearly not a person in the ethically relevant sense” (p.217). If one does not accept Singers argument, that the infant has no claim to a right to life in general, then of course killing it for the reasons you name is not justified. But if one does, then any parental preference (that has any merit in itself) would suffice to allow the infant to be killed. The severe (or not so severe!) disabilities are then merely the reason (or explanation) for the preference that the parents have and Singer uses them to show that the actual common practice, if not the theory, agrees with his claim that infants are not persons with a right to life.

To say that Singer “declares the ostensibly abnormal ones fair game at birth” seems to be like saying that he sometimes advocates the killing of female infants. He sure does, but the reason why the female infants may be killed is not that they are female, but because they are not persons, as it applies to all infants. Of course the parents then usually select against the “abnormal” ones, or, in China, against the girls.

So, while it is true that Singers ethic allows for eugenic considerations by establishing that the young infant has no right to life at all I think it should be noted that, in his view, that really applies to all infants. He would probably not object to killing a genetically “perfect” infant for the sole reason that its parents just don’t love it and don’t want it. I think this should be included in a discussion about Singers view on infanticide.

Maybe he explains that in more depth in his other books, which I have not read. And I might have not understood him completely because my view is one of philanthropic antinatalism which makes it hard to follow some of his arguments. For example I reject his “replacement”-theory, because the quality of life of the genetically “superior” replacement-child is also not good enough to justify creating it IMHO. So, much of what Singer says makes no sense for me personally.

Oh, it also seems worth noting that Singer himself doesn’t claim that his proposed ethic is flawless or finished, but rather that it is better and more coherent than the prevalent sanctity-of-life-ethic. It would be interesting, though maybe not logically necessary, to say, what alternatives one prefers when rejecting Singers ideas. The questions he raises, and that make him predict the “collapse of our traditional ethics”, are not answered simply by saying that Singers position “is morally bankrupt”, so to speak. Rejecting Singers answers just leaves his questions without an answer again.

Let me close by saying that I mean no disrespect by criticising your article and if it sounds like I do that is probably due to my imperfect mastery of the english language

All the best,
rob

I apologize for replying to your comment over a year later; I wasn’t aware that there were any responses to my article at the ISE website, and was only informed of them today. You asked an excellent question, and I think I may have only a mediocre answer to offer at the moment. Historically speaking, eugenics has traditionally justified itself both in terms of allegedly improving the human breed, and in terms of reallocating resources in the here-and-now; both sides of the equation were important to promoters of eugenics in earlier eras. It is certainly true that Singer does not base his infanticidal views on a doctrine of racial genetic improvement, but eugenics as such has never been a necessarily racial endeavor, though several of its more notorious versions have been explicitly racialized. In my view, it could be accurate to call Singer an infanticidist, but leaving it at that would miss the eugenicist justification he provides for his stance. There are any number of possible reasons for supporting infanticide, and only some of them are of a eugenic character. If I advocated killing infants based on birth weight or astrological sign or day of the week on which they were born, for example, these would not be eugenicist positions, since they are not centered on hereditary factors.

I wrote the article more than ten years ago, and there has been a proliferation of good literature on the topic since then, from defenders as well as critics of Singer’s arguments. Most significantly, Singer himself published his booklet “A Darwinian Left” shortly after I wrote the article; the text amounts to a succinct compendium of virtually everything I think is wrong with contemporary left thinking on biological, ecological, and evolutionary questions (my article itself grew out of a series of replies to left supporters of sociobiology). Thankfully, there are also a variety of detailed left critiques of such approaches, though I naturally have various disagreements with some of their arguments. Three noteworthy titles are Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Alexandra Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (University of California Press, 2005); and David Stack, The First Darwinian Left: Socialism and Darwinism 1859-1914 (New Clarion Press, 2003); see the last work in particular for both excellent history and incisive passages on Singer. Aside from those, I highly recommend the discussion of eugenics in Peter Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (University of California Press, 2003), as well as the classic study by Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Harvard University Press, 1995).

One ongoing difficulty with such discussions is a widespread historical naïveté regarding eugenics; many people instinctively associate eugenics primarily with Nazism, and some appear to believe that the Nazi invented eugenics. In reality, many of the most prominent supporters of eugenics before 1933 (and after), in Germany, North America, and elsewhere, were progressives, socialists, and radicals of various stripes; a lot of leftists today have yet to come to terms with this aspect of our own history and thus misunderstand what is at stake in contemporary debates on related topics. I think this is especially true in ecological politics (keep in mind Singer’s own background in the Australian Greens), where figures like Garret Hardin continue to be celebrated, oblivious to the political contexts and connotations of his views. In addition to the book by David Stack I cited above, a useful source for historical background on this complex of themes is the research of Diane Paul; my own perspective is very different from hers, but her work is important for setting current debates into context. See for example Diane Paul, Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present (Humanities Press, 1995); Diane Paul, The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (State University of New York Press, 1998); and her essay “Darwin, Social Darwinism, and Eugenics” in the Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Of particular interest is Diane Paul, “Eugenics and the Left” Journal of the History of Ideas 45 (1984), 567-90, reprinted in The Politics of Heredity.

For a more recent statement from Singer himself, see here:

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200609–.htm

And for a full-length argument from a champion of Singer’s views see Nicholas Agar, Liberal Eugenics: In Defence of Human Enhancement (Blackwell, 2004). Note that Agar himself unabashedly uses the term “eugenics” to characterize the position I reject. I think that similarly eugenicist beliefs are a good deal more widespread among progressively minded people today than is usually recognized, and in that sense Singer is simply making explicit what a lot of others are more reluctant to express openly. In my judgement, this means that we need much more discussion and debate of the underlying ethical, historical, and political issues.

Peter Staudenmaier