Cancel Culture, Academic Freedom, and Disability Rights

I've written before about how I support free speech but don't support giving platforms to "White Nationalists" or neo-Nazis or any other racist group who could use the venue to garner more followers. My concern is with audience members who might be easily led or looking for a place to direct their saved up anger. I believe we must act together to ensure that racist or bigoted values don't get amplified. People aren't barred from speaking and sharing their views otherwise, but I'm fine if they are denied a stage, particularly in a public arena. It's not just that I don't like their views, but that I fear that their views, if accepted by a greater number of people, could normalize harmful actions and threaten the safety and security of my friends and neighbours.

But Peter Singer??

Here's a bit of background on this ethics philosopher. He is, if it's possible, the direct opposite of a neo-Nazi. He's all about decreasing suffering worldwide! He advocates for vegetarianism and goes so far as to suggest that, to live a truly ethical life, we should take any extra money just sitting in our bank accounts and donate it to charity to alleviate global poverty. He's ever concerned with us living the best life we can have in the most ethical way possible. But one of his many arguments around alleviating suffering, from a chapter in a book he wrote back in 1979, Practical Ethics, is about the right of parents to euthanize severely disabled infants. Disability activist groups want this view shut down.


In a 2017 interview on Academic Freedom, Singer argued that philosophy should cause offence. It's important for us to be intellectually challenged, and it's inevitable some offence will follow from that. He gets annoyed when he thinks people are not understanding his ideas or appreciating these serious arguments, and the protesters fighting this one issue often misread his essay if they've read it at all, but, after the first protests in 1989, he saw a sudden boom in book sales. Sometimes cancel culture has the reverse effect as desired, and now, fortunately, more people know about all his other views presented in that book.

Philosophy is different than other disciplines, and I wish philosophical critical thinking skills were taught throughout every class in every school. The goal is always finding the Truth, seeking out the best possible argument, never about showing up your opponent or even thinking of people as opponents. We're all on the same side working to find the end of the argument. So, when philosophers put forth an argument, they're looking for rebuttals in order to see if there are any legitimate problems with their ideas and if there are better ways to get to the conclusion - their conclusion or a different one if a different one is better. We never attack people who disagree with us; we hope to learn from their carefully crafted ideas. Imagine what social media would look like if we all were so schooled!

Singer explains, in that interview, that academic journals used to be the place to debate ideas, but now these ideas are more public in social media, and there is now space for detailed arguments to happen more often, with more people, provided they read beyond the headlines, and provided they offer solid arguments instead of strongly emotional, negative reactions, which sometimes happens even on philosophy forums. He explains that the only limit to offering a public platform for an idea should be whether the speaker has a good argument for the view. For any argument prioritizing white people over others, for instance, he can't imagine there being a good argument in there, so it shouldn't be accepted on the stage. People with weak arguments shouldn't be invited to speak because we won't learn from them. It wouldn't challenge us in an intellectual way. It would just stir us up and make us angry. But if they could produce a good argument, then it ought to be discussed, whatever it is.

Let's look at that one argument, then:

In Singer's "Taking Life: Humans," he writes about non-voluntary euthanasia:

"If a human being is not capable of understanding the choice between life and death, euthanasia would be neither voluntary nor involuntary, but non-voluntary. Those unable to give consent would include incurably ill or severely disabled infants, and people who through accident, illness, or old age have permanently lost the capacity to understand the issue involved, without having previously requested or rejected euthanasia in these circumstances. . . .  

Samuel Linares, an infant, swallowed a small object that stuck in his windpipe, causing a loss of oxygen to the brain. He was admitted to a Chicago hospital in a coma and placed on a respirator. Eight months later he was still comatose, still on the respirator, and the hospital was planning to move Samuel to a long-term care unit. Shortly before the move, Samuel's parents visited him in the hospital. His mother left the room, while his father produced a pistol and told the nurse to keep away. He then disconnected Samuel from the respirator, and cradled the baby in his arms until he died. . . . the grand jury refused to issue a homicide indictment. . . .  

Obviously, such cases raise different issues from those raised by voluntary euthanasia. There is no desire to die on the part of the infant. It may also be questioned whether, in such cases, the death is carried out for the sake of the infant, or for the sake of the family as a whole. . . . So one important reason why it is normally a terrible thing to kill an infant is the effect the killing will have on its parents. It is different when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth abnormalities vary, of course. Some are trivial and have little effect on the child or its parents; but others turn the normally joyful event of birth into a threat to the happiness of the parents, and any other children they may have. Parents may, with good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born. In that event the effect that the death of the child will have on its parents can be a reason for, rather than against killing it. Some parents want even the most gravely disabled infant to live as long as possible, and this desire would then be a reason against killing the infant. But what if this is not the case? . . .  

In the discussion that follows I shall assume that the parents do not want the disabled child to live. I shall also assume that the disability is so serious that - again in contrast to the situation of an unwanted but normal child today - there are no other couples keen to adopt the infant. . . . It is true that from time to time cases of infants who are severely disabled and are being allowed to die have reached the courts in a glare of publicity, and this has led to couples offering to adopt the child. Unfortunately such offers are the product of the highly publicised dramatic life-and-death situation, and do not extend to the less publicised but far more common situations in which parents feel themselves unable to look after a severely disabled child, and the child then languishes in an institution. . . . The quality of life that the infant can be expected to have is important."

Singer suggests a "replacement argument": Parents are allowed to abort a severely disabled fetus and then try again to have a healthier pregnancy - to, in effect, replace the child. So, if it were legal to euthanize a child who was struggling in some way, would it enable the parents to have another, likely healthier, child afterwards, rather than the parents spending their time and resources on a very ill child instead? We're okay with using prenatal testing to abort a profoundly disabled fetus, so is it so different in the first few days after birth?

I was faced with this dilemma first hand when, at 5-months pregnant with my last, when I was 39, I was advised after testing that there was a 50/50 chance of the fetus having Edwards syndrome, and it would be in pain for the short time it was alive. The chance of it living past a year old would be just 10%. Doctors were ready to perform a late term abortion that day. I like playing the odds, though, and I figured, even if it were born healthy, I could still drop it and cause a similar scenario. Life's a page turner! I prepped my older children for the possibility that this baby might take a lot of my time and energy, and I intended to make it a profound learning experience as we loved it regardless. I got really lucky, though, and my youngest is perfectly healthy. But, if she were born with the syndrome, and was in pain day after day, and would only live a short, suffering life, my view might have been altered by my own level of pain from caring for a loved one who's so tiny and struggling, and from watching my older children have to cope with it all. Why shouldn't parents be allowed to terminate after they know, for sure, that there is a serious problem? I wouldn't have had another baby to replace it, because I think it would have been too traumatic, and I wasn't getting any younger, but I had other children who also needed my time. Should parents have to manage the surprise extra burden that can come with a severe abnormality in an infant, or should they have the right to euthanize? It's an interesting question!

Singer explains all this further,

Note, however, that neither haemophilia nor Down's syndrome is so crippling as to make life not worth living, from the inner perspective of the person with the condition. To abort a fetus with one of these disabilities, intending to have another child who will not be disabled, is to treat fetuses as interchangeable or replaceable. If the mother has previously decided to have a certain number of children, say two, then what she is doing, in effect, is rejecting one potential child in favour of another. She could, in defence of her actions, say: the loss of life of the aborted fetus is outweighed by the gain of a better life for the normal child who will be conceived only if the disabled one dies. When death occurs before birth, replaceability does not conflict with generally accepted moral convictions. That a fetus is known to be disabled is widely accepted as a ground for abortion. Yet in discussing abortion, we saw that birth does not mark a morally significant dividing line. I cannot see how one could defend the view that fetuses may be 'replaced' before birth, but newborn infants may not be. . . .  

[In the case of a woman who] was told by her doctor that if she went ahead with her plan to become pregnant immediately, her child would have a disability (it could have been haemophilia); but if she waited three months her child would not have the disability. If we think she would do wrong not to wait, it can only be because we are comparing the two possible lives and judging one to have better prospects than the other. Of course, at this stage no life has begun; but the question is, when does a life, in the morally significant sense, really begin? In Chapters 4 and 5 we saw several reasons for saying that life only begins in the morally significant sense when there is awareness of one's existence over time. The metaphor of life as a journey also provides a reason for holding that in infancy, life's voyage has scarcely begun. . . . 

At present parents can choose to keep or destroy their disabled offspring only if the disability happens to be detected during pregnancy. There is no logical basis for restricting parents' choice to these particular disabilities. If disabled newborn infants were not regarded as having a right to life until, say, a week or a month after birth it would allow parents, in consultation with their doctors, to choose on the basis of far greater knowledge of the infant's condition than is possible before birth. 

All these remarks have been concerned with the wrongness of ending the life of the infant, considered in itself rather than for its effects on others. When we take effects on others into account, the picture may alter. Obviously, to go through the whole of pregnancy and labour, only to give birth to a child who one decides should not live, would be a difficult, perhaps heartbreaking, experience. For this reason many women would prefer prenatal diagnosis and abortion rather than live birth with the possibility of infanticide; but if the latter is not morally worse than the former, this would seem to be a choice that the woman herself should be allowed to make. . . .

In any case, the position taken here does not imply that it would be better that no people born with severe disabilities should survive; it implies only that the parents of such infants should be able to make this decision. Nor does this imply lack of respect or equal consideration for people with disabilities who are now living their own lives in accordance with their own wishes."

Despite the careful argument and the final paragraph above, many people made the leap to suggest that the argument implies that Singer thinks life with a disability is not worth living. And they took offence. Great offence.

Ages ago, in 2003, Singer invited disability activist and attorney, Harriet McBryde Johnson, to debate with him, and she chronicled the experience in the New York Times. Singer wanted to clarify his arguments to this specific audience, and McBryde Johnson was baffled that Singer wasn't more of a monster face-to-face. The brunt of the article is useful to really spotlight the difference between a philosophical dialectic and a lawyer's cross-examination. Many people don't quite get what philosophers do when they argue:

My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. . . . What stands out when I recall first meeting Peter Singer in the spring of 2001 is his apparent immunity to my looks, his apparent lack of discombobulation, his immediate ability to deal with me as a person with a particular point of view. . . . 

I proceed to the heart of my argument: that the presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life. I question his replacement-baby theory, with its assumption of ''other things equal,'' arguing that people are not fungible. I draw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac (the next-born after me), each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can't be measured on the same scale. . . . . He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments. He proceeds with the assumption that I am one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth. He sticks to his guns, conceding just enough to show himself open-minded and flexible. We go back and forth for 10 long minutes. Even as I am horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility. He is so respectful, so free of condescension, so focused on the argument, that by the time the show is over, I'm not exactly angry with him."

But she does have one rebuttal - although I think it's a false analogy - before returning to the stance of winning over the audience as if they're a jury:

"What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities, and not other kinds of babies, if no infant is a ''person'' with a right to life? I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies. But I have trouble with basing life-and-death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice. I offer a hypothetical comparison: ''What about mixed-race babies, especially when the combination is entirely nonwhite, who I believe are just about as unadoptable as babies with disabilities?'' Wouldn't a law allowing the killing of these undervalued babies validate race prejudice? Singer agrees there is a problem. ''It would be horrible,'' he says, ''to see mixed-race babies being killed because they can't be adopted, whereas white ones could be.'' What's the difference? Preferences based on race are unreasonable. Preferences based on ability are not. Why? To Singer, it's pretty simple: disability makes a person ''worse off.'' Are we ''worse off''? I don't think so. Not in any meaningful sense. There are too many variables. For those of us with congenital conditions, disability shapes all we are. Those disabled later in life adapt. We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own. We have something the world needs. . . .

My talk to the students is pretty Southern. I've decided to pound them with heart, hammer them with narrative and say ''y'all'' and ''folks.'' I play with the emotional tone, giving them little peaks and valleys, modulating three times in one 45-second patch. I talk about justice. Even beauty and love. I figure they haven't been getting much of that from Singer. Of course, I give them some argument too. I mean to honor my contractual obligations. . . .

Singer's response is surprisingly soft. Maybe after hearing that this discussion is insulting and painful to me, he doesn't want to exacerbate my discomfort. His reframing of the issues is almost pro forma, abstract, entirely impersonal. Likewise, the students' inquiries are abstract and fairly predictable . . . . The next student wants to work the comparison of disability and race, and Singer joins the discussion until he elicits a comment from me that he can characterize as racist. He scores a point, but that's all right. I've never claimed to be free of prejudice, just struggling with it. . . .

The social-science literature suggests that the public in general, and physicians in particular, tend to underestimate the quality of life of disabled people, compared with our own assessments of our lives. The case for assisted suicide rests on stereotypes that our lives are inherently so bad that it is entirely rational if we want to die. . . . Choices are structured by oppression. We shouldn't offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out of bed in the morning and live a good life. . . .

A philosophy professor says, ''It appears that your objections to assisted suicide are essentially tactical.'' ''Excuse me?'' ''By that I mean they are grounded in current conditions of political, social and economic inequality. What if we assume that such conditions do not exist?'' ''Why would we want to do that?'' ''I want to get to the real basis for the position you take.'' I feel as if I'm losing caste. It is suddenly very clear that I'm not a philosopher. . . . 

And then we get further insights into the movement - and how antithetical it is to a philosophical treatise:

I hear from Laura, a beloved movement sister. She is appalled that I let Singer provide even minor physical assistance at the dinner. ''Where was your assistant?'' she wants to know. How could I put myself in a relationship with Singer that made him appear so human, even kind? . . .

I've come to believe that Singer actually is human, even kind in his way. There ensues a discussion of good and evil and personal assistance and power and philosophy and tactics for which I'm profoundly grateful. . . .

I am soon sucked into the daily demands of law practice, family, community and politics. In the closing days of the state legislative session, I help get a bill passed that I hope will move us one small step toward a world in which killing won't be such an appealing solution to the ''problem'' of disability. . . .

I am regularly confronted by people who tell me that Singer doesn't deserve my human sympathy. I should make him an object of implacable wrath, to be cut off, silenced, destroyed absolutely. And I find myself lacking a logical argument to the contrary. . . . ''You know, Harriet, there were some very pleasant Nazis. They say the SS guards went home and played on the floor with their children every night.'' . . . ''He's not exactly a monster. He just has some strange ways of looking at things.'' ''He's advocating genocide.'' ''That's the thing. In his mind, he isn't. He's only giving parents a choice. He thinks the humans he is talking about aren't people, aren't 'persons.''' ''But that's the way it always works, isn't it? They're always animals or vermin or chattel goods. Objects, not persons. He's repackaging some old ideas. Making them acceptable.'' ''I think his ideas are new, in a way. It's not old-fashioned hate. It's a twisted, misinformed, warped kind of beneficence. His motive is to do good.'' ''What do you care about motives?'' she asks. ''Doesn't this beneficent killing make disabled brothers and sisters just as dead?'' ''But he isn't killing anyone. It's just talk.'' ''Just talk? It's talk with an agenda, talk aimed at forming policy. Talk that's getting a receptive audience. You of all people know the power of that kind of talk.'' . . .

As a shield from the terrible purity of Singer's vision, I'll look to the corruption that comes from interconnectedness. To justify my hopes that Singer's theoretical world -- and its entirely logical extensions -- won't become real, I'll invoke the muck and mess and undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived. That's the best I can do."

And I want to ask, BUT if you gave birth to a child who was unlikely to live to be two years old, and wouldn't ever communicate in any way and would experience a painful existence, but you couldn't find out for sure until after birth, would you want the option to terminate in the first few days? Or is any life valuable even if it's full of suffering, in which case all euthanasia is evil. And then that's a different argument. Singer isn't saying all disabled infants should be terminated - not in the slightest, but that, maybe, in some cases, parents should be allowed the option rather than have the child "languish in an institution."

My daughter's dog was put down today. He moved out with my her dad ten years ago, but my daughter and I still took him for walks together. And he and my daughter, my healthy youngest, were very close. He was suffering at the end, unable to keep down food, and it made no sense to continue to keep him alive to live a life with greater pains than pleasures. Sometimes life isn't the best option. Singer has a viable argument, and it should be heard for the intellectual challenge it presents. He's not trying to challenge legislation; he just wants us to think. That solves his criteria.

But what about mine? I worry about racist speakers provoking the audience to think that it's acceptable to kill people because of their heritage. Is that significantly different than a concern that Singer will provoke the audience to think it's acceptable to kill people because of their level of disability? I think there's a huge difference, and it's these two things: First, Singer's arguing that parents might only have the potential to harm their own infants, in a very limited degree, which doesn't affect the safety or security of anyone else. And secondly, it will be painful for parents to do this, to make this decision and carry it out. If it ever were possible, it wouldn't ever be widespread. It would be a difficult choice after much deliberation and much internal trauma. The best way can be the most horrendous path. So, if it happens, it would be rare and only for the most extreme cases. It won't spread like hatred of a targeted ethnicity can spread, provoking a fear in the streets and suspiciousness of our neighbours. If it were to happen in real life, which many philosophical ideas never intend, then it would be rare and private and very very sad. This is not the philosophy of a monster but of a sensitive human being willing to ask some difficult questions.