Should Doctors be Killers?
At one point in the debate, Peter Singer branched from abortion to euthanasia. He mentioned that there are some health conditions after birth where he thinks parents, in consultation with physicians, should be able to euthanize their disabled infant. Euthanasia is a topic that needs its own debate to be adequately addressed. Because I have already blogged extensively about it here and am releasing a book on the topic at the end of 2020, I will keep my remarks here brief so as to stay focused on abortion. I will say this, though:
I suppose to give Peter credit, he was being consistent—but consistently wrong. Beyond the aforementioned point that parents shouldn’t kill their children, I would suggest that physicians also shouldn’t kill their patients. I am reminded of a quote by a physician of Quebec’s Jewish General Hospital, Dr. Michael Bouhadana, who said, “A doctor’s job is to cure sometimes, relieve often, comfort always, kill never.” Or consider the drug company Pfizer: They didn’t want their pharmaceuticals being used in the death penalty. These reasonable perspectives make their way back to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates who declared, “I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody if asked for it, no[r] will I make a suggestion to this effect.”
When writing about this Hippocratic Oath, which became commonplace for physicians to publicly declare, anthropologist Margaret Mead said, “For the first time in our tradition there was a complete separation between killing and curing… With the Greeks, the distinction was made clear. One profession… dedicated completely to life under all circumstances… the life of a slave, the life of the Emperor… the life of a defective child. … This is a priceless possession which we cannot afford to tarnish…”
So what happens, then, when there isn’t a complete separation between killing and curing? Well, what’s happened historically when those charged with curing become those involved with killing? In short, the Holocaust, which, as a matter of tragic fact, ended the lives of three of Peter Singer’s grandparents.
Holocaust-survivor Elie Wiesel wrote an essay titled, “Without Conscience,” which was published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine and read by medical students at UBC in Canada. Wiesel wrote about the role of doctors in killing, saying,
“[I]nstead of doing their job, instead of bringing assistance and comfort to the sick people who needed them most, instead of helping the mutilated and the handicapped to live, eat, and hope one more day, one more hour, doctors became their executioners…Why did some know how to bring honor to humankind, while others renounced humankind with hatred? It is a question of choice. A choice that even now belongs to us—to uniformed soldiers, but even more so to doctors. The killers could have decided not to kill.”
It’s truly bewildering when you have someone, like Peter, who is so close to the brutality and loss that was inflicted by the Nazis who nonetheless holds a view that is similar; namely, that there are human lives unworthy of life. Lawyer Wesley J. Smith pointed this out in a lecture he gave. He noted (around 8:22) how the Nazis would kill disabled children. He mentions how a father of a disabled child wrote Hitler and asked Hitler if his child, who had defective limbs and other difficulties, could be euthanized. Smith describes how Hitler responded by sending his personal physician Karl Brandt to the father:
“Dr. Brandt explained to me [said the father] that the Fuhrer had personally sent him and that my son's case interested The Fuhrer very, very much. The Fuhrer wanted to explore the problem of people who had no future, those whose life was worthless. From then on we wouldn't have to suffer from this terrible misfortune, because The Fuhrer had granted the mercy killing of our son. Later we could have other children, handsome and healthy, of whom The Reich could be proud.”
Smith then paralleled the above with an almost identical sentiment written by Peter Singer himself in his book Practical Ethics: “When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.”
Peter Singer is right to want to reduce suffering and produce a better life for people than they are already experiencing. Those are goals. But he is wrong about the means to achieve those goals. In the debate I made an analogy to someone who wants to go to university to become a scientist to do a great thing like find a cure for cancer. We can all agree that that is a good goal. But what if the means the person used to achieve the goal was to bribe a university with money in order to be accepted? We can all agree that means is not ethical. So I am not questioning Peter’s desire to reduce suffering. I am questioning his means to achieve that; namely, allowing homicide.
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