The Pursuit of Happiness, Peter Singer interviewed by Ronald Bailey

Ronald Bailey from the December 2000 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

Singer: You're drawing together somewhat different aspects of my writings. What's probably true is that some of the reaction that people have to the birth of infants with evident disabilities is genetically coded. That is, for most of human history these infants were unlikely to survive, unlikely to reproduce. Therefore, it was better to not invest in them further: Abandon them and go on with reproduction that can lead to your genes passing on to further generations. I think that's certainly possible. I don't want to say that that makes it good, just as I don't want to say that male dominance being natural makes it good. Given that we now have the possibility of keeping these infants alive, we still need to ask, Well, is that a good thing to do or not a good thing to do, and why?

Reason: Would you require the death of a defective infant because other hypothetical babies would not be born who might lead more fulfilled lives?

Singer: No. My position is that the parents ought to be able to choose this. [Requiring the death of a defective infant] probably wouldn't increase overall happiness, if the parents wanted their child to stay alive. Parent have a very strong desire for their children, so it's hard to imagine.

Reason: But maybe they're wrong. They've misjudged.

Singer: Well, they may be wrong, but if they're going to suffer acutely for a long time over it, it's unlikely I think that the suffering of the child is going to be so great and so impossible to relieve that it will outweigh that. So that's why I would not require it. I could not imagine a society that would function well if it did require that, if it did take that decision from parents. I can imagine some very bizarre cases-if this child really had some condition [such that it] was just going to suffer excruciatingly and the parents nevertheless wanted it kept alive due to religious ideology. I would hope that the doctor would do something so the child didn't live and maybe say to the parents, "Unfortunately it died." But I wouldn't want to make that a matter of general social policy.

Reason: In A Darwinian Left, you talk about not withholding insulin from diabetic children. Yet elsewhere you've argued that it would be all right for parents to choose to kill a hemophiliac infant. Nowadays a hemophiliac can take a shot of blood clotting Factor 8 every week and essentially live a normal life. Why did you make that distinction, or does the decision depend on the state of medical technology?

Singer: First, the quote about hemophiliac babies, which is often cited, is something of a misrepresentation. If you look at the actual passage, I am exploring the implications of a particular viewpoint in which nothing's going on except the parents and the child. Having done that, I come back some pages later to say, but when you look at the larger society, if you've got childless couples who would like to adopt a child and hemophilia is not a serious problem, then it's wrong to kill that child if parents really don't want to rear it for some reason. They ought to give it up for adoption. So that's really the kind of thing I'm saying there. But it is also true that when I first wrote that book back in 1979, it wasn't as easy as it is now to treat hemophilia.

Reason: So the moral choices that people make change with advances in technology?

Singer: Yeah. The morality of the situation depends on the consequences of what you're doing. If the consequences of keeping the baby alive are that you have to go to enormous trouble and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep it alive, then that's a morally different choice from if all you have to do is spend $20 a week, or whatever, for the shot.

Reason: Is it conceptually possible that capitalist market economies actually lead to the greatest overall happiness of humans than other social arrangements?

Singer: It's conceptually possible, certainly. It's an empirical question as to whether capitalist markets work better in terms of providing greater happiness than any other arrangement.

Reason: What kind of argument would persuade you that it is in fact empirically the case?

Singer: Historical arguments about the failure of alternatives are really powerful here. And it all depends, of course, what you mean by "capitalist markets." Some people mean very unregulated free enterprise systems. Other people would look at the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands or, more generally, Western and Central Europe, and say they are capitalist economies with more social welfare provisions and that they're doing better. There's a debate that can go on about options, and you can look at different societies and compare them within that existing range. It's a fairly narrow range. Then you can look at the other attempts we talked about earlier: the Soviet sort of models, which really didn't work. You can look at smaller institutions like the kibbutzim too. That's probably the best way to reason about it, against the background of evolutionary theory that helps us to understand human psychology.

I think the evidence is that, within certain limits, things do work better if you let people decide for themselves. The debate is not whether there should be any [economic liberty] but how much.