Debating with the Devil

Unspeakable Conversations, from the New York times Sunday Magazine (and via Eve Tushnet), is simply the most fascinating essay I’ve read in months. The article, by disability rights activist Harriet Johnson, describes her acquaintanceship with Princeton philosopher Peter Singer. Among disabled rights activists, Singer – who advocates the right of parents to kill disabled infants – is the moral equivalent of a Nazi.

I am talking to my sister Beth on the phone. “You kind of like the monster, don’t you?” she says.

I find myself unable to evade, certainly unwilling to lie. “Yeah, in a way. And he’s not exactly a monster.”

“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.”

From Johnson’s account, Singer seems to combine an intellectual philosophy of ultimate bigotry against the disabled, with an apparently complete lack of personal bigotry against disabled people. And the intellectual exchanges are fascinating.

In the lecture hall that afternoon, Singer lays it all out. The “illogic” of allowing abortion but not infanticide, of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing. Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism, he spins out his bone- chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness. It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible.

As soon as he’s done, I get the microphone and say I’d like to discuss selective infanticide. As a lawyer, I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions. Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law. As an atheist, I object to his using religious terms (“the doctrine of the sanctity of human life”) to characterize his critics. Singer takes a note pad out of his pocket and jots down my points, apparently eager to take them on, and 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. Yes, I am shaking, furious, enraged — but it’s for the big room, 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest, when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail.

If you read one article today…..