Disability scholar says Singer views 'misguided'
Bioethicist Adrienne Asch, the Henry R. Luce Professor in Biology, Ethics and the Politics of Human Reproduction at Wellesley College. and longtime figure in disability studies went head to head with controversial bioethicist Peter Singer in a debate and question-and-answer session at Princeton Oct. 12. The event drew a packed house, including national news media.
Responding to Singer's opening statement, Asch said he was "wrong on both his facts and his premises" -- one premise being that "you can come up with a calculus of values." People setting up such equations invariably considered disability a "universally bad form of human variation," she reminded the audience.
Disability is neither a blessing nor a curse," she told Singer. "It is a fact -- one characteristic. One should not make life-and-death decisions on the basis of one characteristic."
Several weeks earlier, Not Dead Yet had protested at Princeton to draw attention to the professor's belief that parents should be allowed to kill infants under 28 days if they want to try again for a "better" child. "It's obvious that the protests the first day of classes were a factor" in setting up the debate, he said.
Taking a dig at Not Dead Yet, Singer insisted that their views were "not clearly expressed" and made an effort to imply that what irked protesters was not so much the meaning of his ideas as his use of the word "defective" in the oft-quoted line from his 1979 edition of Practical Ethics ( "the killing of a defective infant.... is [sometimes] not wrong at all"). He disingeniously suggested that his current use of the term "disabled" should mollify protesters (Martin Luther King once used the term "Negro," he told the audience.).
A little later on he insisted to his audience, clearly with no awareness of the disability pride or culture movement, that protesters in Not Dead Yet were not happy to be disabled and would certainly opt to be cured if cures were available. "Of course they would," he lectured his audience.
Later on Asch would say that "If Peter Singer had been spending a lot of time with people with what he calls 'severe cognitive impairments' he might be writing different things."
Asch reminded her audience, though, that the "monster" was not Peter Singer so much as "the views he holds.
"We all have to look to ourselves to see what pieces of his view we share," she told the students, faculty and media. The reasons people want to "end disabled lives", she said, come from "misguided views of what makes a life valuable."
Bioethics, medicine and society have all failed "in that they think the inequities in attainment of people with disabilities are intrinsic to disability," said Asch.
When Singer said he didn't think society had "done enough" for disabled people, Asch retorted, "That's because people share your views."
Singer showed no outrage over institutionalization, calling it simply a "regrettable given" (and failing to note that with animals he would not accept such parallel "givens" as factory farming). He reasoned that "if the state is able to commit only x amount of dollars to people with disabilities, the resources will go further if there are fewer of them," and admitted that "this position I'm expressing will discourage society from putting resources into changing."
Asch and Singer sparred over his concept that one could make decisions only "on the evidence available at the time" -- the basis Singer uses for saying parents have a right to decide a child will have a lousy life and on that basis choose to kill it.
"If it's true that you can only make decisions on the evidence available at the time, no social change would ever occur," said Asch " -- there'd be no incentive or drive to change."
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