Singer's Mother

I did not have the time yesterday to elaborate fully on all the claims that I made. I regard them as important, so I think that I should elaborate on some of them more fully. Today, I shall concentrate on the hypocrisy of Peter Singer with regard to his own mother. A distinction needs to be drawn between the respective facts that:

1. Singer did not euthanise his mother; and
   
2. Singer spent a lot of money on caring for his mother.
   

It can be nearly argued that by Singer's own ethics, he should have euthanised his mother. To begin with, he holds that we do wrong by bringing about a person with impaired chances of happiness. He specifically has in mind a child who is disabled. However, his claims are not limited merely to those children who are severely disabled. For example, even if the child were merely hemophiliac, Singer claims that its parents might still be better off killing it. If they could have another child after it that was normal, say, then ceteris paribus, they should kill the hemophiliac. So that there will be no mistake about this, I will quote Singer, as he is quoted in the New Yorker:

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.

In other words, it is better to kill people with fewer prospects of a happy life than let them live. Singer's example is of a child born with a disability being replaced by a normal child later on. But why draw the line with replacing disabled people with healthy ones? It is not merely the disabled person who has a reduced capacity for happiness. It is also the people who have to take care of the disabled person accordingly. Why not, therefore, kill the disabled person when it would result in the reduced capacity for happiness to others because of their burden of care for that person? The loss of a happy life for the first person is surely outweighed by the gain of a happier life for her carers.

The callousness of such reasoning should be obvious. However, it does not follow from this line of argument alone that Singer should have euthanised his mother. For one thing, euthanising his mother would undoubtedly have caused great suffering to both himself and his family. It might well be that this suffering would have outweighed the suffering caused by simply caring for her until her death. Especially because of the tens of thousands of dollars a year that Singer spent on his mother's care. This money spared his family from having to provide all the care for his mother hands-on themselves. This undeniably spared them much suffering in the process.

However, it also leads to the second fact, which is far more controversial. Singer has claimed repeatedly that we have no special obligations to our relatives. He adheres to the Benthamite principle that all are to count for one and none for more than one. One has as much duty towards a Bangladeshi child as one does towards one's own mother. Also, if one has a choice between saving one's own mother and saving the lives of ten strangers, then one must choose the ten strangers. Again, as reported in the New Yorker by Michael Specter,

He once told me that he has no respect for people who donate funds for research on breast cancer or heart disease in the hope that it might indirectly save them or members of their family from illness, since they could be using that money to save the lives of the poor. ("That is not charity," he said. "It's self-interest.")

Let's take him at face value, then. Many people had needs that were greater than or equal to those of Singer's mother. The money that he spent on her care could have gone to saving the lives of hundreds of people in Bangladesh. Surely, therefore, by Singer's own ethics, it impinged upon him not to spend this money on his mother in this way. It is therefore hard to avoid the conclusion that Singer, according his own theory, here behaved immorally. By his own heartless argument, we should have no respect for him because he acted not out of charity, but self-interest. Of course, we do respect him here, precisely because he did breach his own ethics. It was a reassurace to the rest of us, not only that he is a decent man, but that he is human. But this does not remove the personal difficulty that Singer must now face for not having practised his own ethics consistently. His remarks to Specter in the above article suggest that he does not think that he can justify his actions morally:

I asked him how a man who has written that we ought to do what is morally right without regard to proximity or family relationships could possibly spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on private care for his mother. He replied that it was "probably not the best use you could make of my money. That is true. But it does provide employment for a number of people who find something worthwhile in what they're doing."

This might be forgivable if his alleged immorality occurred in a moment of weakness. But his care for his mother was not only deliberate, but sustained over a number of years. It is therefore difficult simply to write this off as moral failing; it seems indeed like a bona fide case of sheer hypocrisy.