In a recent op-ed, “A Convenient Truth,” philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer discusses the much-remarked case of “Ashley,” a severely developmentally disabled 9-year old whose parents want to secure treatment that will prevent her from maturing physically (so that they will be better able to care for her). Addressing the debate over whether or not such treatment would be consistent with Ashley’s human dignity, Singer writes:
As a parent and grandparent, I find 3-month-old babies adorable, but not dignified. Nor do I believe that getting bigger and older, while remaining at the same mental level, would do anything to change that.
Here’s where things get philosophically interesting. We are always ready to find dignity in human beings, including those whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant, but we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats, though they clearly operate at a more advanced mental level than human infants. Just making that comparison provokes outrage in some quarters. . . .
What matters in Ashley’s life is that she should not suffer, and that she should be able to enjoy whatever she is capable of enjoying. Beyond that, she is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her. Lofty talk about human dignity should not stand in the way of children like her getting the treatment that is best both for them and their families.
Now, this seems wrong to me. A better moral anthropology, I think, is one that thinks “what we are” is, in fact, every bit as important to why we are “precious” as is the (we can hope) fact that others love us. But Singer is serious and prominent, and so I’m curious about others’ reactions to his claim. Any thoughts?
Posted by Rick Garnett on January 28, 2007 at 03:51 PM
Comments
Rick, I think part of the problem for some of us is that “dignity,” in any but the Kantian sense, is an enormously ambiguous and vague term. I don’t really know what it means. In what ways is a small child dignified in a way that is different from an elephant, a dolphin or a bear? I’m not trying to be flip about this; I’m honestly confused.
I guess I just can’t follow either (1) the decision procedure by which we assign dignity to various beings, or (2) the logic that makes ethical decisions turn on whether the object of those decisions has dignity (in other than the Kantian sense).
Note finally that it is emphatically not true that Singer is claiming that the only reason not to throw her in the garbage is her parents’ capacity to suffer. The whole quote runs as follows:
What matters in Ashley’s life is that she should not suffer, and that she should be able to enjoy whatever she is capable of enjoying. Beyond that, she is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her.
Note that the part you are referring to is the “beyond that” part — the subsidiary issue for Singer. For SInger, the best reason not to throw Ashley in the garbage is that if you did so, she would suffer and fail to realize her very limited opportunities for happiness. For Singer, what is important is not her lack of sapience but rather her possession of sentience. However, as he persuasively argues elsewhere, a creature like Ashley is not different from many non-human animals in this important respect, and indeed, it is hard to construct a principled difference between her and many non-human mammals that would result in her maintaining a privileged position with regard to our ethical duties towards her. Singer derives from this, not that we should treat Ashley as badly as we treat many other animals, but rather that we should stop treating animals so very badly.
Posted by: marghlar | Jan 30, 2007 9:00:40 PM
I appreciate all these comments, from so many people who know many of the relevant materials so much better than I do. But, for what it’s worth, it is not clear to me why, from “she can’t act autonomously in any way,” it should follow either that “she lacks dignity” (conceding that maybe it does follow that she lacks it in the “Kantian sense”) or that the only reasons for not throwing her in the garbage can are those proposed by Singer, i.e., that third parties happen to care about her.
Posted by: Rick Garnett | Jan 30, 2007 8:07:07 PM
OK then. So we agree that Singer is basically right in this case; that dignity is not what matters in Ashley’s case; what matters is her capacity to suffer, and the degree to which her suffering is likely to cause others to suffer.
Posted by: marghlar | Jan 30, 2007 7:53:50 PM
We don’t disagree- she can’t act autonomously in any way, and she lacks dignity in the Kantian sense. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason to not, say, throw her in a garbage can- the reasons are just those that Singer mentions. Those are all reasons a Kantian can and ought to accept.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 30, 2007 6:05:25 PM
More importantly, perhaps, anything else that could act autonomous in the right ways would also have dignity.
OK Matt. Now explain to me the ways in which Ashley can “act autonomous[ly] in the right ways” in a way that is different from my cat, or just about any other mammal. I’d suggest that you’ll have trouble figuring out a way to categorize Ashely in a way that makes her the right sort of autonomous agent.
Posted by: marghlar | Jan 30, 2007 2:31:38 PM
Kantians aren’t committed to the claim that only “genotypic homo sapiens” have dignity in any way. First, trivially, since many, perhaps most cases of serious cognitive imparement that might keep one from being the sort of being that can be autonomous (the source of dignity, to put it too roughly) are not caused by genetic deviance. More importantly, perhaps, anything else that could act autonomous in the right ways would also have dignity. We just don’t know about those sorts of things. But, of course, a Kantian can very well think that lots of things are bad even though they don’t directly have anything to do with dignity. Just because the only thing that’s unconditionally good is the good will doesn’t mean that all sorts of badness have to be directly related to that. So, being cruel to animals is bad, and Kantians have no trouble saying that, despite what Singer might think. (I don’t hate him like lots of people do, but he is pretty bad on other people’s views.)
Posted by: Matt | Jan 30, 2007 12:41:53 PM
I’m with Singer on this one. “Dignity” is sense without reference. I have enormous trouble conceiving of what it is in the world that we should understand “Dignity” to be referring to.
Singer has spent a good amount of time demonstrating that the standard decision procedures for assigning dignity to feeling entities are enormously arbitrary. Those who wish to justify inflicting suffering on a feeling being on that basis should have the burden of proof to demonstrate why they distribute dignity to some entities and not others. Until they’ve done so, we should rightly regard dignitarian arguments with a great deal of distrust.
The only writer on this thread who seems to have really addressed this issue directly is Frank, but his argument that the sacredness of human embodiment gives dignity to human individuals, whatever their cognitive capacities seems merely to be shifting the ball. Now we are forced to come up with a decision procedure for which sentient beings are sacredly embodied (if we can agree on what that means); and the methods by which someone would demonstrate that all genotypic humans are so embodied while no other sentient or sapient creatures are seem elusive in the extreme.
I’d like to see less question-begging on this thread, and more confrontation of Singer’s central puzzle: Why is it that only genotypic homo sapiens have Kantian “dignity” or “worth?”
Posted by: marghlar | Jan 30, 2007 11:10:47 AM
I suspect many of us inspired by Kant do not follow him to the letter with regard to what specific properties or attributes human beings must have to qualify for the possession of intrinsic moral worth or value (as with Regan above). For instance, see what Martha Nussbuam has done with her provocative albeit tentative adumbration of ‘ten capabilities as central requirements of a life with dignity’ in Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (2006 [see the references to dignity in the index]) (and, earlier, Rawls’s political principles were intended to fill out–‘give shape and content to’–the abstract idea of dignity). As earlier noted, the notion of dignity is historically and conceptually integral to international human rights norms (these have something to do with the prevention and alleviation of suffering, do they not?), and the latest human rights convention happens to be on the rights of the disabled (the most rapidly negotiated human rights treaty in history and the first of the 21st century; see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6173073.stm).
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jan 29, 2007 1:44:04 PM
I understand the Kantian argument (thanks for explaining it so well, Patrick), but am I the only one troubled by the extension of the argument, viz., that seriously disabled humans lack intrinsic moral worth? I find such a conclusion exceedingly uncomfortable, as do many disabled persons, which is partly why Singer is so reviled by many disability activists.
Posted by: Daniel Goldberg | Jan 29, 2007 11:56:46 AM
The heart of Singer’s comment is to deconstruct the loaded term “dignity.” In the sentencing arena, the term dignity is thrown around to attack or defend the death penalty, to attack or defend shaming punishments, to attack or defend imprisonment, to attack or defend physical punishments.
“Dignity” claims — like most deontological arguments — are easy to state and difficult to refute (and may often be cover for other conscious or unconscious beliefs and commitments). That’s why consequentialists like Singer rankle at all dignity talk, especially when they see such talk being used to justify avoidable suffering.
This is why Singer’s comparison to animals (and the reference above to Nazis) is provocative and telling: dominant groups often rely on dignity denial to justify ethically questionable behavior: slavery depended, in part, on a denial of dignity to blacks; the Nazis denied dignity to non-Aryans; anti-sodomy laws often were based on a denial of dignity to homosexuals; legalized abortion relies, in part, on a denial of dignity to embryoes; widespread animal mistreatment is based, in part, on a denial of dignity to animals.
I think Singer is simply saying let’s stop talking about “dignity” and let’s instead talk about preventing avoidable suffering.
Posted by: Utilitarians unite | Jan 29, 2007 10:25:47 AM
I hate to to be the Godwin’s law trigger, but this statement, standing alone, does seem to step (goosestep?) in the Nazi direction:
“Beyond that, she is precious not so much for what she is, but because her parents and siblings love her and care about her.”
So someone’s (or something’s) value derives from whether others love her? So if we “all” (however defined) decide together that we don’t love someone, then she has no value? Neat trick, and quite convenient to do the horrible.
Again, sorry for the extreme Nazi reference, but it does seem apt here.
Posted by: just me | Jan 29, 2007 9:58:50 AM
I read Singer as claiming that 1) humans do not have intrinsic “dignity” simply because they are human, 2) if any such dignity exists it comes from mental level, probably capacity to suffer if I had to guess based on what else I know about Singer, 3) that Ashley’s mental level is below that of common house pets, and that 4) because of this she has little in the way of intrinsic dignity, but rather has an interest in not suffering, or even being as happy as possible, and has worth because people care about her and her suffering would cause them to suffer as well.
Posted by: Patrick (not O’Donnell) | Jan 29, 2007 9:52:30 AM
Briefly: after Kant, beings possessed of dignity make objective claims on us, it is this dignity that permits our actions to have that ‘motive’ proper to morality and accounts for the rational recognition of the objective worth of others as ‘ends in themselves.’ Dignity is an intrinsic value that signifies absolute worth, ‘a value that cannot be compared to, traded off against, or compensated for or replaced by any other value'(Allen Wood). Acting morally here means, in one sense, acting for the sake of humanity in someone’s person, thereby respecting the objective worth of humanity as an end in itself and calling upon us to treat everyone with equal dignity. Such a conception is metaphysical in nature. It assumes the fundamental importance of metaphysical freedom and moral autonomy. It means persons are to be construed as both infinitely valuable and irreplaceably valuable. Allen Wood’s work on Kant has helpful discussions of dignity, as does James Rachels’ The Elements of Moral Philosophy (2003, 4th ed.), pp. 130-140. On how dignity has been essential to fundamental formulations of human rights, see Jack Donnelly’s Universal Human Rights in Theory & Practice (2003, 2nd ed.). See also, Robert Kraynak and Glenn Tinder, eds., In Defense of Human Dignity: Essays for Our Times (2003). Understanding the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic value is of some help here as well.
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jan 29, 2007 12:38:44 AM
Perhaps someone can tell us what “dignity” means in ths context? It would also help if someone told us what “sacred” means.
Whenever I hear these discussions I can’t help thinking these are just code words for the fact that we all possess an instinct for self preservation, and championing another’s right to the same insures our own. Dignity and sacredness come down to, “If I don’t let it happen to you, then it won’t happen to me.” Is the selfish gene at work here?
Posted by: Elliot | Jan 28, 2007 10:37:28 PM
Yea, I think the problem is partially a misreading of Singer here (whatever one thinks of him). He isn’t saying that all humans should be valued by whether and why they are precious to others; he’s saying that this human doesn’t have the kind of agency that gives rise to a special kind of (human) dignity. I agree with Joe: you and Singer are on different pages as to what Ashley is.
Posted by: Steve | Jan 28, 2007 10:21:56 PM
Now, this seems wrong to me. A better moral anthropology, I think, is one that thinks “what we are” is, in fact, every bit as important to why we are “precious” as is the (we can hope) fact that others love us.
But isn’t that exactly what Singer is saying? It doesn’t help that you traded an ellipsis for this sentence: “But why should dignity always go together with species membership, no matter what the characteristics of the individual may be?”.
It seems to me that where you and Singer disagree is not on where value comes from, but rather on what Ashley is.
Posted by: Joe | Jan 28, 2007 10:01:38 PM
Who says we don’t attribute dignity to dogs or cats?
Posted by: Bruce Boyden | Jan 28, 2007 9:43:52 PM
From the little I know of Regan’s position (I’ve only looked at it a bit) it’s not one I find appealing or convincing. I’m hesitant to say much about it since I’ve read very little of it, but in general the (more or less orthodox now) Kantian view of intrinsic worth is the only one I can make and sense of, and on that view, of course, animals don’t have intrinsic moral worth. There are many good reasons to not be cruel to animals or wantonly kill them, and good reasons to treat seriously disabled humans with kindness, compasion, and care, but these reasons don’t depend on the (to my mind highly dubious) claim that these entities have intrinsic moral worth.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 28, 2007 7:33:06 PM
Matt, While I think you may be right about a strict Kantian response to Singer’s remarks, work in the spirit of Kant (neo-Kantian or otherwise) might rely on the distinction Tom Regan made in The Case for Animal Rights (1983) between ‘moral agents’ and ‘moral patients,’ with ‘human infants, young children, and the mentally deranged or enfeebled of all ages’ being ‘paradigm cases’ of the latter. On this view, moral patients possess the (equal) inherent worth intrinsic to all members of this (now expanded) moral community (and thus moral agents have direct duties to moral patients [which of course for Regan includes some non-human animals as well]).
Hard and tragic cases are just that, so I suspect most ethical ‘theories,’ be they of classical Greek vintage or of modern provenance, have no obvious or easy answers (and Singer might have made that point without a polemic against the notion of dignity).
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jan 28, 2007 6:50:42 PM
I don’t agree with Singer’s general approach to philosophy nor to a significant number of his particular conclusions. I don’t share his skepticism about the notion of human dignity in general. But I think he’s exactly right about the specifics of this case, and that most of those (disability rights activists and the like) who have gone into hysterics about this particular case have not thought about it very well. (Lindsay Bernstien wrote a terrific post about that aspect here:
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2007/01/ashleys_treatme.html
It’s not clear that Singer says too much that a Kantian would have to disagree with in the quoted passage, either, since on Kant’s account human dignity comes from the ability to legislate the moral law, something that Ashley obviously never will do. Exactly what a Kantian should think about such cases is hard issue, but I don’t think that Singer is too far wrong to say that in tragic cases such as Ashley’s it’s her parent’s love and care that matter most.
Posted by: Matt | Jan 28, 2007 5:51:25 PM
Patrick is brilliant, as always. For a better approach toward getting people to recognize the “unnecessary and therefore unconscionable degree of suffering in the (non-human) animal kingdom,” I suggest Matt Scully’s Dominion: http://www.amazon.com/Dominion-Power-Suffering-Animals-Mercy/dp/0312319738
As for the core question, I’ll paste in something I wrote 5 years ago:
[Cases like these] force us to articulate our reasons for valuing any feature of the natural or built environment. Why, for example, do we now value humans more than computers? If someone (believes he has) preserved his consciousness on a machine, should the resulting (simulacrum of the) person have (some of) the rights of its creator? Taking up the challenge, Richard Posner [reviewing a book on animal rights] observes that, eventually, “there will be computers that have as many ‘neurons’ as [humans], and the ‘neurons’ will be ‘wired’ similarly.” In such a case, Posner asks, should we be distressed at the thought of destroying a “conscious” computer?
Posner wisely grounds his own response in a widely held intuition: “Most of us would think it downright offensive to give greater rights to . . . computers than to retarded people, upon a showing that . . . the computer has a greater cognitive capacity to profoundly retarded human being.” But this is not simply a visceral response or brute affect; it is a signifying emotion, reflecting a deeper self-knowledge. No matter how highly we wish to value an artifact like a computer, our scale of values itself is parasitic on our embodied form.
We sense, however inarticulately, that our centers of value cannot hold once the human person, as embodied presently, ceases to be the valuer. As Clifford Geertz has observed, man is a being “suspended in webs of significance,” largely of his own making. Far from being one of many potential transducers, the body qua body is the only reliable vehicle for perceptions continuous with those we now experience.
And from that, I’d reason, perhaps following Michael Perry’s work and JPII’s Theology of the Body, that the sacredness of human embodiment gives dignity to human individuals, whatever their cognitive capacities. These cognitive capacities are not ghosts in a machine; rather, they are constituted by embodiment.
Posted by: Frank | Jan 28, 2007 4:57:34 PM
I wholeheartedly agree with you Rick. The history of moral anthropology from Plato, through the Stoics, and up to Kant would suggest our moral significance is, indeeed, not solely or simply (and instrumentally) derived from the fact that others love and care for us but our status as human beings possessed of intrinsic value (and such a move in secular ethics was in no small measure beholden to Judaic and Christian traditions: e.g., that we are created in the image of God, that we are children of God, etc.). Singer has blurred or effaced various philosophical and theological boundaries or distinctions that once prevailed between human and non-human animals in order to arrive at an ethical position that prompts or provokes us to think deeply about the suffering of non-human animals. While I’m in sympathy if not agreement with his motivations and especially conclusions, I think we can get there with premises that are not utilitarian, however sophisticated, and thus hold fast to conceptions of human dignity and/or intrinsic worth, conceptions that are the philosophical bedrock (presupposition, necessary condition) of the notion of human rights. In the effort to compel us to recognize our contribution to the enormous amount of unnecessary and therefore unconscionable degree of suffering in the (non-human) animal kingdom, Singer has swung too far in the other direction: conflating or collapsing distinctions between human beings and other animals. Were it otherwise, we would accord little or no ethical significance to the fact that there are some among us ‘whose mental age will never exceed that of an infant.’
Posted by: Patrick S. O’Donnell | Jan 28, 2007 4:38:53 PM