Not Dead Yet!
Question and Answer about Peter Singer

Who are we, and why are we protesting Peter Singer? 

We are Not Dead Yet, a national grassroots disability rights organization. In the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 people with disabilities are described as “a discrete and insular minority group”. The disability rights movement is founded on a belief that the pervasive discrimination and injustice that this minority group faces must be addressed. It is from this foundation that our concern for justice flows. It is from this concern for justice that we find ourselves opposed to Peter Singer’s approach to public policy. For Singer makes policy suggestions about people with disabilities without ever directly addressing, much less designing proposals to solve, the injustice that disabled people face.

But isn’t he a respected scholar? 

He is talking, not just about ideas, but about actual people living in the actual world. These are empirical matters. There is extensive research that indicates that people with and without disabilities have positive opinions about their own quality of life. But Singer ignores this research and takes it for granted that people with disabilities have inferior lives. 

He also ignores the research that indicates doctors who treat newly disabled people, and disabled newborns vastly underestimate the way those people will, within a few years, evaluate their own quality of life. He treats discrimination and other social problems as if they cannot be remedied. He acknowledges the research that shows that parents of disabled infants almost always withhold lifesaving treatment when doctors encourage them to, but he fails to consider the relevance of that fact when he talks about giving parents, not doctors, the right to make life-and-death decisions. 

Singer’s work is not only shoddy – it’s dishonest. If Singer were a college freshman in a special education course, these errors and omissions would be unacceptable; why are the standards so much lower for an Ivy League professor?

Is Peter Singer proposing something new? 

No. But don’t take our word for it. In 1994, Holocaust scholar Michael Burleigh had some pointed comments about Singer’s dismissal of “Nazi” analogies. Writing in History Today, he asserted: “…they (Nazis) were rather adept in dressing up their coldly utilitarian calculations about 'useless eaters' and 'ballast existences' with the quasi-religious rhetoric of 'deliverance' and the humanitarianism of 'mercy-killing'.” He adds that, when Singer makes comparisons between humans with disabilities and lower animals, he is “…using arguments and analogies employed again and again by the Nazis.“

The erosion or outright denial of civil rights to members of society who are seen as less valuable than those in power, even to the point of “justified” killing, has a long and sad history. It has always been wrong in the past and it is wrong now.