Non-voluntary Euthanasia

Non-voluntary Euthanasia


Non-Voluntary Euthanasia
DR. BRIAN POLLARD

Advocates of legalised euthanasia almost always insist that they only want voluntary euthanasia (VE) — and they say they are as opposed to the taking of life without the subject’s knowledge or consent, that is, non-voluntary euthanasia (NVE), as anyone else.

Some do extend their advocacy to some examples of NVE, such as seriously deformed newborns, [1] where consent would not be possible, but this is not usual. It is widely accepted that sufficient protection against the unwanted extension of VE to NVE would be ensured by the inclusion of appropriate legal safeguards.

As safeguards, clauses are proposed that would require the doctor to be satisfied that the patient’s request was freely made and sufficiently informed, that there was no psychological abnormality such as depression, and possibly by requiring psychiatric consultation, that more than one doctor be involved in the decision that it was medically appropriate to take life in the circumstances, and that there be adequate documentation. It is also common to find lawyers who declare that such laws would be feasible to devise, though it is less common to find actual draft laws published for discussion. In one sense, those lawyers are correct when they say such law would be possible — but they stop short of addressing the question of whether they would be safe, in practice. It is uncommon to find any analysis that assesses the effectiveness of the so-called safeguards.

By contrast, overwhelming evidence is now available in the published reports of a number of independent committees of inquiry into the consequences of legalising VE, which all concluded that NO such law could be guaranteed to be safe against the likelihood of abuse. In fact, no committee set up for this purpose has ever reached any conclusion other than prohibition of legalisation.
Though the first of these reports appeared in 1994 and the last in 1998, their arguments are so compelling that no criticism of them has ever been published. Until and unless it can be shown that their common conclusion is unwarranted, they must be regarded as having established the truth.

This seems to some to be such an unexpected development, and so contrary to what is confidently often asserted, that it barely seems credible. The commonest and most serious form of abuse of any euthanasia law would be the endangering or the actual taking of the lives of some of the other terminally ill or disadvantaged groups of the sick or disabled who did not want their lives taken. That is, the apparently strict control over the practice of VE would be illusory, and in the worst case, acceptance of VE would lead to the practise of NVE. Additionally, since concealment would be easy to carry out, and hence correspondingly difficult to discover, a truly compassionate society must rate the risk as too high to be acceptable.

This common finding by each committee is consistent with what had already been predicted many times, namely that NVE is such a logical extension of VE that its occurrence should be regarded more as a fulfilled expectation than a matter for surprise. The arguments for VE already encompass the rationale for NVE.

That progression would be logical because, once it had been decided that taking life provided a benefit to one whose quality of life had led him/her to ask for death, it could then be thought discriminatory and unfair to withhold that supposed benefit from others in a similar plight, just because they did not, or could not, ask. NVE, like VE, is also thought by its practitioners to be compassionate and benevolent, not malicious or malevolent.

Since nobody would take a life they valued, in each instance of VE or NVE the ultimate justification is that the particular life no longer has sufficient value to mandate its continuance. Such reasoning would be incompatible with recognising the equal, inherent dignity of every person, as that dignity is declared in statements of human rights to attach to every life, without exception. That view of human dignity is also the one that provides the basis in criminal law for the provision of universal protection for every innocent human life, without exception. Hence, both practices are radically incompatible both with what needs to be acknowledged if we are to live well and peaceably with each other and with the very notion of justice in society, since justice is founded on and exists to respect equal dignity.

It may be objected that these arguments are theoretical and do not necessarily apply to the actual decision-making required in medical practice at or near the end of life. Thus, it is said doctors are not monsters who would suddenly begin to take life indiscriminately, and the risk of extension of one euthanasia practice to the other is overstated and no more than scare mongering, for which, in any case, there is no evidence. The difficulty with that position is that the evidence for NVE at present is readily found, even though it is carried out in secret and to an unknown extent.

THE NETHERLANDS
Dutch euthanasia has been known to be commonly practised since 1973, when a court determined that a doctor, who had killed her mother who was dying and had requested euthanasia, was guilty but that her action was justified. At her trial, evidence was given on her behalf that she was doing no more than what was already common but unpublicised. The court also described circumstances in which it thought that doctors may be excused after euthanasia.
There ensued many years during which the Dutch maintained that euthanasia was closely supervised and controlled by the authorities, while some well informed outsiders maintained that this was certainly not the case, and that abuse was already common and extended as far as medical life-taking without the patient’s consent.

During this period, even though VE was the only practice publicly discussed, official support for NVE could be readily found in the Netherlands. The State Commission on Euthanasia in 1987 had recommended that NVE should not be an offence, if carried out in the context of ‘careful medical practice’, though that term was not defined. [2] In 1988, a Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) working party condoned euthanasia for deformed infants, in some instances thinking it might be compulsory. In 1991, a KNMG committee condoned the killing of patients in persistent coma. [3]

Dutch euthanasia practices were first officially examined in the Remmelink Report of 1991 which was based on medical practice throughout 1990, [4] for which the statistical study was done by van der Maas and others. [5] This study was later repeated and its findings were reported in 1996. [6]
In 1991, by adopting the narrow definition of euthanasia only as ‘active termination of life upon the patient’s request’, there were 2,300 instances of euthanasia in the year of the study, or 1.8% of all deaths. When, however, to these are added instances of life-taking without request and intentionally shortening the lives of both conscious and unconscious patients, the figures for which are found in the statistical study, the conclusions are dramatically altered.

They now become: 2,300 instances of euthanasia on request; 400 of assisted suicide; 1,000 instances of life-ending actions without patient request; 8,750 patients in whom life-sustaining treatment was withdrawn or withheld without request, ‘partly with the purpose’ (4,750) or ‘with the explicit purpose’ (4,000) of shortening life; 8,100 cases of morphine overdose ‘partly with the purpose’ (6,750) or ‘with the explicit purpose’ (1,350) of shortening life; 5,800 cases of withdrawing or withholding treatment on explicit request ‘partly with the purpose’ (4,292) or ‘with the explicit purpose’ (1,508) of shortening life. [7] Thus, there were up to 23,359 instances of doctors intending, by act or omission, to shorten life. The true incidence of euthanasia could have been as high as 20% of all deaths in the year.

Although the Report stated that the 1,000 instances of ‘life ending actions without request’ were carried out on incompetent persons ‘in their death agony’, on the doctors’ testimony at interview as described in the Survey, 14% of these patients were competent and 11% were partly so. According to that part of the Survey known as the death certificate study, 36% were competent. While NVE is generally thought of, and defined, as taking the life of an incompetent patient who could not choose at the time, these figures include another and unexpected category of NVE as killing practised on persons who were competent — those who could have been consulted, but were not. [8]
One observer who has closely studied Dutch euthanasia estimated that the Dutch statistics allow for the possibility that there were ‘about five thousand cases in which physicians made decisions that might or were intended to end the lives of competent patients without consulting them’. When he tried to obtain a possible explanation for this astonishing practice while he was visiting the Netherlands, he could get none. He was left to conjecture that when a doctor already thought it was appropriate to end the patient’s life, he might think it safer not to seek consent, since if it was refused, to proceed would evidently be murder. [9]

In the preamble to its Guidelines for Euthanasia in 1987, the KNMG had written: ‘If there is no request from the patient, then proceeding with the termination of his life is juridically a matter of murder or killing, and not of euthanasia’. [10] Using their own society’s definition, Dutch doctors were carrying out medical murder in 1991, and have continued to do so ever since.
There followed a period of official inactivity because some of the findings were so unexpected, and because euthanasia was well supported by the community. Euthanasia activists lobbied to have it formally legalised, but without success. In particular, NVE presented a semantic problem because by the official definition, it was not any form of euthanasia. To meet this difficulty, the authorities abandoned their candour of 1987 in favour of an innocuous-sounding acronym, LAWER, ‘life-terminating acts without explicit request’. [11] The topic could now be openly discussed as though it were morally, medically and socially neutral, and it was soon to become just another medical alternative available to doctors and the community.

In 1993, authors from the department of Public Health at the Erasmus University could write: ‘But is it not true that once one accepts euthanasia and assisted suicide, the principle of universalizability forces one to accept termination of life without explicit request, at least sometimes, as well? In our view, the answer to this question must be in the affirmative’. [12]
In February 1993, new regulations about the medical reporting of euthanasia were issued, [13] but they had little impact, either on reporting or on the practices themselves. The new rules required the reporting of both VE and NVE on the same form. This had the effect of confirming in many doctors the view that both were equally acceptable to the authorities. Indeed, in 1993 the Secretary of Health, referring to these practices, said: ‘For a physician, the considerations in these two cases are not essentially different; from the moral point of view, the two actions are not of an essentially different kind’. [14]
In the official 1996 review of developments since 1991, it was concluded that ‘euthanasia seems to have increased in incidence since 1990, and the ending of life without the patient’s explicit request seems to have decreased slightly’. Later in this paper, the matter of a possible ‘slippery slope’ associated with euthanasia is discussed, and it is mentioned that some euthanasia supporters insist there is no evidence that it has ever happened or would even be likely to happen. The reader’s attention is therefore drawn again to the last quote above, where the Dutch can say simply, in essence, that medical murder (their own term) seems to have decreased slightly in the five years since it was first officially detected. The Dutch have reached the position where medical murder is now entrenched, and is not seen by their authorities as anything that might represent a deterioration in standards or call for correction. Not only have the Dutch become unwilling or unable to recognise the corruption of medicine and law attributable to their acceptance of any form of euthanasia, it seems that neither have some of the Australian supporters.

In 1995, two separate Dutch courts upheld the actions of doctors who had deliberately ended the lives of handicapped neonates with lethal injections, thus providing the first legal endorsement of NVE. In one case, the judge said ‘In the decision of active ending of life, Dr Kadjik had acted with scientific responsible insight and in accordance with the medical ethic and accepted norms and in due consideration of due care resulting therefrom; he is entitled to an appeal of force majeure’. [15] To justify what is admittedly an offence, courts in the Netherlands are allowed to decide that it is lawful for a doctor, faced with the alternative of leaving a patient in pain or of giving relief by taking life, to take the ‘compassionate’ option, by taking life. The doctor is said to be acting under a higher duty.

Most jurisdictions elsewhere regard this so-called dilemma as a fiction, on account of the proven effectiveness of palliative care to control such pain. This was specifically referred to by the US Supreme Court in its historic judgment of November 1996, when Justice O’Connor noted: ‘A patient who is...experiencing great pain has no legal barriers to obtaining medication from qualified physicians to alleviate that suffering, even to the point of causing unconsciousness and hastening death’. [16]
The significance of NVE in the Netherlands has now been reduced almost to the point where discussion about it relates only to its detail, while the fact that it is still a major criminal offence by Dutch statute law, as it is elsewhere throughout the world, is no longer given special mention. That its incidence hardly fell between 1991 and 1995, or that it occurs at all, elicits no critical comment. An American psychiatrist estimated that, if NVE had been practised in the US at the same rate as prevailed in the Netherlands in 1990, the figure would have exceeded the ‘combined total of all deaths from suicides and homicides’ in that year. [17]

AUSTRALIA
In all Australian states, euthanasia is the crime of murder. In a study by sociologists in South Australia reported in 1994, using an anonymous questionnaire sent to 10% of the medical practitioners in that state, a significant incidence of NVE was discovered. [18] The authors had seeded linked questions in different parts of their questionnaire, so that their association would be less evident to the respondents. 19% of doctors surveyed admitted they had ended life deliberately, and on 49% of those occasions, the answers revealed they had done so without patient request.
This study has not been repeated in Australia, but it is known that there is a high incidence of illegal euthanasia among the gay communities in the large cities, and it is probable that this includes NVE also.

UNITED STATES
In 1998, the results were published of a national survey of the attitudes and practices, concerning assisted suicide and euthanasia, of physicians in the 10 specialties in which doctors are most likely to receive requests for euthanasia. [19] 61% of the 3,102 physicians surveyed responded. Under the heading ‘Characteristics of Patients Receiving Assistance’ where a request for death had been met, it is reported that ‘54 per cent of the requests for a lethal injection were made by a family member or partner’. This brought no specific comment from the authors, though it reveals that slightly more than half the medical killing reported by some 1,800 doctors was NVE. Does this mean that, as in the Netherlands, NVE no longer causes surprise in the US, or did the authors not realise that they had uncovered a deeply disturbing state of affairs?
This paper went on: “requests for a lethal injection were characterised as indirect rather than explicit in 79 per cent of cases. Five per cent of patients who received prescriptions and 7 per cent of those who received a lethal injection were described as ‘confused 50% or more of the time”‘. Since all these events were carried out in private and therefore unsupervised, the figures give grounds for great concern about the potential for the uncontrolled extension of the euthanasia practices of some doctors. Because they are done in secret, not even a law to allow VE could hope to prevent such extension.
The opinion that there is no evidence for a ‘slippery slope’, by which is meant the progression of VE to NVE, is still commonly heard, even though evidence for it is available, as just discussed. When this is pointed out, the response has been that, though this may be so, there is no evidence that one has actually led to the other. This evasive answer fails to offer any explanation at all for the occurrence of NVE, which is, by any legal criterion, medical murder, and shows little concern that it is happening at all. It would seem that, to some, it is more important simply to deny the facts or to denigrate those who draw attention to them, than to lose face by condemning NVE.

Ready proof that the progression of VE to NVE has grounds in logic is available whenever euthanasia becomes a topic for public discussion following the media disclosure of some instance of mercy killing. At such times, radio talk-back programs quickly come round to discussing the plight of the senile, elderly people in nursing homes, how their lives are futile, how they, their families and the public purse would all experience great relief from their demise, and particularly singled out for comment are those who are irreversibly mentally incompetent. This is heard from those who, shortly before, professed to want only VE, and who, I suspect, do not even realise they have made this subtle but significant mental shift.

Two dangerous ideas lie just below the surface of awareness in an unknown number of people in the community, though they are not usually thought proper to be voiced openly: that there are groups of unfortunate people whom society could well do without, and that they cost a lot of money that could be better spent. These ideas are rejected by the usual advocates of VE, as they should be, but those who hold them would constitute a significant problem were legalisation of VE to be voted on. They would cast a vote in favour, but they would not forever be satisfied with VE only, and would be likely to push for its extension to NVE. And if that vote were made reliant on compassion, even though it may be misplaced compassion, these disadvantaged people would often seem to be the most deserving of compassionate release.
It is impossible for those who would have VE legalised to guarantee that such law could or would remain unaltered in the future. When legalised VE had in time caused a lowering of the community’s respect for all human life, as it undoubtedly would, and when health costs had escalated to what were seen to be unsustainable levels, as they undoubtedly will, a precedent for the further erosion of protection for human life would already exist, having been created when VE was legalised.

CONCLUSION
As long as notions of life-taking without consent are simplistically thought to be only associated with some degree of malicious intent, it can be considered insulting to suggest that NVE might also be practised, if VE were legally permitted. Especially is such a suggestion thought to reflect adversely on doctors, who, while they are often criticised on other grounds, are not generally thought to be unprincipled or malicious. But when the actual motivation for NVE, in its practitioners’ estimation, is that it is an act of kindness, the risk to the lives of some of the more vulnerable in society then becomes more apparent.
The prospect of NVE then changes from being repugnant and rare to an act that can be thought to be desirable and beneficial, in some circumstances. So regarded, NVE could be confidently predicted to be, in time, virtually inevitable. Any instance of NVE is a case in practice of ‘the tendency of a principle to expand itself to the limits of its logic’.


ENDNOTES
Kuhse H, Singer P. Should the Baby Live? Oxford; Oxford University Press. 1985. p v. Back to text.
The Legalisation of Euthanasia. Web page, NSW Right to Life,1999. Back to text.
Keown J. The Law and Practice of Euthanasia in the Netherlands. Law Q Rev 1992; 108: 51-78. Back to text.
Report of the Committee to Investigate Medical Practice Concerning Euthanasia. Medical Decisions about the End of Life. I. Remmelink Report. The Hague; Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Welfare, Public Health and Culture. 1991. Back to text.
Van der Maas PJ et al. Euthanasia and Other Decisions Concerning the End of Life. Elsevier Science Publications, Amsterdam. 1992. Back to text.
Van der Maas PJ, van ver Wal G, Haverkate I, de Graaf CML, Kester J et al. Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide and other Medical Practices Involving the End of Life in the Netherlands. 1990-1995. New Eng J Med 1996; 335: 1699-1705. Back to text.
Keown J. Further Reflections of Euthanasia in the Netherlands in the Light of The Remmelink Report and the van der Maas Study. Chapter in Euthanasia, Clinical Practice and the Law. Ed Gormally L. The Linacre Centre 1994. p219-240. Back to text.
Do. p 230. Back to text.
Hendin H. Seduced by Death: Doctors, Patients and the Dutch Cure. Issues Law Med 1994. 10: 123-168. Back to text.
Guidelines for Euthanasia (KNMG). trans Lagerwey W. Issues Law Med 1988; 3: 429-437. Back to text.
Pijnenborg L, van der Maas PJ, van Delden JJM, Looman CWN. Life terminating acts without explicit request of patient. Lancet 1993; 341: 1196-1199. Back to text.
Van Delden JJM, Pijnenborg L, van der Maas PJ. The Remmelink Report; Two Years Later. Hastings Center Report 1993; Nov/Dec 24-27. Back to text.
Fenigsen R. The Netherlands; New Regulations Concerning Euthanasia. Issues Law Med 1993; 9: 167-171. Back to text.
Do. p 170. Back to text.
Brownstein EG. Neonatal Euthanasia Case Law in the Netherlands. Aust Law J 1997; 7: 54-58. Back to text.
Washington vs Glucksberg, 117 SCt 2303. Back to text.
Op cit 8. p 165. Back to text.
Stevens C, Hassan R. Management of death, dying and euthanasia; attitudes and practices of medical practitioners in South Australia. J Med Ethics 1994. Back to text.
Meier DE, Emmons CA, Wallenstein S, Quill T, Morrison RS, Cassel CK. A National Survey of Physician-Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia in the United States. N Eng J Med 1998; 338: 1193-1201. 20: 41-46. Back to text.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
Pollard, Dr. Brian. “Non-voluntary Euthanasia.” NSW Website (1999).
Published by permission of Dr. Brian Pollard.
AUTHOR
Dr. Brian Pollard is a former anaesthetist (anesthesiologist) who founded and directed, from 1982, one of Australia’s first palliative care services. Dr. Pollard is the author of The Challenge of Euthanasia and is involved in active opposition to legalised euthanasia in Australia.
Copyright © 1999 NSW Right to Life Association

APS Observer - On Not Being Human

APS Observer - On Not Being Human

On Not Being Human
APS President Morton Ann Gernsbacher, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Around the time I took office as president of the Association for Psychological Science, Wray Herbert, Public Affairs Director of APS, began e-publishing his now syndicated blog, “We’re Only Human.” Although I won’t pretend to be privy to the inner workings of Wray’s mind, I’m guessing that Wray chose his blog’s moniker to allow wide berth for our diverse curiosities, eccentricities, and proclivities. We might do this, we might even do that, because, well, after all, we are human.But are we? Do we all agree that all humans are indeed, human?
The anonymous tract, Disputatio Nova Contra Mulieres, Qua Probatur Eas Homines Non Esse (A New Argument Against Women, in Which it Is Demonstrated That They Are not Human Beings), first published in 1595, was reprinted prolifically during the 17th and 18th centuries. In the 1860s, British anthropologists espoused that Blacks were an inferior species, more comparable to apes than to Caucasians, and therefore well suited for slavery. At the Nuremberg Trial, one SS general explained his allegiance to genocide by the simple contention that “Jews are not even human.”
Sixteenth-century theologians, Victorian anthropologists, and 20th-century Nazis are not the only ones who have deemed various groups of humans ape-like or nonhuman; some current-day American psychological scientists are just as guilty of this crime.

A few years ago, I was at a conference on language and evolution when an audience member questioned a prominent child language researcher’s thesis by raising a counter-example: One aspect of the development of children with Williams syndrome didn’t quite fit the researcher’s theory. The prominent child language researcher quickly retorted, “Oh, I’ve seen children with Williams syndrome. They don’t count. They’re not even human. They must belong to some other species entirely.”

With the wave of a hand, an entire group of people was erased from the human race. Without a contesting word, members of the human species were sacrificed — but a theory was saved. And what was the distinctly nonhuman behavior demonstrated by some children with William syndrome? It was their ability to develop a prodigious vocabulary, prior to developing the ability to extend an index finger to point.

Admittedly, this psychological scientist’s dehumanizing pronouncement occurred during a relatively free-flowing discussion at a rela-tively small, invitation-only conference. The outrageous comment wasn’t even illuminated on a PowerPoint slide. But similar pronounce-ments have been typeset on the pages of other psychological scientists’ best-selling books and bound into our field’s most prestigious scholarly journals.

For example, in a recent New York Times “notable book of the year,” an internationally acclaimed psychological scientist segregated autistic1 people from other humans and placed them “together with robots and chimpanzees.” The distinguishing feature, according to this psychological scientist, is humans’ “innate equipment to discern other people’s beliefs and intentions,” which he proposed that robots, chimpanzees, and autistic people inherently lack.
However, laboratory tasks that probe people’s understanding of the intentionality of other humans’ intentions fail to distinguish autistic from nonautistic people (Aldridge, Stone, Sweeney, & Bower, 2000; Carpenter, Pennington, & Rogers, 2001; Russell & Hill, 2001; Se-banz, Knoblich, Stumpf, & Prinz, 2005) and failure on laboratory tasks that probe people’s understanding of other humans’ beliefs is nei-ther universal among autistic people (Happe, 1995; Kleinman, Marciano, & Ault, 2001; Ozonoff, Rogers, & Pennington, 1991; Peterson, 2002) nor unique to autistic people (Benson, Abbeduto, Short, Bibler-Nuccio, & Mass, 1993; Miller, 2001; Peterson & Siegal, 1995; Rowe, Bullock, Polkey, & Morris, 2001; Saltzman, Strauss, Hunter, & Archibald, 2000; Tager-Flusberg, 2001). Nonetheless, such theoriz-ing was recapitulated in the popular press as the claim, “it’s as if they [autistic people] do not understand or are missing a core aspect of what it is to be human” (Falcon & Shoop, 2002). If that they referred to members of any other minority group, we’d call the statement hate speech.

Consider the theorizing of another internationally acclaimed psychological scientist, presented in a widely circulated scholarly journal. After proposing the thesis that “cultural learning” is “a uniquely human form of social learning that allows for a fidelity of transition of behaviors and information among conspecifics,” the authors argued that, like chimpanzees, “autistic children show little or no evidence of cultural learning.” However, the authors ran into a similar deficit of empirical proof, best captured by their admission: “It can be stated with confidence that the vast majority of autistic children do not engage in [a specific type of cultural] learning. Although we are aware of no studies that specifically test for [this type of cultural] learning per se...” In this case, the authors salvaged their thesis by observing that “one robust and recurrent finding is that throughout their development autistic children show significant deficits in their ability to interact with and relate to peers.”

The authors are right; difficulty developing “peer relationships appropriate to developmental level” is a bona fide DSM-IV diagnostic criterion for autism. But by this logic, any DSM-IV diagnostic criterion for any DSM-IV diagnosis could be used as a basis for segregating humans who fit the diagnosis from humans who don’t. And if the diagnostic criterion (e.g., reading disorder, written expression disorder, or erectile disorder) is also met by any nonhuman species, it can become the basis for dehumanization.

In a more recent scholarly article, also written with the aim of delineating “the crucial difference between human cognition and that of other species,” autistic people were again segregated from other humans and placed with great apes. After acknowledging that the empiri-cal literature demonstrates that “great apes and children with autism are clearly not blind to all aspects of intentional action,” the authors raised the bar (“understanding the intentional actions and perceptions of others is not by itself sufficient to produce humanlike social and cultural activities”), and continued to pound home their belief that autistic children do not “engage socially and culturally with others in the ways that human children do”; they do not “interact with other persons in the species-typical manner.” Their social behavior is just not human.

Why are humans dehumanized? According to Morton Deutsch, this year’s APS James McKeen Cattell award recipient, humans are de-humanized when they are perceived as a threat. What threat do humans with Williams syndrome and autistic humans pose to psychological scientists? A threat to the universality of the scientists’ theories, a threat to the scientists’ ability to accept human diversity?

Last fall, a Duquesne University sophomore violated his Catholic university’s code of conduct by posting on Facebook his opinion that homosexual behavior was “subhuman.” Shouldn’t psychological scientists be held to an equally high code of conduct? In addition to being required to remove his offensive comment from the Web, the Duquesne sophomore had to write a 10-page essay on respect for human dignity. I wish some psychological scientists would at least read, if not write, a similar essay.


References
Aldridge, M. A., Stone, K. R., Sweeney, M. H., & Bower, T. G. R. (2000). Preverbal children with autism understand the intentions of others. Developmental Science, 3, 294-301.
Benson, G., Abbeduto, L., Short, K., Bibler-Nuccio, J., & Mass, F. (1993). Development of theory of mind in individuals with MR. American Journal on Mental Retardation, 98, 427-433.
Carpenter, M., Pennington, B. F., & Rogers, S. J. (2001). Understanding of others’ intentions in children with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 589-599.
Falcon, M., & Shoop, S. A. (2002, April 10). Stars ‘CAN-do’ about defeating autism. USA Today. Retrieved May 1, 2005 from http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/spotlight/2002/04/10-autism.htm
Happe, F. G. (1995). The role of age and verbal ability in the theory of mind task performance of subjects with autism. Child Development, 66, 843-855.
Kleinman, J., Marciano, P. L., & Ault, R. L. (2001). Advanced theory of mind in high-functioning adults with autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 31, 29-36.
Miller, C. (2001). False belief understanding in children with specific language impairment. Journal of Communication Disorders, 34, 73-86.
Ozonoff, S., Rogers, S. J., & Pennington, B. F. (1991). Asperger’s syndrome: Evidence of an empirical distinction from high-functioning autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 32, 1107-1022.
Peterson, C. C. (2002). Drawing insight from pictures: The development of concepts of false drawing and false belief in children with deafness, normal hearing, and autism. Child Development, 73, 1442-1459.
Peterson, C. C., & Siegal, M. (1995). Deafness, conversation and theory of mind. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 36, 459-474.
Rowe, A. D., Bullock, P. R., Polkey, C. E., & Morris, R. G. (2001). “Theory of mind” impairments and the relationship to executive functioning following frontal lobe excisions. Brain, 124, 600-616.
Russell, J., & Hill, E. (2001). Action-monitoring and intention reporting in children with autism. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 1105-1113.
Saltzman, J., Strauss, E., Hunter, M., & Archibald, S. (2000). Theory of mind and executive functions in normal human aging and Parkinson’s disease. Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society, 6, 781-788.
Sebanz, N., Knoblich, G., Stumpf, L., & Prinz, W. (2005). Far from action-blind: Representation of others’ actions in individuals with autism. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22, 433-454.
Tager-Flusberg, H. (2001). A reexamination of the theory of mind hypothesis of autism. In J. A. Burack (Ed.), The development of autism: Perspectives from theory and research (pp. 173-193). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Morton Ann Gernsbacher is the Vilas Research Professor and Sir Frederic C. Bartlett Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be reached via email at mgernsbacher@psychologicalscience.org.
1 See Sinclair (1999; http://web.syr.edu/~jisincla/person_first.htm ) to appreciate my respectful use of the term “autistic” rather than “person with autism.”

The Mystery of Consciousness -- Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 -- Printout -- TIME

...I disagree with what this article says about the afterlife, but it is interesing that there is more and more proof that what was done to Terri Schiavo was utterly without basis in science or fact, never mind the immorality of murder.


The Mystery of Consciousness -- Friday, Jan. 19, 2007 -- Printout -- TIME

Friday, Jan. 19, 2007
The Mystery of Consciousness

By Steven Pinker

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?

The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.

It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.

THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS

WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.

What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.

The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.
The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

THE BRAIN AS MACHINE
SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.

And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.

THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL
ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."
It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness.

Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.

The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."

Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others.

BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES
A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.

What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on.
A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear.

Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making, just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor.

WAVES OF BRAIN
CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch.
So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?

TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM
TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.

No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

TOWARD A NEW MORALITY
MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.
As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.
Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate


Find this article at:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1580394,00.html

Princeton Professor Singer: And I repeat, I would kill Disabled Infants

Princeton Professor Singer: And I repeat, I would kill Disabled Infants

Princeton Professor Singer: And I repeat, I would kill Disabled Infants
He is consistent. States "there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby"
By John-Henry Westen

PRINCETON, September 12, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) - In a question and answer article published in the UK's Independent today, controversial Princeton University Professor Peter Singer repeats his notorious stand on the killing of disabled newborns. Asked, "Would you kill a disabled baby?", Singer responded, "Yes, if that was in the best interests of the baby and of the family as a whole."

People who oppose Singer's position have maintained that Singer is the logical extension of the culture of death and that society will eventually embrace his stance if there is no shift to the culture of life. Alex Schadenberg, Executive Director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition commented to LifeSiteNews.com about Singer saying, "at least he's consistent."
In fact, Singer himself uses the abortion debate to justify his murderous stance.
"Many people find this shocking," continued Singer, "yet they support a woman's right to have an abortion." Concluding his point, Singer said, "One point on which I agree with opponents of abortion is that, from the point of view of ethics rather than the law, there is no sharp distinction between the foetus and the newborn baby."

Singer's position, similar to the culture of death, is that there is no inherent dignity in man, there is no sanctity of human life. Man deserves no special treatment since, Singer rejects that man was created in the image and likeness of God.

Asked about the choice between killing 10 cows or a human, Singer said he would kill the cows, but not because they were of less value, but because humans would mourn the death more. "I've written that it is much worse to kill a being who is aware of having a past and a future, and who plans for the future. Normal humans have such plans, but I don't think cows do. And normal humans have family and friends who will grieve their death in ways more vivid and longer-lasting than the way cows may care about other cows. (Although a cow certainly misses her calf for a long time, if the calf is taken from her. That's why there is a major ethical problem with dairy products.) If I really had to make such a decision, I'd kill the cows."

Schadenberg commented saying, "Once again Singer is making distinctions between human beings he would consider normal and those he would consider not normal, thus he is deciding who is a person and who is not. Non-persons are allowed to be killed." The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition leader concluded, "even though Singer does not like to be compared to the Nazi's especially since his parents died in the Holocaust, his philosophical position is identical to what the Nazi's proposed. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is primarily concerned for the lives of people with disabilities and other vulnerable persons."
See the whole interview:http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article1466409...

Peter Singer: Architect of the Culture of Death

Peter Singer: Architect of the Culture of Death

Peter Singer: Architect of the Culture of Death
DONALD DEMARCO
The new tradition that Peter Singer welcomes is founded on a "quality-of-life" ethic. It allegedly replaces the outgoing morality that is based on the "sanctity-of-life."
Peter Singer
"After ruling our thoughts and our decisions about life and death for nearly two thousand years, the traditional Western ethic has collapsed."

On this triumphant note, Professor Peter Singer begins his milestone book, Rethinking Life and Death. It conveys an attitude of revolutionary confidence that brings to mind another atheistic iconoclast, Derek Humphry, who has said, "We are trying to overturn 2,000 years of Christian tradition."

The new tradition that Singer welcomes is founded on a "quality-of-life" ethic. It allegedly replaces the outgoing morality that is based on the "sanctity-of-life." Wesley J. Smith states that Rethinking Life and Death can fairly be called the Mein Kampf of the euthanasia movement, in that it drops many of the euphemisms common to pro-euthanasia writing and acknowledges euthanasia for what it is: killing." A disability advocacy group that calls itself "Not Dead Yet" has fiercely objected to Singer's views on euthanasia. Some refer to him as "Professor Death." Others have gone as far as to liken him to Josef Mengele. Troy McClure, an advocate for the disabled, calls him "the most dangerous man in the world today." There is indeed a bluntness to Singer's pronouncements that gives his thought a certain transparency. This makes his philosophy, comparatively speaking, easy to understand and to evaluate.

Despite the vehemence of some of his opponents, Professor Singer is regarded, in other circles, as an important and highly respected philosopher and bioethicist. His books are widely read, his articles frequently appear in anthologies, he is very much in demand throughout the world as a speaker, and has lectured at prestigious universities in different countries. He currently holds the Ira W. Decamp chair of Bioethics at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Human Values. And he has written a major article for Encyclopedia Britannica.

Singer's philosophy begins in a broad egalitarianism and culminates in a narrow preferentialism. His egalitarianism has won him many supporters; his preferentialism has earned him his detractors. Hence, he is both strongly admired and soundly vilified. In his widely read article, "All Animals Are Equal," Singer expresses his disdain for racism and sexism. Here he is on solid ground. From this beachhead, he invites his readers to conquer "the last remaining form of discrimination," which is discrimination against animals. He refers to this form of discrimination, borrowing the term from Richard Ryder, "speciesism." This latter form of discrimination rests on the wholly unwarranted assumption, in Singer's view, that one species is superior to another. "I am urging," he writes, "that we extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species." Here Singer endears himself to animal "rights" activists. In 1992, he devoted an entire book to the subject, Animal Liberation: A New Ethic for Our Treatment of Animals.

Singer rejects what he regards as non-philosophical ways of understanding human beings and non-human animals. He finds notions of "sanctity-of-life," "dignity," "created in the image of God," and so on to be spurious. "Fine phrases," he says, "are the last resource of those who have run out of argument." He also sees no moral or philosophical significance to traditional teens such as "being," "nature" and "essence." He takes pride in being a modern philosopher who has cast off such "metaphysical and religious shackles."
What is fundamentally relevant, for Singer, is the capacity of humans and non-human animals to suffer. Surely non-human animals, especially mammals, suffer. At this point, Singer adds to his egalitarian followers those who base their ethics on compassion. Singer deplores the fact that we cruelly and unconscionably oppress and misuse non-human animals by eating their flesh and experimenting on them. Thus he advocates a vegetarian diet for everyone and a greatly restricted use of animal experimentation.

By using a broad egalitarian base that elicits a compassionate response to the capacity of human and non-human animals to suffer, Singer thereby replaces the sanctity-of-life ethic with a quality-of-life ethic that, in his view, has a more solid and realistic foundation. In this way Singer appears to possess a myriad of modern virtues. He is broadminded, fair, non-discriminatory, compassionate, innovative, iconoclastic, and consistent. It is the quality of life that counts, not some abstract and gratuitous notion that cannot be validated or substantiated through rational inquiry.

Charles Darwin once conjectured that "animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine ... may partake of our origin in one common ancestor — we may all be melted together." Singer takes Darwin's "conjecture" and turns it into a conviction. Thus he adds to his coterie of adherents, Darwinists and assorted evolutionists.

Humans and non-human animals are fundamentally sufferers. They possess consciousness that gives them the capacity to suffer or to enjoy life, to be miserable or to be happy. This incontrovertible fact gives Singer a basis, ironically, for a new form of discrimination that is more invidious than the ones he roundly condemns. Singer identifies the suffering/enjoying status of all animals with their quality of life. It follows from this precept, then, that those who suffer more than others have less quality-of-life, and those who do not possess an insufficiently developed consciousness fall below the plane of personhood. He argues, for example, that where a baby has Down syndrome, and in other instances of "life that has begun very badly," parents should be free to kill the child within 28 days after birth. Here he is in fundamental agreement with Michael Tooley, a philosopher he admires, who states that "new-born humans are neither persons nor quasi-persons, and their destruction is in no way intrinsically wrong." Tooley believes that killing infants becomes wrong when they acquire "morally significant properties," an event he believes occurs about three months after their birth.

According to Singer, some humans are non-persons, while some non-human animals are persons. The key is not nature or species membership, but consciousness. A pre-conscious human cannot suffer as much as a conscious horse. In dealing with animals, we care only about their quality of life. We put a horse that has broken its leg out of its misery as quickly as possible. This merciful act spares the animal an untold amount of needless suffering. If we look upon human animals in the same fashion, our opposition to killing those who are suffering will begin to dissolve. The "quality-of-life" ethic has a tangible correlative when it relates to suffering; the "sanctity-of-life" seemingly relates to a mere vapor.

Here is where Singer picks up his detractors. According to this avant garde thinker, unborn babies or neonates, lacking the requisite consciousness to qualify as persons, have less right to continue to live than an adult gorilla. By the same token, a suffering or disabled child would have a weaker claim not to be killed than a mature pig. Singer writes, in Rethinking Life and Death:
Human babies are not born self-aware or capable of grasping their lives over time. They are not persons. Hence their lives would seem to be no more worthy of protection that the life of a fetus.

And writing specifically about Down syndrome babies, he advocates trading a disabled or defective child (one who is apparently doomed to too much suffering) for one who has better prospects for happiness:
We may not want a child to start on life's uncertain voyage if the prospects arc clouded. When this can be known at a very early stage in the voyage, we may still have a chance to make a fresh start. This means detaching ourselves from the infant who has been born, cutting ourselves free before the ties that have already begun to bind us to our child have become irresistible. Instead of going forward and putting all our effort into making the best of the situation, we can still say no, and start again from the beginning.

Needless to say, we all begin our lives on an uncertain voyage. Life is full of surprises. A Helen Keller can enjoy a fulfilling life, despite her limitations; Loeb and Leopold can become hardened killers, despite the fact that they were darlings of fortune. Who can prognosticate? Human beings should not be subject to factory control criteria. Even in starting again, one still does not generate the same individual that was lost. Singer's concern for quality-of-life causes him to miss the reality and the value of the underlying life.
Ironically, the man who claimed to be conquering the last domain of discrimination was offending his readers precisely because of his penchant for discrimination (and even in failing to discriminate). A number of statements that appeared in the first edition of his Practical Ethics were expurgated from the second edition. They include his demeaning of persons with Down syndrome, reviling mentally challenged individuals as "vegetables," rating the mind of a one-year-old human below that of many brute animals, and stating that "not ... everything the Nazis did was horrendous; we cannot condemn euthanasia just because the Nazis did it."

For Peter Singer a human being is not a subject who suffers, but a sufferer. Singer's error here is to identify the subject with consciousness. This is an error that dates back to 17th Century Cartesianism — "I think therefore I am" (which is to identify being with thinking). Descartes defined man solely in terms of his consciousness as a thinking thing (res cogitans) rather than as a subject who possesses consciousness.

At the heart of Pope John Paul II's personalism (his philosophy of the person) is the recognition that it is the concrete individual person who is the subject of consciousness. The subject comes before consciousness. That subject may exist prior to consciousness (as in the case of the human embryo) or during lapses of consciousness (as in sleep or in a coma). But the existing subject is not to be identified with consciousness itself, which is an operation or activity of the subject. The Holy Father rejects what he calls the "hypostatization of the cogito" (the reification of consciousness) precisely because it ignores the fundamental reality of the subject of consciousness — the person — who is also the object of love. "Consciousness itself' is to be regarded "neither as an individual subject nor as an independent faculty."

John Paul refers to the elevation of consciousness to the equivalent of the person's being as "the great anthropocentric shift in philosophy." What he means by this "shift" is a movement away from existence to a kind of absolutization of consciousness. Referring to Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Holy Father reiterates that "it is not thought which determines existence, but existence, "esse," which determines thought!"

Singer, by trying to be more broadminded than is reasonable, has created a philosophy that actually dehumanizes people, reducing them to points of consciousness that are indistinguishable from those of many non-human animals. Therefore, what is of primary importance for the Princeton bioethicists is not the existence of the being in question, but its quality of life. But this process of dehumanization leads directly to discrimination against those whose quality of life is not sufficiently developed. Singer has little choice but to divide humanity into those who have a preferred state of life from those who do not. In this way, his broad egalitarianism decays into a narrow preferentialism:
When we reject belief in God we must give up the idea that life on this planet has some preordained meaning. Life as a whole has no meaning. Life began, as the best available theories tell us, in a chance combination of gasses; it then evolved through random mutation and natural selection. All this just happened; it did not happen to any overall purpose. Now that it has resulted in the existence of beings who prefer some states of affairs to others, however, it may be possible for particular lives to be meaningful. In this sense some atheists can find meaning in life.

Life can be meaningful for an atheist when he is able to spend his life in a "preferred state." The atheistic perspective here does not center on people, however, it centers on happiness. This curious preference for happiness over people engenders a rather chilling logic. It is not human life or the existing human being that is good, but the "preferred state." Human life is not sacrosanct, but a certain kind of life can be "meaningful." If one baby is disabled, does it not make sense to kill it and replace it with one who is not and "therefore" has a better chance for happiness? "When the death of the disabled infant," writes Singer, "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."

Singer has a point, though perhaps marginal at best, that all other things being equal, it is better to be more happy than to be less happy. Yet this point hardly forms a basis for ending the life of a person who has less happiness than the hypothetically conceived greater happiness of his possible replacement. Ethics should center on the person, not the quantum of happiness a person may or may not enjoy. It is the subject who exists that has the right to life, and neither Peter Singer nor anyone else who employs a "relative happiness calculator" should expropriate that right.
Having neglected concrete existence, Singer inevitably wanders into abstractions. He is a humanist, one might say, because he wants people to enjoy better and happier states of life. But the more relevant point is that he is not particularly interested in the actual lives of those who are faced with states that he believes to be less than preferable. On the other hand, Pope John Paul II stresses that each human life is "inviolable, unrepeatable, and irreplaceable." In stating this, the Pontiff is implying that our first priority should be loving human beings rather than preferring better states.
In a 1995 article in the London Spectator entitled "Killing Babies Isn't Always Wrong," Singer said of the Pope, "I sometimes think that he and I at least share the virtue of seeing clearly what is at stake." The Culture of Life based on the sanctity-of-life ethic is at stake. The Pope and the Meister Singer are poles apart. "That day had to come," states Singer, "when Copernicus proved that the earth is not at the center of the universe. It is ridiculous to pretend that the old ethics make sense when plainly they do not. The notion that human life is sacred just because it's human is medieval."
There are a number of things that are "plain." One is that Copernicus did not "prove" that the earth is not at the center of the universe. He proposed a theory based on the erroneous assumption that planets travel in perfect circles and hypothesized that the sun was at the center, not of the universe, but of what we now refer to as the solar system, Another is that the sacredness of life is a Judaeo-Christian notion, not an arbitrary fabrication of the Middle Ages. Yet another is that it is unethical to kill disabled people just because they are disabled.

At a Princeton forum Professor Singer remarked that he would have supported the parents of his disabled protesters, if they had sought to kill their disabled offspring in infancy. This is the kind of unkind remark that will ensure that his disabled protesters will continue to protest.
An additional error in Singer's thinking is the assumption he makes that the suffering (or happiness) of individuals can somehow be added to each other and thus create "all this suffering in the world." C. S. Lewis explains that if you have a toothache of intensity x and another person in the room with you also has a toothache of intensity x, "You may, if you choose, say that the total amount of pain in the room is now 2x. But you must remember that no one is suffering 2x." There is no composite pain in anyone's consciousness. There is no such thing as the sum of collective human suffering, because no one suffers it.
Yet another error in Singer's thinking is that philosophy should be built up solely on the basis of rational thinking, and that feelings and emotions should be distrusted, if not uprooted. Concerning the infant child, he advises us, in Practical Ethics, to "put aside feelings based on its small, helpless and — sometimes — cute appearance," so we can look at the more ethically relevant aspects, such as its quality of life. This coldly cerebral approach is radically incompatible with our ability to derive any enjoyment whatsoever from life. By "putting feelings aside," we would be putting enjoyment aside. It is not the mind that becomes filled with joy, but the heart. Thus the man (Peter Singer) who allegedly prizes happiness is eager to de-activate the very faculty that makes happiness possible. Dr. David Gend, who is a general practitioner and secretary of the Queensland, Australia, branch of the World Federation of Doctors who Respect Human Life, suggests that Singer's announcement of the collapse of the sanctity-of-life ethic is premature:
Nevertheless, Herod could not slaughter all the innocents, and Singer will not corrupt the love of innocence in every reader. As long as some hearts are softened by the image of an infant stirring in its sleep, or even by their baby's movements on ultrasound at sixteen weeks, Singer's call to "put feelings aside" in killing babies will reek of decay."
Reason and emotion are not antagonistic to each other. This is the assumption intrinsic to Cartesian dualism in the integrated person, reason and emotion form an indissoluble unity. For a person to set aside his feelings, therefore, in order to view a situation "ethically" is tantamount to setting aside his humanity. It is precisely this utter detachment from one's moral feelings, particularly relevant in the case where an individual experiences no emotions whatsoever while holding an infant, that is suggestive of a moral disorder. Singer seems to view practical ethics the way one views practical mathematics. But this is to dehumanize ethics. Perceiving the ethical significance of things is not a specialized activity of reason. There is a "moral sense" (James Q. Wilson) and a "wisdom in disgust" (Leon Kass), a "knowledge through connaturality" (Jacques Maritain), and a "copresence" (Gabriel Marcel), that involves the harmonious integration of reason and emotion.
"The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of," said Pascal. Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio, author of Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, finds scientific evidence that "Absence of emotion appears to be at least as pernicious for rationality as excessive emotion ... Emotion may well be the support system without which the edifice of reason cannot function properly and may even collapse." The ethic that is more likely to "collapse," therefore is not one that is based on the personal integration of reason and emotion, but the rational approach that is dissociated from emotion and thereby left one-sided, vulnerable, and counterproductive.
Professor Singer underscores the importance of reason, broadmindedness, and compassion. But his emphasis on reason displaces human feelings. His advocacy of broadmindedness causes him to lose sight of the distinctiveness of the human being (he does not object to sexual "relationships" between humans and non-human animals). And his sensitivity for compassion is exercised at the expense of failing to understand how suffering can have personal meaning. In the end, his philosophy is one-sided and distorted. It plays into the Culture of Death because it distrusts the province of the heart, fails to discern the true dignity of the human person, and elevates the killing of innocent human beings — young and old — to the level of a social therapeutic.ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
DeMarco, Donald. "Peter Singer: Architect of the Culture of Death." Social Justice Review 94 no. 9-10 (September/October 2003):154-157Reprinted with permission of Social Justice Review.
SOcial Justice Review is a pioneer American journal of Catholic social action founded in 1908 by Frederick P. Kenkel. It is the official organ of the Catholic Central Union of America. SJR is published bi-monthly. Subscribe by calling 314-371-1653 or click here.

We must debate mercy killing of disabled babies, say top doctors | News | This is London

We must debate mercy killing of disabled babies, say top doctors News This is London

We must debate mercy killing of disabled babies, say top doctors05.11.06
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Severely disabled: Charlotte Wyatt's parents fought to keep her alive
A doctors' group today called for a debate on the mercy killing of disabled babies.
The medical profession should examine the "active euthanasia" of desperatelyill newborns, said the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology.
It wants an inquiry into whether the "deliberate intervention to cause the death of an infant" should be legalised.
The proposal met with a furious response from some quarters last night.
Labour MP Jim Dobbin compared it to the eugenics policies of the Nazis and said: "This sends the message that only the perfect are acceptable and the disabled can be discarded."
The college suggested that decisions on when young babies should be killed or allowed to die should depend not only on the gravity of their condition.
Its submission to an inquiry on the ethics of treatment for severely ill and disabled newborns raises the question of whether such children should be killed if they are not wanted by their parents.
The study comes against the background of growing acceptance of the ideas of euthanasia, suicide and hastening death for mortally sick adults and the dying elderly.
The college said of euthanasia in babies: "If assisted dying legislation is to be anticipated or enacted at the other end of life, now would be a pertinent time to discuss this."
The Disability Rights Commission said it would vehemently oppose such a move.
"It is morally reprehensible to place the value of one life above another," said a spokesman.
John Wyatt, a neonatologist at University College London Hospital, said euthanasia would turn medicine into social engineering where those considered worthless were doomed to die.
Any law allowing newborn babies to be killed would cover cases like that of Charlotte Wyatt, who was born three months prematurely, weighing just one pound and with severe brain and lung damage.
Doctors wanted to switch off her life support machine but her parents - who have now separated - fought to keep her alive.
Charlotte has confounded medical opinion and is now three years old. However, she is severely disabled and needs constant medical care.
The call for a discussion on euthanasia was made in a report for an inquiry into the ethics of treatment of premature babies conducted by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics. The highly influential medical forum's final report is to be published later this month.
There is increasing debate over abortion and the survival of babies born at ever-earlier stages of pregnancy. Those delivered after 23 weeks in the womb often survive yet abortion laws allow termination of pregnancy at 24 weeks.
The emotion behind the debate has been deepened by film showing a 12-week-old foetus moving its limbs and 'walking' in the womb.
Some doctors consider, however, that a baby born so prematurely and who survives thanks to modern medical treatment is likely to be so badly disabled that worthwhile life is impossible.
At the same time, Labour's Mental Capacity Act allows adults to order their own deaths in advance through 'living wills' or appoint 'attorneys' who can tell doctors to let them die if they are desperately sick.
Government legal advisers are also considering downgrading euthanasia from its status.
Any such move is unlikely to become law in the near future although pro-euthanasia MPs and peers are trying to establish a euthanasia law for adults.
The college's report, signed by its ethics chief Dr Susan Bewley, said the Nuffield inquiry should "think more radically about non-resuscitation, withdrawal of treatment decisions, the best interests test and active euthanasia" in the care of sickly newborns.
It added that concerns over suffering "might lead to a positive argument for resuscitation limits for the extremely premature infant or to intentional assisted dying".
The college also raised the question of "whether there should be other factors for babies, such as being wanted by their parents or other carers and having the potential to make some, even if small, contribution to wider society".

Nazi Persecution of the Disabled: Murder of "The Unfit"

Nazi Persecution of the Disabled: Murder of "The Unfit"

NAZI PERSECUTION OF THE DISABLED: MURDER OF "The Unfit"The Nazi persecution of persons with disabilities in Germany was one component of radical public health policies aimed at excluding hereditarily "unfit" Germans from the national community. These strategies began with forced sterilization and escalated toward mass murder. The most extreme measure, the Euthanasia Program, was in itself a rehearsal for Nazi Germany's broader genocidal policies. It is estimated that 275,000 adults and children were murdered because of their disabilities.


The ideological justification conceived by medical perpetrators for the destruction of the "unfit" was also applied to other categories of "biological enemies," most notably to Jews and Roma (Gypsies). Compulsory sterilization and "euthanasia," like the "Final Solution," were components of a biomedical vision which imagined a racially and genetically pure and productive society, and embraced unthinkable strategies to eliminate those who did not fit within that vision.Throughout this Special Focus page and its related links, you will see translations of terms used during the Nazi regime; please note that although many of these terms are unacceptable or offensive today, they are included here as examples of Nazi terminology and the propaganda campaign used to justify mass murder.
HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCELinks:
Euthanasia ProgramGassing OperationsMosaic of VictimsThe Handicapped(USHMM Library bibliography)The Mentally and Physically Handicapped: Victims of the Nazi Era(USHMM brochure)Crying Hands: Eugenics and Deaf People in Nazi Germany(USHMM Library featured item)The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution(USHMM Library featured item)The Nazi Persecution of Deaf People(Panel Presentation, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, August 2001)

Welcome to The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation

Welcome to The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation


Learning from Deadly Dutch Mistakes


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The Netherlands has earned a dubious distinction in recent years as one of the suicide capitals of the world.Euthanasia of adults and teenagers has been legal there since 2002 and the Dutch Royal Medical Association recently made international headlines by persuading the Dutch government to establish a committee to regulate infant euthanasia. Not that doctors there needed the government’s blessing to practice their healing arts: By their own accounting, Dutch physicians had already been euthanizing about 15 sick babies each year.Euthanasia advocates hail the Dutch model as progressive and reasonable, offering a humane escape from this fallen world for everyone from terminally ill cancer patients to depressed adolescents and sickly infants. If they want to die (or, in the case of newborns, if their parents wish they had never been born), who has the right to stop them?Read Entire Article From PoliticalMavens.com . . .
Read Wesley’s J. Smith Comments . . .

Colleen Carroll Campbell on Infant Euthanasia on National Review Online

Colleen Carroll Campbell on Infant Euthanasia on National Review Online

March 13, 2006, 8:18 a.m.Chilling ProtocolEnding young life — now, and even here.By Colleen Carroll Campbell
When little Chanou was born in 2000 with a rare and painful illness that leads to abnormal bone development, doctors gave the Dutch infant less than three years to live. As it turns out, she only had seven months.


That’s when her parents and physicians, discouraged by her grim prognosis, joined forces to do something that has become increasingly accepted in the Netherlands: They euthanized her.
“It is in some ways beautiful,” Dutch pediatrician Eduard Verhagen told the London Times, when describing the dying moments of children like Chanou. “But it is also extremely emotional and very difficult.”
Not as difficult as it should be. In the Netherlands, euthanasia of teenagers and adults is legal and baby euthanasia — already practiced among Dutch doctors — will soon be sanctioned by the government. According to the Times, a committee established at the urging of the Dutch Royal Medical Association will begin regulating baby euthanasia in a few weeks. Its standard for deciding who lives and dies will be Verhagen’s own invention, the Groningen Protocol.
The Groningen Protocol is chilling, not only because of its audacity in attempting to judge the worth of human lives but because of its subjectivity in making those judgments. The protocol says that a newborn can be euthanized if his diagnosis and prognosis are “certain,” his suffering is “hopeless and unbearable,” and his quality of life is “very poor,” according to the child’s parents and “at least one independent doctor.”
That standard assumes that physicians are infallible, our current medical knowledge is complete, and human beings are omniscient. How else could one assess with certainty another’s prognosis, experience of suffering, and quality of life? We can know a child suffers; we can know a disease has no known cure. But we cannot pronounce with certainty that another person has no hope or that his suffering has rendered his life worthless. Verhagen himself suggested as much when he told the Times, “No doctor likes to do this. You will always ask yourself, ‘Is there something I have not thought of?’ That is why it needs to be done under a spotlight: you can never, ever be wrong.”
But human beings will be wrong. Discouraged doctors, distraught parents, and distant bureaucrats will make mistakes. And even when their deadly decisions conform perfectly to the protocol, they will commit grave evil by destroying innocent human life in a futile quest to destroy suffering itself.
Americans may be tempted to think that such things could never happen here. But support for infant and child euthanasia has a long history in the United States, stretching from the founding days of the Euthanasia Society of America in 1938 to the recent pronouncements of Peter Singer, a prominent Princeton ethicist who favors a parent’s right to kill disabled newborns.
The threat of euthanasia is already a reality for some American children. Haleigh Poutre, the 12-year-old Massachusetts girl severely beaten by her stepfather last fall, had spent only eight days in the hospital when her state custodians began fighting for the right to remove her ventilator and feeding tube. Doctors had diagnosed her condition as a persistent vegetative state, but Haleigh recovered before they could euthanize her.
Haleigh’s case reminds us that child euthanasia can happen in any nation that has lost respect for the intrinsic value of life and the inviolable dignity of the person. The chilling reality is that although our depraved indifference to the sanctity of human life may not be as advanced as Holland’s, we are moving in that direction.
— Colleen Carroll Campbell, an NRO contributor, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.
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