Surely the true reason that Singer is reviled is his rejection of "Speciesism," the idea that human interests matter more than similar interests in a nonhuman being. What he rejects here, and the reason the Catholic Church might well take issue with him, is society's equation of human form with humanity in the moral sense. This has roots in Aristotle and wends its way into the Catholic Church via Aquinas. In bioethics, speciesism supports a love affair with the human form that is detrimental to the interests of human and nonhuman alike. It is also detrimental to the interests of the actual disabled community, who have been devalued in proportion to their alleged lack of resemblance to the "human" form. Singer argues that the measure of value is whether or not a being has interests, not whether or not a being has a human form. His theory does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, disability or species.

Our current love affair with the human form has led to a distortion of priorities in bioethics. Suppose an otherwise healthy and lively individual is desperately in need of a heart in order to continue living (this is the situation of one of my current students). There are, at present, a host of people who have no remaining interests, namely those in a Persistent Vegetative State (PVS). One of those people may well have a heart that could be donated to preserve the life and fulfill the continuing interests of this person and those who surround her. Nevertheless, our love affair with the human form keeps us from harvesting this heart. Our definition of brain death cannot be made to encompass humans who still breathe on their own, although it can be extended to humans who breathe on respirators, if their families are inclined to donate that heart. At the same time, were there a perfectly happy, very conscious baboon whose heart could be used, we would have no difficulty thwarting the interests of the baboon in favor of the human. The person who is desperately in need of a compatible heart is disabled as a result, the term "disabled" does not really apply appropriately to someone in a PVS, an anencephalic infant, or someone who meets the criteria for whole brain death (brain dead in the legal sense). The rejection of speciesism would be beneficial for the disabled community.

What the rejection of speciesism (and other isms of domination) would not be good for is the list of people who benefit from it, and that list is very long indeed. It encompasses those who perform animal experiments, the meat industry, and others who exploit animals as though their interests were less important. It is also antithetical to capitalism and the exploitation of the peoples of less developed countries. If the interests of the starving child in Appalachia, the starving child in Zimbabwe, and the privileged members of the upper middle and upper classes are to be given equal moral weight, our behavior in the world would need to be radically altered. As one rather famous rule utilitarian once quoted another rather famous social contract theorist as saying to him "The great thing about our theories is that they don't entail we have to give up any of our money!"

I do not personally consider myself to be a utilitarian. I would locate my own theories somewhere in the vicinity of feminist/care-based/ecological-feminist views that recognize a variety of values, including those often overlooked in traditional ethical theory (love, caring, particularity, attention), and which reject all of the "isms" of domination. Nevertheless, I admire both Singer's consistency and his rejection of our dangerous bigotry in favor of those who most closely resemble us in superficial ways, ways irrelevant to moral value. I think we are afraid of Singer because he strikes at the heart of this bigotry, and the society and institutions we have built on its foundation.

-- Louisa Moon, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy, MiraCosta College (posted 3/9, 9:38 a.m., E.S.T.)

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