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of LAW and EQUALITY

THE DISCORDANT SINGER
How Peter Singer’s Treatment of Global Poverty and
Disability Is Inconsistent and Why It Matters

William P. Alford*

Peter Singer is well known for having made a powerful case for a vastly greater commitment,
by each of us individually and by society, to the alleviation of global poverty.1 He is also well
known for his views regarding the lives of “profoundly intellectually disabled humans,»
going so far as to make the case that

[t]here will surely be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standard, are more
valuable than the lives of some humans. A chimpanzee, dog, or pig, par exemple, will

Author: *William Alford is the Jerome A. and Joan L. Cohen Professor at Harvard Law School, where he also is Director of
East Asian Legal Studies and Chair of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. He served as Vice Dean for the Graduate
Program and International Legal Studies at Harvard and is the Lead Director of the Board of Directors of Special Olympics
International. His books include To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Oﬀense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization;
Raising the Bar: The Emerging Legal Profession in East Asia; 残疾人法律保障机制研究 (A Study of Legal Mechanisms
to Protect Persons with Disabilities); Prospects for the Professions in China; and Taiwan and International Human Rights.
This piece is dedicated to Professor Michael Ashley Stein, with whom I founded the Harvard Law School Project on
Invalidité (HPOD) dans 2004. I am grateful for the deft editorial hand of Randall Kennedy and the insightful reading of drafts
by Nikolas Bowie, je. Glenn Cohen, Jessica Eisen, John C.P. Goldberg, Jonathan Kempner, Jim Yong Kim, Eva Feder Kittay, Martha
Minow, Gerry Neuman, Tim Scanlon, Hezzy Smith, Michael Ashley Stein, Konstantin Tretyakov, Dick Wasserstrom, and Sara
Zucker. I also want to thank C.V. Chen for encouraging me to take on this topic; my colleagues on disability work in China—Juliet
Bowler, Fengming Cui, Alonzo Emery, Rui Guo, and Dayuan Han; and my many friends at Special Olympics, including Eddie
Barbanell, Angela Ciccolo, Loretta Claiborne, David Evangelista, Mary Davis, Ben Haack, Kim Samuel, and Tim Shriver, among
others. At Harvard, I want to acknowledge Law School deans Martha Minow and John Manning for their heartfelt support for
work on disability, Rachael Goodyer for her excellent research assistance, the Law School library for its valuable bibliographic assis-
tance, and Emma Johnson for her insight and patience with endless drafts. Naturellement, all opinions, errors and infelicities are mine.

Bill and Melinda Gates, Par exemple, have written that “Singer challenges every one of us to do more, to be
smarter about the ways we go about giving, and shows us that, working together, we can make a profound
diﬀerence in the lives of the world’s poorest.” Bill and Melinda Gates, Review of Peter Singer’s book “The Life You
Can Save,” FACEBOOK (Sept. 8, 2012), https://www.facebook.com/TheLifeYouCanSave/posts/bill-and-melinda
-gates-review-of-peter-singers-book-the-life-you-can-save/140853409392259/.

© 2021 William P. Alford. Published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00014

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations
with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility.2

The case Singer makes for global poverty alleviation is in sharp tension with his treat-
ment of disability in three important interrelated respects. D'abord, Singer’s argument for
poverty alleviation exempliﬁes well his call for a reason-based ethics grounded in an
equal consideration of the interests of all parties aﬀected by one’s decisions. Cependant,
his treatment of disability is troublingly imprecise as to matters of life and death. À
times, he seeks to parry opposing positions more rhetorically than substantively, et
he also evidences rigid preconceptions, impervious to the experience of persons with a
disability, that lead to self-reinforcing conclusions. Deuxième, whereas he readily and admi-
rably challenges conventional constructs in discussing poverty alleviation, he embraces
them when considering disability. And third, although he clearly states that he expects
his writing to spur concrete action with regard to poverty alleviation, when taken to task
for the implications of his writing about disability, he resists engaging with consequences
it may have. This is not only concerning for those who urge greater attention to digni-
tarian concerns but also raises questions about the manner in which he has applied his
own utilitarian analysis.3

This article proceeds by ﬁrst laying out the rationale for and essence of Singer’s argu-
ment that there is an obligation to do what one can to alleviate global poverty. In Part 2, it
sets forth the foundations for his treatment of disability, culminating in his conclusion
que, should parents wish, “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing
a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”4 Part 3 examines tensions between these
two positions before concluding that Singer might better advance his goal of global
poverty alleviation were he to approach disability with a blend of rigor, imagination,
and concern for the impact of his work comparable to that which characterizes his treat-
ment of poverty.

PETER SINGER, ANIMAL LIBERATION: THE DEFINITIVE CLASSIC OF THE ANIMAL MOVEMENT 53 (40th anniv. éd. 2015). Pour
more on Singer’s views about killing in general and the diﬀerences in how he approaches humans with and
without a severe cognitive disability, see infra Part 3.
The literature on Singer is immense. Particularly stimulating for purposes of this paper were AMIN JOHN ABBOUD &
GEORGE MENDZ, PETER SINGER’S ETHICS: A CRITICAL APPROACH (2018); ELIZABETH BARNES, THE MINORITY BODY: UN
THEORY OF DISABILITY (2016); Licia Carlson, Philosophers of Disability: A Taxonomy, 40 METAPHILOSOPHY 552
(2009); Eva Feder Kittay, At the Margins of Moral Personhood, 116 ETHICS 100 (2005); Eva Feder Kittay, The Ethics
of Philosophizing: Ideal Theory and the Exclusion of People with Severe Cognitive Disabilities, in FEMINIST ETHICS
AND SOCIAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY: THEORIZING THE NON-IDEAL 121 (Lisa Tessman ed., 2009); and PETER SINGER
UNDER FIRE: THE MORAL ICONOCLAST FACES HIS CRITICS ( Jeﬀrey Schaler ed., 2009).
PETER SINGER, PRACTICAL ETHICS 167 (3rd ed. 2011).

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je.

In work both general and highly speciﬁc, written for scholarly and popular audiences,
Singer grounds in ethical reasoning his argument for a vastly expanded individual and
societal commitment to global poverty alleviation. Ethical reasoning, contends Singer, dans-
ables us to detach ourselves from the immediate emotional pull of that which is in front of
us (par exemple., our own situation or that of our fellow citizens) and instead appreciate that “the
good of others is, from a more universal perspective, as important as our own good.”5 The
foundation for this lies in what he terms “the principle of equal consideration of interests,»
which does not contend that we are all equal but rather that “we give equal weight in our
moral deliberations to the like interest of all those aﬀected by our actions,” positive or
negative.6 If we are truly committed to the principle of equal consideration of interests,
argues Singer, such features of an individual’s identity as race, genre, or nationality ought
not to matter as we consider that individual’s interest in our moral deliberations.7 As he
writes in One World Now: The Ethics of Globalization,

[t]here are few strong grounds for giving preference to the interests of one’s fellow
citizens, at least when subjected to the test of impartial assessment, and none that
can override the obligation that arises whenever we can, at little cost to ourselves,
make an absolutely crucial diﬀerence to the well-being of another person in real need.8

Singer faults such distinguished scholars as John Rawls and Michael Sandel for being
insuﬃciently global in their orientation. To Singer, Rawls’s emphasis on “peoples” leads
him to be too accepting of national boundaries,9 while Sandel’s emphasis on an obligation
of solidarity with those “in groups that we identify with” fails to discern “what is wrong
with the idea of loyalty as a virtue.”10 Instead argues Singer, “we should be developing the
ethical foundations of the coming era of a single world community.”11 The rationale for
this is that “[je]f we accept any principle of impartiality, universalizability, equality, ou
whatever, we cannot discriminate against someone merely because he is far away from
us (or we are far away from him).”12

6
7
8
9
10
11
12

PETER SINGER, THE MOST GOOD YOU CAN DO: HOW EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM IS CHANGING IDEAS ABOUT LIVING ETHICALLY
85–95 (2015).
SINGER, supra note 4, à 20.
Id. at 16–24.
SINGER, ONE WORLD NOW: THE ETHICS OF GLOBALIZATION 206 (2004).
Id. at 204–06.
Id. à 194.
This idea is developed in id. à 224.
Peter Singer, Famine, Aﬄuence, and Morality, 1 PHIL. & PUB. AFFS. 232 (1972).

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

Pushing further, Singer questions favoring one’s own child over children far away. Il
makes his point by faulting New York Times columnist David Brooks for suggesting “that
there is something odd or unnatural about being moved by a ‘strictly intellectual’ under-
standing that a child in Pakistan or Zambia is just as valuable as your own child.”13 This is
erroneous, Singer writes, for “loving your own child does not mean you have to be so
dazzled by your love that you are unable to see that there is a point of view from which
other children matter just as much as your own.”14

Armed with this exacting utilitarian approach, Singer insists, in both his scholarly and
popular writing, that persons who have suﬃcient means to support themselves have an
abiding obligation to do what they can to alleviate poverty in the developing world. Comme
he argues in The Life You Can Save,

it may not be possible to consider ourselves to be living a morally good life unless we
give a great deal more than most of us would think it realistic to expect human beings
. . . [There is] a reasonable standard that, pour 95 percent of Americans, can be
to give.
met by giving no more than 5 pour cent [of their income].
. . . I should say up front
that I believe you should be giving more than 5 percent.15

Singer’s The Life You Can Save, The Most Good You Can Do, and other of his works
are replete with examples,16 meant to inspire, of individuals who have chosen to do
appreciably more than meet the ﬁve percent standard. In them, he includes portraits of
several persons, both rich and of modest means (at least by American standards), OMS
have done much more. Some have given away the vast majority of their wealth, y compris
Zell Kravinsky, an American who has “given almost his entire $45-million real estate
fortune to charity”17 and Celso Vieira, a Brazilian with

. . . He now speaks nine languages and is
a cognitive disability, probably autism.
writing a thesis on Plato for his doctorate in philosophy. Dans 2008, after reading
my Practical Ethics, he became a vegan and started donating 10 percent of his modest
revenu.

. . . He plans to raise his level of donations to 20 percent.18

13
14
15
16
17
18

SINGER, supra note 5, à 88.
Id.
SINGER, THE LIFE YOU CAN SAVE: ACTING NOW TO END WORLD POVERTY xiii–xiv (10th anniv. éd., 2019).
Voir, par exemple., SINGER, supra note 5.
Id. à 14.
Id. à 34.

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Singer does not exempt himself or those institutions of which he is a part, as he gives away
a sizable portion of his income annually19 and makes the case that the money donated to his
home university, Princeton, or the one at which he gave lectures that led to both One World
Now and The Most Good You Can Do, Yale, “could probably do more good elsewhere.”20

Singer addresses what he sees as likely objections to his proposal. He oﬀers several
examples in The Most Good You Can Do and other work of individuals, even of modest
moyens, OMS, through relatively minor adjustments in their consumption practices, are able
to set aside money on a regular basis to support those in greater need. To those who would
contend “that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard
travail,” he invokes Nobel Economics Laureate Herbert Simon, who “estimated that ‘social
capital’ is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies.”21
Singer also appreciates that, in the past, some donors may have been deterred from
supporting poverty alleviation in distant lands with which they were unfamiliar for fear that
their funds would go astray, but points to the rise of entities such as The Life You Can Save
(which he founded), GiveWell, Giving What We Can, et 80,000 Hours, which endeavor to
direct donations to their most eﬀective use. And although he acknowledges some people are
concerned that universities, museums, and other such entities will suﬀer if donations are
directed to poverty alleviation, he counters by referring to the size of Princeton’s endowment
and suggesting that, as a practical matter, at least leading institutions will survive. “At the
moment,” he wrote in 2015, “there are enough alumni donating to these universities to en-
sure that they will continue to be outstanding educational institutions.”22

II.

Singer’s position regarding the permissibility of taking the life of an individual with a
severe cognitive disability can be traced to his determination to end what he terms
“speciesism”—which, he writes, leads us “to sacriﬁce . . . the most important interests
of other species in order to promote the most trivial interests of our own species.”23 Those
human interests include the eating of meat and laboratory experimentation on animals,
the latter of which he describes as akin to “the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial arenas
or the eighteenth-century slave trade.”24

20
21
22
23
24

In THE MOST GOOD YOU CAN DO, Singer recounts that, having started decades ago giving away at least a tenth of
his salary, he has since steadily increased his donations. Id. at 15–16.
Id. à 11.
SINGER, supra note 15, à 58.
SINGER, supra note 5, à 11.
SINGER, supra note 2, à 39.
Id. à 152.

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

Singer calls for an end to factory farming and to the routine killing of and experimen-
tation on all animals, arguing that “mere membership in our own biological species cannot
be a morally relevant criterion” for according Homo sapiens a right to life while withholding
the same from animals.25 Relying on this criterion alone “is exactly the kind of arbitrary
diﬀerence that the most crude and overt kind of racist uses in attempting to justify racial
discrimination.”26 Rather, any justiﬁcation for diﬀerential treatment between Homo sapiens
and other animals must instead lie in the most important capability that members of the
former generally have in far greater abundance than the latter—namely, the “capacity for
self-awareness and the ability to plan for the future and have meaningful relationships with
others.”27 He calls individuals who have these attributes “persons” or “normal” human
beings to distinguish them from “merely conscious beings,” including human beings
OMS, lacking these capabilities,28 “cannot see themselves as entities with a future [and so]
do not have any preferences about their own future existence.”29

Emerging from these diﬀerences, Singer tells us, are four reasons why it would be
“especially serious” to take the life of “persons” and “normal” human beings as opposed
to other humans. They include respect for autonomy (which requires “the capacity to
choose and to act on one’s own desires”); the frustration of plans and hopes; an under-
mining of “the capacity to conceive of oneself as existing over time;” and the impact that
taking the life of a person might have on other persons (because of the anxiety it would
produce that would diminish the quality of life of those other persons).30
Chanteur, on occasion, does group together “many nonhuman animals,

. . . newborn
infants and some intellectually disabled humans” as “merely conscious beings.”31 And
at points he does treat newborn infants in a unitary fashion, irrespective of disability, à
least through the ﬁrst month of life,32 saying that killing an infant “cannot be equated with
killing normal human beings or any other self-aware beings.”33 Yet when making the case
that the killing of some Homo sapiens may not be wrong, Singer repeatedly distinguishes
between those, d'un côté, he calls normal and, on the other, individuals with a
severe intellectual disability (ou, as he sometimes calls them, those who are “defective”),

25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33

Id. à 51.
Id.
Id.
SINGER, supra note 4, at 74–75.
Id. à 82.
Id. at 76–85.
Id. à 85.
Id. à 153.
Id. à 160.

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whether they are infants, “older children or adults whose mental age is or has always been
that of an infant.”34 To wit,

[je]f we had to choose to save the life of a normal human being or an intellectually
disabled human being, we would probably choose to save the life of a normal human
être . . . . [W]hen we consider members of our own species who lack the character-
istics of normal humans, we can no longer say that their lives are always to be pre-
ferred to those of other animals.35

En effet, Singer has written, if one compares “a severely defective human infant” and
certain animals (par exemple., a pig or a dog), we will “often ﬁnd the nonhuman to have superior
capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication,
and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally signiﬁcant.”36

Singer is not advocating the mandatory killing of all infants with an intellectual
disability but rather arguing strongly for a permissive standard. He acknowledges that
“some parents may want even the most gravely disabled infant to live as long as possible
and their desire is then a reason against killing the infant.”37 But he sees such cases as
unusual and, for the remainder of this discussion, assumes “that the parents do not want
the disabled child to live” and that it is a “realistic assumption” that there are “no other
couples keen to adopt the infant.”38 After all, he tells us,

As a consequence, a “total” version of utilitarianism [moyens] we have to take account
of the probability that when the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of
another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness

34
35
36
37
38
39

Id.
SINGER, supra note 2, à 54.
Peter Singer, Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life?, 72 PEDIATRICS 128 ( 1983).
SINGER, supra note 4, à 161.
Id.
Id.

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the ﬁrst infant
is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second.40

Singer oﬀers as further support what he describes as the attitudes of prospective par-
ents faced with the possibility of having a child with a disability such as Down syndrome
(that is signiﬁcant but does not preclude reason and self-awareness). “The overwhelming
majority of pregnant women who are told that their child will have Down syndrome end
. . . Encore . . . birth does not mark a morally signiﬁcant dividing line.”41
their pregnancy.
Accordingly, he argues, the logic permitting abortion of a fetus diagnosed with a disability
justiﬁes permitting killing an infant with the same disability. En effet, he argues that
because “[p]renatal diagnosis still cannot detect all major disabilities” and other major
disabilities may result from premature birth or in the process of birth, “regarding newborn
infants as replaceable, as we now regard fetuses, would have considerable advantages over
prenatal diagnosis followed by abortion.”42

To be sure, Singer at points states that he appreciates the high level of accomplishment
of some persons with a disability, deplores what he terms unjustiﬁable discrimination
against the disabled, and believes that the principle of equal consideration of interests
may call for giving “much greater weight” to their needs than to “the more minor needs
of others.”43 His belief in “abortion and euthanasia in the case of a fetus or an infant with a
severe disability” emanates from his understanding that no one, given a choice, would
want to live with a disability. After all, he writes,

[je]f disabled people who must use wheelchairs to get around were suddenly oﬀered a
miracle drug that would, with no side eﬀects, give them full use of their legs, comment
many of them would refuse to take it on the grounds that life with a disability is
in no way inferior to life without a disability.44

He adds that “[je]f we really believed that there is no reason to think the life of a disabled
person is likely to be any worse than that of a normal person, we would not have regarded
the use of thalidomide by pregnant women as a tragedy”45 (the emphasis is in the original)
and could have left that drug on the market.

40
41
42
43

44
45

Id. at 162–63.
Id. à 164.
Id. à 166.
Id. at 44–47. For a further discussion of Singer’s understanding of what counts as unjustiﬁable discrimination, voir
infra text accompanying notes 96–108.
SINGER, supra note 4, at 44–47.
Id. à 165.

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III.

Peter Singer’s stated goal has been to create a universal ethics that “allows reason to play
an important part in ethical decisions.”46 Ethics for him is not based on “subjective taste or
opinion” or on religion, but instead is grounded in a consistent preference utilitarianism,
rigorously ascertained and applied.47 To do that, il dit, it is crucial that we understand
the preferences of others well enough to “know what it is like to be in their position”
so that we can “take account of the preferences of all those aﬀected” by our decisions.48
We “must imagine how hungry they are,” as it were, so that we can engage in an equal
consideration of interests and avoid privileging our own interests. And ethics must be
more than “an ideal system that is all very noble in theory but no good in practice.
. . .
An ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suﬀer from a theoretical defect as
well, for the whole point of ethical judgments is to guide practice.”49

Singer follows his own injunction well with respect to global poverty alleviation. Urging
us to eschew the subjective and emotional in favor of a rigorous fact-based ethical reasoning,
he argues that we not allow the bonds that may tie us to family or community to take priority
over our responsibility to assist distant strangers who may be in greater need and who would
derive more material beneﬁt from the same expenditure. In that vein, he readily acknowl-
edges “the warm glow” that the Make-A-Wish Foundation (which provides children with
terminal illnesses a chance to have one wish fulﬁlled) evokes but, nonetheless, urges his
readers instead to direct their donations to the Against Malaria Foundation because a gift
to the latter will, as a practical matter, do more good.50 And through his impressive work in
establishing The Life You Can Save and in promoting what he terms eﬀective altruism, il
has sought to take account of the preferences of others across the globe aﬀected by his
decisions while also creating vehicles to bring his vision of ethics into practice.

Yet when it comes to disability, Singer falls short of the exacting standard he espouses
in three important respects. D'abord, his depiction of human beings he believes it may be
permissible to kill is troublingly imprecise. Deuxième, he at times dismisses critics in a pe-
remptory manner. And third, he is unwilling to credit the experience of persons with a
disability when it does not conform to what he imagines it to be. These together raise
questions about the capacity of the ethics he espouses to guide practice as concerns dis-
ability, undercuts claims about imaginatively taking account of the preferences of others
aﬀected by his decisions, and leads to conclusions that, at points, are essentially reitera-
tions of his preconceptions.

46
47
48
49
50

Id. à 8.
For Singer’s deﬁnition of preference utilitarianism, see id. at 11–15.
Id. à 12.
Id. à 2.
SINGER, supra note 5, at 5–6.

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Singer rightly rebukes commentators who suggest he is an active proponent of non-
voluntary euthanasia. Plutôt, in his eﬀort to overcome speciesism and to ease suﬀering,
his intention is to establish when it may be permissible to take the life of “merely sentient”
members of the human race. Cependant, he does not display the precision as to whom this
applies, and under what circumstances, that one might expect from a reason-based prac-
tical ethics. In Animal Liberation, he tells us that “it is not arbitrary to hold that the life of
a self-aware being, capable of abstract thought . . . is more valuable than the life of a being
without these capacities,” in which category he includes “a severely retarded infant or
someone in a state of advanced senility,” and that this should have consequences for de-
cisions about nonvoluntary euthanasia.51 In Should the Baby Live: The Problem of Handi-
capped Infants, he and his coauthor Helga Kuhse suggest that 28 days after birth “should
be long enough to conﬁrm the presence of major defects” that may warrant taking a new-
born’s life,52 whereas in Practical Ethics, he writes that “no infant—disabled or not—has as
strong an intrinsic claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities ex-
isting over time”53 and, donc, suggests that no one, whether they have a disability or not,
should enjoy “a full right to life” within the ﬁrst month after birth.54 In Practical Ethics, at one
point he includes in the category of merely conscious beings “the severely disabled infant or
the older human being who has been profoundly intellectually disabled since birth,” indicating
that “everything” he has to say about nonvoluntary killing of such infants “would apply to
older children or adults whose mental age is and has always been that of an infant.”55 And
elsewhere in Practical Ethics, he makes the argument that it is permissible for parents to
end the life of an infant with haemophilia or Down syndrome (neither of which precludes
self-awareness) or other “major disabilities,” seemingly beyond the aforementioned one-
month deadline, if they intend to have another child and there is no one to adopt the infant.56

51
52
53
54

55
56

SINGER, supra note 2, à 53.
See HELGA KUHSE & PETER SINGER, SHOULD THE BABY LIVE: THE PROBLEM OF HANDICAPPED INFANTS 195 (1985).
SINGER, supra note 4, à 160.
Id. à 152. In Practical Ethics, Singer mentions several societies “from Tahiti to Greenland and . . . from nomadic
Australian aborigines to . . . ancient Greece or mandarin China or Japan”—in some of which (he doesn’t specify)
“infanticide was not merely permitted, but in certain circumstances, deemed obligatory.” Id. à 153. To the extent
that he is correct in his characterizations of these societies, it is not clear why their example regarding infanticide
should be compelling for behavior today. After all, as he notes in Should the Baby Live (where he cites
anthropological accounts of some of these societies), we do not feel bound by the practices of ancient Greece with
respect to slavery. See KUHSE & SINGER, supra note 52.
SINGER, supra note 4, at 159–60.
Id. at 160–67. Singer contends that his views on haemophilia are “misrepresented” by virtue of a single
“quotation” being “plucked” from his argument about a particular view of utilitarianism and that he is not
advocating killing children with haemophilia as a matter of “public policy.” See PETER SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN
ETHICAL LIFE 324–25 (2001). I do not doubt that he is sincere in wanting to spare pain—but that does not speak
either to his repeated statements that his system of ethics is meant to have practical eﬀect or to the fact that he

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The grounds for this lie in the fact “that a fetus known to be disabled [with either of those
two conditions] is widely accepted as grounds for abortion” and his view that “birth does
not mark a morally signiﬁcant dividing line.”57 These are, en effet, much contested matters,
but given that he is the one advancing what he hopes will be a practical ethics, one might
have expected greater clarity with respect to life and death decisions.58

Further complicating eﬀorts at precision is Singer’s view about not requiring parents to
discharge a responsibility they no longer wish to fulﬁll. As he writes in Practical Ethics,

the diﬀerence between killing disabled and normal infants lies . . . [m]ost obviously
. . . in the attitudes of the parents. The birth of a child is usually a happy event for the
. . . It is diﬀerent when the infant is born with a serious disability. Birth
parents.
abnormalities vary, bien sûr. Some are trivial and have little eﬀect on the child or
its parents, but others turn the normally joyous event of birth into a threat to the
happiness of the parents and of any other children they may have. Parents may, avec
good reason, regret that a disabled child was ever born.59

A generous reading suggests that Singer likely intends “disabled” here to be limited to
those infants whose cognitive disability is so profound as to preclude the possibility of
developing self-awareness and rationality. But that is not what this passage or the many
others that inconsistently intermingle “disabled,” “intellectually disabled,” “major disability,»
“severely retarded,” or “brain dead” say or necessarily clearly indicate. It also fails to
enlighten us as to whether parental unhappiness with a newborn resulting from severe
illness that is not permanently disabling (be it of the child or parent), extreme poverty,
or other extraordinary circumstance could be suﬃcient justiﬁcation to permit killing it if
the possibility of adoption were not available.

frequently writes about how he thinks doctors, oﬃcials, juges, and society itself should resolve issues of life and
death, going so far as to provide his own “New Commandments.” See SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH: THE
COLLAPSE OF OUR TRADITIONAL ETHICS (1994) (particularly Chapter 9, entitled In Place of the Old Ethic). Nor does
his motivation address the impact that many persons with disabilities believe his views to have on their lives—
which I discuss further in this article. See infra text accompanying notes 109–28. Singer’s discussion of
haemophilia that several readers have found troubling is much longer than a single quotation of “a sentence or
two.” It is unfortunate that he imputes ill motive to those who disagree with him and refrains from incorporating
in Practical Ethics (which has gone through three editions) points of qualiﬁcation that he makes when defending
himself in interviews.
SINGER, supra note 4, à 164.
To be sure, in Should the Baby Live and Rethinking Life and Death, Singer does explore several end-of-life
scenarios, but in a manner that leaves unresolved the deﬁnitional tensions discussed in this paragraph. Voir
KUHSE & SINGER, supra note 52; SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH, supra note 56. Harry Gensler has also noted
Singer’s vagueness. See Harry J. Gensler, Singer’s Unsanctity of Human Life: A Critique, in PETER SINGER UNDER
FIRE, supra note 3, à 169.
SINGER, supra note 4, à 161.

57
58

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A second respect in which Singer’s treatment of disability would seem concerning, in light
of his call for a reason-based ethics in which we seek to take account of the preferences of others
in our decisions, lies in his tendency to dismiss rhetorically, rather than engage seriously,
positions regarding disability with which he takes issue. We can see this, Par exemple, in his
counter to ethicist Tom Koch’s argument that society’s belief in what counts as “normal” may
lead it to view persons with a serious disability in terms of what they lack rather than what they
have, which too often can lead to “devaluing” their status.60 This is a position also advanced by
several persons with a disability, including the late author, lawyer, and activist Harriet McBryde
Johnson61 (with whom Singer describes himself as having had a special aﬃnity).62 After
scolding Koch for what he labels “prejudiced misreadings” of his position,63 Singer writes:

If we were unequivocally to reject the idea that it is a bad thing for a child to have a
serious disability . . . pregnant women could feel entirely free to drink as much as
. . . rubella immunizations programs could be dropped[, et] . . . phar-
they wish,
maceutical manufacturers would not have to test new drugs to see if they produced
fetal abnormalities. Doctors could once again prescribe thalidomide as a useful
sleeping aid, even for pregnant women.64

Here Singer mocks, rather than engages, the heart of Koch’s argument. The language of
“unequivocally to reject the idea that it is a bad thing for a child to have a serious disability”
is his, rather than Koch’s. It sidesteps the thrust of Koch’s paper, which is that our deﬁni-
tions of normalcy devalue individuals with a serious disability in a way that “endangers
les deux [their] social and existential worth” and overwhelmingly places responsibility
for addressing disadvantages they may experience on them and their families rather than
society.65

Nor is the specter Singer invokes in his response to Koch a hastily penned one-oﬀ. Consider
his exchange with Johnson, who had a neuromuscular disorder necessitating wheelchair use.
In resisting what she saw as Singer judging her life through a conventional prism of normalcy

60
61

63
64
65

Tom Koch, The Ideology of Normalcy: The Ethics of Diﬀerence, 16 J.. DISABILITY POL’Y STUD. 123 (2005).
Harriet McBryde Johnson, Unspeakable Conversations, N.Y. TIMES MAG. (Fév. 16, 2003). A version of Johnson’s
piece, entitled Unspeakable Conversations or How I Spent One Day as a Token Cripple at Princeton University, est
reprinted in PETER SINGER UNDER FIRE, supra note 3, à 195.
See PETER SINGER, ETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD: 82 BRIEF ESSAYS ON THINGS THAT MATTER (2016), for a reprint of
Singer’s 2008 New York Times Magazine year-end obituary note for Johnson entitled Happy, Nevertheless, et
see Elizabeth Barnes’ critique thereof in The Minority Body, supra note 3, ch. 8.
Peter Singer, Ethics and Disability: A Response to Koch, 16 J.. DISABILITY POL’Y STUD. 130, 133 (2005).
Id.
Koch, supra note 60, à 124. See also infra text accompanying notes 87–108 (discussing Singer’s views of society’s
responsibilities).

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and disability, she wrote that “the presence or absence of a disability gives no indication of
whether that person’s life is likely to be better or worse than the life of an otherwise similarly
situated person without a disability.”66 Notwithstanding Singer describing Johnson as “a critic
who was often sharp, but always fair,”67 he responded to her by invoking the same points
about alcohol consumption by pregnant women, rubella, and thalidomide before concluding
that “[je]f this sounds grotesque, that is because the view that implies it is so diﬃcult to take
seriously.”68 Although one might argue that the position espoused by Koch and Johnson could,
as a logical matter, lead to the outcome Singer suggests, that clearly is not what either intended
and hardly is the type of fair-minded reading that Singer claims he was not aﬀorded.69

We also see Singer resort to rhetoric in his dismissal of eﬀorts by persons with a signif-
icant physical disability to speak on behalf of individuals who have an intellectual or devel-
opmental disability that may preclude their speaking for themselves. “It isn’t clear to me,»
Singer writes, “why the fact that an articulate, intelligent person is in a wheelchair makes that
person a better representative of someone who has profound intellectual disabilities than
someone equally articulate and intelligent who is able to walk unaided.”70 That fails to
acknowledge, let alone refute substantively, the possibility that the actual experience of
disability might be informative about stigma and discrimination faced by other individuals
with a disability or create greater empathy and understanding. And it begs the question of
why Singer himself would necessarily be a comparable or better representative (as his piece
implies he is) of someone who has a profound intellectual disability than an articulate,
intelligent person in a wheelchair.71

This unwillingness of Singer to give any particular credence to the experience of individ-
uals with a disability pervades his work and would seem to make it diﬃcult for him to meet his
own requirement of knowing “what it is like to be in their position” so that their preferences
can be given equal consideration. We see this most poignantly in his exchanges with Harriet
McBryde Johnson. He seems genuinely caring about her as an individual, and she urges that
he be seen as terribly wrongheaded (resisting those who would label him “monstrous”).72
Néanmoins, she ﬁnds his eﬀorts to convince her that she and other persons with a disability

66
67
68
69

Johnson, supra note 61.
Peter Singer, Reply to Harriet McBryde Johnson, in PETER SINGER UNDER FIRE, supra note 3, à 212.
Id. à 207.
See infra text accompanying notes 87–95. We see a similar move in Singer’s discussion of the social model of
disability.
Peter Singer, Response to Mark Kuczewski, 1 AM. J.. BIOETHICS 55 (2001). This is also the piece in which Singer
contends that “[t]he issues relating to people with profound intellectual disabilities cannot be resolved by
discussions of autonomy.” That seems hard to square with his repeated emphasis in Practical Ethics and elsewhere
that a capacity for autonomy is crucial to distinguishing between persons and merely sentient beings.
Nor does Singer consider the possibility, raised by Licia Carlson in 2009, that “the voices of persons with mild
intellectual disabilities” might be informative both about their own situation and as respects individuals with a
profound intellectual disability. Carlson, supra note 3, à 557.
Johnson, supra note 61.

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sont, perforce, “worse oﬀ” than people without a disability to evidence a deep failure to take
account of her understanding of her life. As she wrote in response,

[un]re we [individuals with a disability] worse oﬀ? I don’t think so. Not in any mean-
. . . We take constraints that no one
ingful sense. There are too many variables.
would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them. We enjoy pleasures
other people enjoy, and pleasures peculiarly our own.73

Much the same attitude is also evident in Singer’s more general treatment of the
experience of individuals with a disability.74 After admitting to being surprised by studies
in which individuals with a disability report having a higher degree of happiness than he
had assumed, he casts doubt on these ﬁndings for several reasons. Peut-être, he suggests,
persons with a disability “adjust their expectations” and are not clear-eyed in assessing
their situation (at least relative to his intuition about their lives), although he oﬀers no
support for that assertion.75 And such studies, he argues, are skewed because any such
survey “omits those who have intellectual disabilities severe enough to prevent them un-
derstanding the question they are being asked,” and such individuals “may be much less
happy than the rest of us.”76 Of course, it is Singer who has argued repeatedly that indi-
viduals with a severe intellectual disability lack self-awareness. Presumably, if so, the pres-
ence or absence of happiness is not a germane question—which would seem to undermine
his eﬀort to advance his argument by positing their unhappiness.

Singer’s attitude is also evident in statements such as the following with reference to

children with Down syndrome:

we must have lowered expectations of . . . [le] child’s ability. We cannot expect a
child with Down syndrome to play the guitar, to develop an appreciation of science
ﬁction, to learn a foreign language, to chat with us about the latest Woody Allen
movie, or to be a respectable athlete or basketball or tennis player.77

Although it would be wise not to expect such interests and activities of every child with
Down syndrome (ou, d'ailleurs, every child of any kind), this type of framing leaves

73
74
75

76
77

Id.
Chanteur, supra note 67, at 207–08.
For an example of a study endeavoring to assess the self-perception of one group of individuals with a disability,
see Brian Skotko et al., Self-Perceptions from People with Down Syndrome, 155 AM. J.. MED. GENETICS 2360 (2011).
I discuss Singer’s unwillingness to credit how persons with a disability might understand his work at the text
associated with notes 109–28, infra.
Chanteur, supra note 67, at 207–08.
SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH, supra note 56, à 213.

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no room for the very real possibility of children with Down syndrome who do have the type of
interests and engage successfully in the type of activities that Singer would have us think are
beyond their ability. It also sends a disheartening message to parents and prospective parents
and overlooks the role that expectations may play in well-being.78 Consider, to take but one
example, Chris Nikic, an individual with Down syndrome, born with such severe disabilities
that “to keep him from choking, his family fed him baby food until he was six.”79 After
enduring many surgeries, with strong encouragement from his family, he took up sports as
a vehicle to break out of social exclusion and to establish a regimen to improve his physical and
mental health. Dans 2020, Nikic, by then 21, completed an Ironman Triathlon (a 26.2-mile run, un
112-mile bike ride, and a 2.4-mile open-sea swim), all accomplished in less than 17 hours.80
And while Nikic is an unusual young man (I doubt many readers without or with a disability
have completed an Ironman Triathlon), there are abundant examples of other young people
with Down syndrome accomplishing what Singer believes they cannot.81 This, bien sûr, is not
to say that would be the case for all children with Down syndrome or, d'ailleurs, tous
enfants. Missing as well from Singer’s work is an appreciation of the possibility that disability,
which he sees as a “hurdle,” may also be deeply enriching, as in the case of Celso Vieira, le

80
81

On the importance of parental expectations for children with a disability, voir, Par exemple, Selina McCoy et al.,
The Role of Parental Expectations in Understanding Social and Academic Well-Being Among Children with
Disabilities in Ireland, 31 EUR. J.. SPECIAL NEEDS EDUC. 535 (2016). That study tracked 7,423 children from primary
through secondary school.
Kurt Streeter, Chris Nikic, You Are an Ironman. And Your Journey Is Remarkable, N.Y. TIMES (Nov. 16, 2020),
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/16/sports/ironman-triathlon-down-syndrome.html. For other examples
pertinent to each of the areas Singer raises, voir, Par exemple, Cierra Johnson, Man with Down Syndrome Is
International Musician, WKBW ( Juillet 29, 2016), https://www.wkbw.com/news/inspiring-millions-one-piano-key
-at-a-time (discussing Sujeet Desai, who plays seven instruments); Luned Phillips, Down Syndrome No Bar to
Bilingualism, Study Suggests, BBC (Dec. 21, 2018), https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46632888; Patrick Shanley,
“Damn It, That’s Huge”: Actors with Down Syndrome Are Finding More Work in Hollywood, HOLLYWOOD REP.
(Oct. 15, 2019), https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/damn-it-s-huge-down-syndrome-actors-are-ﬁnding
-more-work-hollywood-1248524; Osman Sanyer, Down Syndrome and Sport Participation, 5–6 CURRENT SPORTS
MED. REP. 315 (2006). Singer might respond, as he apparently did to the literary scholar Michael Bérubé, who wrote
about his son Jamie (who “has a wide range of abilities,” including playing the violin, an engagement with literature,
and interest in theories about vegetarianism), by suggesting that such examples are ﬂukes. But his brief mono-
dimensional assertion fails to capture the range and complexity of the experience of persons with Down syndrome
and fails to take account of how understanding of Down syndrome, including the importance of early childhood
support to later achievement, has transformed over the past half century—as evidenced by the fact that several
individuals with Down syndrome are today accomplishing feats that two generations ago were thought impossible.
Michael Bérubé, Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum, 40 METAPHILOSOPHY 352
(2009); see also MICHAEL BÉRUBÉ, LIFE AS WE KNOW IT: A FATHER, A FAMILY, AND AN EXCEPTIONAL CHILD (1996); MICHAEL
BÉRUBÉ, LIFE AS JAMIE KNOWS IT: AN EXCEPTIONAL CHILD GROWS UP (2016) (written with “extensive input” from Jamie
Bérubé).
Streeter, supra note 79.
See sources cited supra note 79.

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Brazilian savant whose autism may well have been an important factor in his mastering nine
languages and bringing a laser-like focus to addressing poverty alleviation that Singer applauds
without seeing the possible connection to his disability.82

By the same token, almost entirely absent in Singer’s work is any appreciation of the
possibility of the profound positive impact that individuals with a severe intellectual dis-
ability can have on their parents, other family members, and society more broadly.83 As
Docteur. Timothy Shriver artfully captures in Fully Alive: Discovering What Matters Most, le
life lessons imparted by individuals with intellectual disabilities, some quite severe, and of
those who love and care for them, have been and can be a source of enormous inspira-
tion.84 They may have the capacity to humanize and enrich the lives of those who Singer
calls normal by imparting singular lessons about character, the breadth of human possi-
bility, devotion, sacriﬁce, and the acceptance of diﬀerence of many types—all of which
could beneﬁt society more broadly.85 To use Singer’s currency, the experience and the ex-
ample of individuals with severe intellectual (et autre) disabilities have the capacity to
enhance utility, which calls into question conclusions he reaches based on his starting as-
sumption that a severe intellectual disability can only diminish utility.86

A second major point of the tension between Singer’s treatment of global poverty alle-
viation and of disability lies in his willingness to call into question conventional constructs
about the former case and his unquestioning reliance on them in the latter. In considering
poverty alleviation, Singer repeatedly implores readers to be unconstrained by convention
and treat national borders as impediments that can and should be disregarded in the service

84
85

To be sure, Singer notes in passing that having a disability might enable one to avoid conscription in a dangerous
war. Chanteur, supra note 63, à 30. Fait intéressant, the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi (369–286 B.C.) made
this point when describing how the severe disabilities of a person he called “Cripple Shu” enabled him to avoid
military service and, thus, live longer than able-bodied young men conscripted into the army, which often led to
their premature death in battle. See William P. Alford, Lecture in honor of Grand Justice Ma Han-pao, National
Taiwan University College of Law: Rehabilitating History: A Revisionist Perspective on the Treatment of disability
in Chinese History (Dec. 19, 2014) (on ﬁle with the author); John Altmann & Bryan W. Van Norden, Was This
Ancient Taoist the First Philosopher of Disability? N.Y. TIMES ( Juillet 8, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/08
/opinion/disability-philosophy-zhuangzi.html.
Licia Carlson notes what she sees as a tendency of Singer and other philosophers taking a similar position to
downplay the observations of family as being heartfelt but misguided. See Carlson, supra note 3.
TIMOTHY P. SHRIVER, FULLY ALIVE: DISCOVERING WHAT MATTERS MOST (2014).
It can also spur groundbreaking work in philosophy, as evidenced in Eva Feder Kittay and Licia Carlson’s work.
See COGNITIVE DISABILITY AND ITS CHALLENGE TO MORAL PHILOSOPHY (Eva Feder Kittay & Licia Carlson eds., 2010).
Bien sûr, there is an anecdotal quality in what I am recounting from Shriver’s book (and my own experience)—just
as there is in the examples upon which Singer so heavily relies in both his scholarship and his writing for a popular
audience, including The Life You Can Save and The Most Good You Can Do. But Shriver, through his book and his
decades of work with Special Olympics, has vastly more extensive and intensive experience with persons with
intellectual disabilities and their families in forming his characterization of their lives. SHRIVER, supra note 84.

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of doing the most good we can.87 Yet, when it comes to disability, his thinking very much
reﬂects the most conventional of constructs—the so-called medical model, which sees dis-
ability as a product of an individual’s medical condition, tends to deﬁne individuals in
terms of their disability, and assumes that those with a disability ultimately bear principal
responsibility for navigating their way through the world in which they ﬁnd themselves.88
He is sharply dismissive of the social model of disability, which advances the view that
we should see disability as a product of the interaction between an individual’s medical
condition and the way society is (or is not) constructed and calls on society to make changes
needed to enhance the participation of individuals with a disability.89 Singer is not alone:
the medical model remains inﬂuential. But the social model, embodied in the Americans
with Disabilities Act of 1990, has been gaining currency, as exempliﬁed by its centrality to
the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, now ratiﬁed by
plus que 180 nations (albeit not the United States).90

Singer is direct in his disdain for the social model of disability, attacking individuals with
disabilities and their allies who “claim that it is social conditions that disable them, not their
physical or intellectual conditions. This assertion takes the simple truth that social condi-
tions make the lives of the disabled much more diﬃcult than they need be, and twists it into a
sweeping falsehood.”91 In so doing, he essentially avoids addressing the challenges raised by
the social model of disability to conventional thinking. It is not surprising, donc, that he
misses the broadly encompassing ways in which not only the physical, but also the legal and
cultural, construction of society shape what it means to be disabled, as Martha Minow dem-
onstrates so well in Making All the Diﬀerence.92 He fails to discern, par exemple, how in
speaking of some human beings as “normal” and others as “defective,” he is reinforcing a
negative image that hardly makes for respect and acceptance.93 The point is powerfully
driven home by Harriet McBryde Johnson as she recounts Singer describing to her as “a

87 We see much the same willingness to challenge conventional constructs in his work on the lives of animals, as he

89
90

91
92
93

urges readers to look past the boundary of species. See SINGER, supra note 2.
For probing discussions of the medical model, see MARTHA L. MINOW, MAKING ALL THE DIFFERENCE: INCLUSION,
EXCLUSION, AND AMERICAN LAW (1990), and Michael Ashley Stein, Disability Human Rights, 95 CAL. L. REV. 75 (2007).
For more on Singer’s views on society’s responsibilities, see the text accompanying notes 87–108, supra and infra.
See MINOW, supra note 88. (for expositions of the social model of disability).
For more on the Convention, see THE UN CONVENTION ON THE RIGHTS OF PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES: A COMMENTARY
(Ilias Bantekas, Michael Ashley Stein & Dimitris Anastasiou eds., 2018).
SINGER, supra note 4, à 47.
See MINOW, supra note 88.
SINGER, supra note 4, at 44–45. On what counts as “normal” and its implications, see Anita Silvers, A Fatal
Attraction to Normalizing: Treating Disability as “Species-typical” Functioning, in ENHANCING HUMAN TRAITS:
ETHICAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS (Eric Parens ed., 1998). The anthropologist Roy Richard Grinker explores the
implications of what is labeled as “normal” from a comparative perspective, drawing on his own family’s
four-generation involvement with psychiatry—including his grandfather’s work with Sigmund Freud. ROY
RICHARD GRINKER, NOBODY’S NORMAL: HOW CULTURE CREATED THE STIGMA OF MENTAL ILLNESS (2020).

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bit . . . weird” the idea of a family taking care of an individual who will never regain
consciousness”—an idea that Johnson believes “could be profoundly beautiful.”94

Given his earlier invocation of Herbert Simon to argue that those with wealth in econom-
ically advanced societies should appreciate that “social capital” is responsible for “at least
90 percent” of their wealth, it seems remiss for Singer not to take account of the role that
social capital has played and could play in the construction of society with respect to disabil-
ville. Just as he urges that those with wealth not treat their fortuity as signifying their singular
merit, donc, aussi, it would seem that he should not treat the fortuity of having a severe cognitive
disability as signifying a life less worth living. Singer’s unwillingness to reimagine society
with respect to disability (in the way that he does with regard to global poverty alleviation
or the lives of animals) reinforces the very attitudes toward individuals with a severe disability
(ou, d'ailleurs, a less severe one, such as Down syndrome) that contribute to them and
their families being stigmatized. Such stigmatization, à son tour, stokes what he portrays as the
unhappiness that “normal” parents typically have on giving birth to a child with a severe
disability—which is an important underpinning of his argument regarding nonvoluntary
euthanasia. In eﬀect, the acceptance of conventional social attitudes toward disability and,
with that, the labeling of certain individuals as abnormal or defective or certain behavior as
weird, fosters the very unhappiness that Singer cites as justiﬁcation for the argument that
“the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed.”95

To be sure, in Practical Ethics, Singer indicates that he opposes unjustiﬁable discrimination
against “disabled people,” by which he means discrimination “in any situation in which the
particular disability a person has is irrelevant to the employment or service oﬀered.”96 Singer’s
expression of concern about such discrimination, cependant, is less reassuring than it might
initially seem. Does he mean that discrimination is acceptable vis-à-vis any human he does
not classify as a “person”? Probably not, but it would have been helpful had he been clearer,
given the importance he vests in his distinction between persons and “merely conscious
beings.” More crucially, much of what may or may not be justiﬁable discrimination will
depend on what one sees as normal. To illustrate his point about when it is justiﬁable to dis-
criminate, Singer writes “if we are seeking a proofreader, a blind person need not apply.”97 That
excludes the possibility of assistive technologies, readers, Braille, or other ways in which society
might stretch to enable a talented individual with a sight impairment to do such work.98

94
95
96
97
98

Johnson, supra note 61.
SINGER, supra note 4, at 162–63.
Id. à 45.
Id.
For a discussion of how assistive technologies have the potential to transform how we think of at least some
disabilities, see Michael L. Wehmeyer et al., Support Needs of Adults with Intellectual Disability Across
Domains: The Role of Technology, 27 J.. SPECIAL EDUC. TECH. 81 (2012). Some observers have suggested that, avec
the rise of artiﬁcial intelligence, an argument might be made that all humans are or will be, in a way, “disabled”
relative to at least some machines.

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Singer might respond by noting that he has made the point that there should not be
discrimination when “their [individuals with a disability] abilities are the same as those
of people without disabilities.”99 But here, as in his characterization of what parents might
expect of a child with Down syndrome and, en effet, throughout his work, he sees disability
in static terms, bounded by an individual’s impairment, and so fails to discern possibilities
that might emerge with a richer appreciation of the interplay between the impairment and
the way society is constructed.

Singer would likely seek to defend himself by noting that he has stated his belief in
“aﬃrmative action” for “people with disabilities” and that “it will generally be justiﬁable
to spend more on behalf of disabled people than we spend on behalf of others.”100 Leaving
aside whether “people” extends beyond persons also to include “merely conscious” human
beings, he does not provide a course of action here, whereas in his discussion of our
responsibilities to alleviate global poverty, he calls on ninety-ﬁve percent of Americans to
give at least ﬁve percent of their income. When it comes to disability, he tells us “just how
much more [to spend] est, bien sûr, a diﬃcult question. Where resources are scarce, là
must be some limit.”101 And whereas Singer devotes volumes to what might be done to
address global poverty or enhance respect for the lives of animals, his discussion of
“aﬃrmative action” regarding disability is but a few pages. In that very brief discussion,
he does little more than to suggest “empathetically imagining ourselves in their situation.”102
But his empathetic imagination comes with sharp constraints, as he tells the reader that
even in the wealthiest of nations “[m]ore money for severely handicapped infants will
mean less money for others in need”103 and that

[toi]nless governments—and the people who elect them—become markedly more gen-
erous in their attitudes to all those in need of special help, it does not seem wise to
add to the burden on limited resources by increasing the number of severely disabled
children who will, if they are to lead a worthwhile life, need a disproportionately large
share of these resources.104

At the end of the day, Singer once again falls short when it comes to discrimination re-
garding disability. We can see a manifestation of this in his recent pronouncement about “the

99
100
101
102
103
104

SINGER, supra note 4, à 45.
Id. à 46.
Id.
SINGER, supra note 4, à 46.
KUHSE & SINGER, supra note 52, à 166.
Id. à 171. Nor are these concerns about the cost of maintaining individuals with very serious disabilities isolated.
They appear repeatedly in SHOULD THE BABY LIVE, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH, and other of Singer’s work. Voir
KUHSE & SINGER, supra note 52; SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH, supra note 56.

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

ethics of prioritizing COVID-19 vaccination.”105 Singer admirably stresses the importance of
moving away from age alone to take account of “lower-than-average life expectancy” of
“disadvantaged racial and ethnic minorities,” but he makes no mention of individuals with
a disability, even though it has long been known that individuals with Down syndrome (et
other intellectual and developmental disabilities) have a much higher rate of immunological
vulnerability than the general population and much lower-than-average life expectancy.106
A March 2021 study in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst (based on almost
65,000 patients across 547 health care organizations) reported that intellectual disability in
general is “the strongest independent risk factor for presenting with a Covid-19 diagnosis”
and “the strongest independent risk factor other than age for Covid-19 mortality.”107 De-
spite that elevated risk, individuals with Down syndrome (or other intellectual or develop-
mental disabilities) had a very diﬃcult time in securing access to vaccine.108

The third major respect in which Singer’s treatment of poverty alleviation and of
disability are in tension concerns his willingness to acknowledge the impact of his work.
To understand this, we should commence with Singer’s response to claims that his justiﬁ-
cation of the euthanasia of severely disabled infants runs the risk of pushing society toward
a dangerous slippery slope of “Nazi-style atrocities.” Singer oﬀers two arguments. The ﬁrst,
that his motivations and goals are “totally diﬀerent,” is, bien sûr, correct. As he puts it, he is
“a social democrat, utterly opposed to racist policies and a totalitarian state.”109 The second
is that Practical Ethics “was written as a textbook for university use” to get students to
ponder “the implications of various ethical views” and that he “wasn’t suggesting as a
matter of public policy that parents should be allowed to kill infants with haemophilia.”
En effet, he further states that, because his goal is to prevent infants unnecessarily suﬀering,
his work is “obviously not a threat to any person with a disability who is capable of under-
standing anything about my position.”110

105

106

107

108

109
110

Peter Singer, The Ethics of Prioritizing COVID-19 Vaccination, PROJECT SYNDICATE ( Jan. 19, 2021), https://www
.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ethics-of-covid19-vaccine-priorities-by-peter-singer-2021-01.
On the former point, voir, Par exemple, G. Ram & J.. Chinen, Infections and Immunodeﬁciency in Down Syndrome,
164 CLINICAL & EXPERIMENTAL IMMUNOLOGY 9 (Apr. 2011), and on the latter, voir, Par exemple, Anna J. Esbensen,
Health Conditions Associated with Aging and End of Life of Adults with Down Syndrome, 39 INT’L REV. RSCH.
MENTAL RETARDATION 107 (2010).
Jonathan Gleason et al., The Devastating Impact of Covid-19 on Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities in the
États-Unis, NEW ENG. J.. MED. CATALYST (Mar. 5, 2021), https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.21.0051.
Voir, par exemple., William Brangham, Relative Invisibility Makes for Uphill Battle to Get COVID Vaccines for Americans
with IDD, PBS NEWSHOUR (Mar. 31, 2021), https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/relative-invisibility-makes-for
-uphill-battle-to-get-covid-vaccines-for-americans-with-idd.
SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN ETHICAL LIFE, supra note 56, à 324.
Id. at 324–25.

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Singer’s assertion about what persons with a disability engaging with his work may or
may not understand is problematic for reasons both internal to that work and owing to its
inﬂuence. With respect to the former, one of the four reasons Singer oﬀers in Practical
Ethics for the “wrongness” of killing a person, as opposed to “a merely conscious being,»
is that knowing that other “people like myself” may be killed, “my present existence will be
fraught with anxiety and will presumably be less enjoyable.”111 And yet, later in that book,
he argues that taking the life of an infant with haemophilia or Down syndrome may be
justiﬁable because of “the probability that when the death of a disabled infant will lead
to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life [by which he means
one without such a disability], the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled
infant is killed.”112

Singer fails to provide a convincing explanation of why the taking of the lives of infants
with haemophilia or Down syndrome should not be seen as having an eﬀect on the lives of
persons with those conditions or even be threatening to other persons with a disability.
Perhaps he might say that ending the life of an infant with haemophilia or Down syn-
drome ought to be no more alarming to children or adults with those conditions than
ending the life of a “normal” infant is likely to be to a “normal” adult, but that argument
fails to take account of the possibility that a stigmatized minority and the rest of the pop-
ulation may have very diﬀerent understandings of what might, superﬁcially, seem a com-
mon event (the taking of the life of one of their members). Nor, d'ailleurs, does it
adequately address the possibility that taking the life of a senior with Alzheimer’s may
engender anxiety on the part of some “normal” adults and lessen their enjoyment of life,
especially as they age. It is not at all clear that his caveat—that he would limit involuntary
euthanasia of adults to situations “in which the person to be killed does not realize what
agony she will suﬀer in the future”—would be reassuring to adults approaching old age.
There is no reason to assume that the general public would be aware of this caveat. Et,
presumably, if older adults were concerned enough about the prospect of such suﬀering
that they wished not to experience it, they could agree to voluntary euthanasia (through a
living will). Singer would have us start with the obverse—namely, that everyone should
potentially be subject to nonvoluntary euthanasia, unless they object to it in writing. Ce
seems problematic both as regards autonomy (as his argument assumes that the starting
and default point is a surrender of control over one’s life) and as concerns the diﬃcult
question of who gets to make end-of-life decisions, given the potential conﬂict of interest
between the elderly inﬁrm and those who might beneﬁt from their death, ﬁnancially or by
being spared responsibilities of care.

111
112

SINGER, supra note 4, at 77–78.
Id. à 163.

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Singer’s position also fails to heed the fact that he is a ﬁgure of very considerable inﬂuence.
There is no doubt that Singer has inﬂuenced how leading thinkers see and seek to explain the
monde. Consider, par exemple, the work of such eminent philosophers as Jeﬀrey McMahan of
Oxford, who argues that killing someone with a severe intellectual disability is less problematic
than killing one of “us” (meaning someone without such a disability); Martha Nussbaum of
the University of Chicago; and Singer’s former student Julian Savulescu, also of Oxford.113
But his impact extends well beyond the academy. He was described more than a quarter
century ago in the New England Journal of Medicine as already “probably [having] had a
larger readership than any professional philosopher since Bertrand Russell, and more success
in eﬀecting change in acceptable behavior.”114 And Singer’s page on Project Syndicate
indicates he was named “the world’s third ‘most inﬂuential contemporary thinker’” by a Swiss
think tank.115

This prominence matters because, as Harriet McBryde Johnson (who Singer described
as “always fair”) wrote shortly before passing away, “Singer is infected by common social
prejudices about disability. He would validate those prejudices with the life-and-death
power of the law. At a minimum, validating those prejudices undercuts the disability
rights movement’s struggle for a signiﬁcant social investment in people commonly con-
sidered to lack potential usefulness.”116 To which one might add there is the potential im-
pact on the attitudes of prospective and actual parents (birth or adoptive) of an infant with
a severe intellectual disability, haemophilia, or Down syndrome. As earlier noted, tel
attitudes are crucial to Singer’s argument regarding the permissibility of nonvoluntary eu-
thanasia, but he seems to assume that parents have clear, fully formed views one way or
the other and seems not to take account of the role work such as his may have in shaping
their opinions or that of society more generally (nor, d'ailleurs, does he delineate
carefully between expectant parents, birth parents, and adoptive parents).117

113

114

115
116
117

See JEFFREY MCMAHAN, THE ETHICS OF KILLING: PROBLEMS AT THE MARGINS OF LIFE (2002); Julian Savulescu, Le
Welfarist Account of Disability in DISABILITY AND DISADVANTAGE (Brownlee & Cureton eds., 2009). See also
MARTHA NUSSBAUM, FRONTIERS OF JUSTICE (2007), views she has tempered as noted in Martha Nussbaum, Le
Capabilities of People with Cognitive Disabilities, 40 METAPHILOSOPHY 331 (2009).
Jeﬀrey Spike, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of our Traditional Ethics, 333 NEW ENG. J.. MED. 1509
(Nov. 1995) (reviewing SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND DEATH, supra note 56).
Chanteur, supra note 105 (referencing the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute).
Harriet McBryde Johnson, Afterword, in PETER SINGER UNDER FIRE, supra note 3, à 204.
Chanteur, by the way, assumes that families wishing to adopt will be unwilling to adopt a gravely disabled child,
save in the rare case. “This is a realistic assumption even in a society in which there is a long waiting list of
couples wishing to adopt normal babies.” SINGER, supra note 4, à 161. That is not necessarily clear. To take but
one example, the fact is that for many years a sizable number of children adopted, especially from outside the
West, have had special needs, some quite major, and there has not been a shortage of families seeking to make
such adoptions. Voir, par exemple., David Crary, Adopting China’s Special Needs Kids, ASSOC. PRESS (Mar. 28, 2010), https://
archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/04/03/adopted_chinese_orphans_often_have_special_needs/.

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To raise such questions about Singer’s impact is not to argue that he should refrain from
constructing challenging thought experiments because they might cause oﬀense, although it
might have been helpful had he at least brieﬂy acknowledged the tug between the demands
of pure logic and the power of personal bonds, as his own experience bears out.118 Nor is it
to overstate his part in perpetuating the enormous stigma that attaches to disability with
very tangible and at times tragic consequences.119 Rather, it is to highlight that, even as he
cultivates his role as an inﬂuential public intellectual, he refuses to acknowledge the impact
his work regarding disability has on the general public, on parents, and on the sense of
self-worth of persons with disabilities—which presumably would be of consequence for
qualities he values, including autonomy and the capacity to engage with others.

It is important to note that Singer is not shy about wanting to have a broad impact. Il
begins The Most Good You Can Do: How Eﬀective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Liv-
ing Ethically by recounting with pride how his Practical Ethics class at Princeton led one of
his best students to abandon philosophy for a Wall Street arbitrage ﬁrm so that he could
be an “eﬀective altruist” by having more income to donate to charity.120 Nor is this an
isolated example. Over decades, through books written for a mass audience, op-eds,
TED talks, founding an important NGO, and much more, Singer has worked hard to
be a public intellectual having an impact on policy. The Life You Can Save, The Most Good
You Can Do, and Ethics in the Real World: 82 Brief Essays on Things That Matter121 oﬀer
many examples of people putting his ideas, chieﬂy, but by no means exclusively, regarding
global poverty alleviation, into action. As he states in the preface to The Life You Can Save
(the subtitle of which is Acting Now to End World Poverty), “I believe that if you read this
book to the end, and look honestly and carefully at our situation, assessing both the facts
and the ethical actions, you will agree that we must act.”122

118

119

120
121
122

Singer discusses this tug with respect to his late mother in Michael Specter, The Dangerous Philosopher, NEW
YORKER, Sept. 6, 1999, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1999/09/06/the-dangerous-philosopher.
Johnson, supra note 61. It is a fact that persons with a disability commit suicide at a far higher rate than the
general population. For discussions of the impact of societal attitudes on the perceived self-worth of persons with
disabilities, voir, Par exemple, Ben Mattlin, People with Disabilities Often Fear They’re a Burden. That’s Why Legal
Assisted Suicide Scares Me, VOX (Sept. 21, 2017), https://www.vox.com/ﬁrst-person/2017/9/21/16307868/assisted
-suicide-disabilities-legal; Nicky Clark, Enough Is Enough: Disabled Persons Are Driven to Suicide by the
Government’s Welfare Reform, THE INDEPENDENT (Oct. 4, 2012), https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment
/enough-enough-disabled-people-are-driven-suicide-because-government-s-welfare-reform-8197640.html. Je suis
aware that some might contend that noting this may seem inconsistent with Johnson’s earlier point about the
way in which she and others with a disability may understand their lives. I read her as saying that the sense
persons with a disability may have of their self-worth can be and is eroded by societal practices and norms that
devalue their worth.
SINGER, supra note 5 at 3–4.
Id.; SINGER, supra note 15; SINGER, ETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD, supra note 62.
SINGER, supra note 15, at xv.

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Some might contend that Singer could endeavor to defend himself in two principal
ways—ﬁrst, by suggesting that his work on global poverty alleviation is written for a general
audience whereas that on euthanasia was intended as academic thought experiments, et
second, by his clear disavowal of ill motive, as in his statement, “It’s certainly nothing
against people with disabilities that motivates my position [regarding the permissibility of
killing infants with a severe cognitive disability].”123 As concerns the ﬁrst, Singer declares at
the outset of Practical Ethics, from which many of the examples about disability discussed
earlier in this article are drawn (purposefully), that “[t]his book is . . . about the application
of ethics . . . to practical issues,” and soon thereafter he reiterates that “an ethical judgment
that is no good in practice must suﬀer from a theoretical defect as well, for the whole point
of ethical judgments is to guide practice.”124 Were there any doubt about his intention
regarding the reach of Practical Ethics, he lets the reader know that it “is widely read,»
has been “translated into ﬁfteen languages,” and is required for the aforementioned
Princeton course that he sees as changing lives. And he has set out his views regarding life
and death with respect to disability in several ways meant to reach far beyond a university
audience, including “rewriting the commandments . . . of the old ethic that we have
seen to be false” and otherwise dispensing advice to public oﬃcials, juges, and health
care professionals engaged in making life and death decisions.125

I do not doubt Singer’s sincerity when he speaks of his motivation, but that is a separate
question from his impact. As Eva Feder Kittay has powerfully argued, philosophers—and espe-
cially ethicists—have a responsibility to be attentive to the impact of their work, especially with
respect to its consequences for subjects of their inquiry, and perhaps particularly when those
subjects have been the focus of much discrimination.126 Singer has indicated that he considers
it unfortunate that what he characterizes as “a misunderstanding of my views” has “caused
distress to some people with disabilities,”127 even as he has noted that one “positive outcome”
of protests about his views that sought to prevent him from speaking was that they “drew atten-
tion to my views,” especially concerning global poverty alleviation and animal liberation.128

123
124
125

126
127
128

SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN ETHICAL LIFE, supra note 56, à 325.
SINGER, supra note 4, à 2.
Voir, par exemple., the essays in SINGER, RETHINKING LIFE AND Death, supra note 56; SINGER, supra note 62; the excerpts of his
academic work in SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN ETHICAL LIFE, supra note 56 (which the author notes was intended to
reach beyond academic circles to prompt debate); see also Singer’s interviews with Bob Abernethy and Nell
Boyce, also reprinted in SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN ETHICAL LIFE, supra note 56.
See Kittay, supra note 3.
SINGER, WRITINGS ON AN ETHICAL LIFE, supra note 56, à 325.
Peter Singer, An Intellectual Biography, in PETER SINGER UNDER FIRE, supra note 3, at 64–65. Although Singer’s
assertion that the lives of “some nonhuman animals . . . by any standard, are more valuable” than those of
severely cognitively disabled humans draws attention to his case for animals, is it necessary, as Michael Bérubé has
written, to view the situation of individuals with such a disability and that of animals in what are, in eﬀect, zero-sum
termes? See BÉRUBÉ, LIFE AS WE KNOW IT, supra note 79. Would it not be possible to make the point about valuing the

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My pointing out tensions between Singer’s argument regarding our responsibility to
address global poverty alleviation and his treatment of disability is not meant to disparage
the former goal. Singer is right to remind readers of how much less governments in the
aﬄuent world have done for development than is generally assumed. I share his commit-
ment to doing more. I maintain, though, that addressing challenges of poverty that we face
at home would make eﬀorts at addressing challenges abroad more palatable both here and
là, and potentially more eﬀective.129 More importantly, I believe that a greater recog-
nition of how intimately interwoven poverty and disability are would beneﬁt each. Un
authoritative joint study by the World Health Organization and the World Bank concluded
dans 2011 que, conservatively speaking, at least ﬁfteen percent of the human race—equaling
more than one billion people—have a disability, and that the situation of persons with a
disability is especially acute in developing nations.130 In the words of then-WHO Director-
General Dr. Margaret Chan and then-World Bank President Robert Zoellick,

Across the world, people with disabilities have poorer health outcomes, lower edu-
cation achievements, less economic participation and higher rates of poverty than

129

lives of animals without repeatedly contributing, however inadvertently, to what Harriet McBryde Johnson and
many others see as deeply unfortunate societal attitudes about individuals with a disability?
Singer takes insuﬃcient account of how giving close to home (and seeing results) might help inculcate a more
general and generous spirit of giving and also of the argument, often made, that developed countries are being
hypocritical in pressing for involvement in the aﬀairs of developing nations when they have so many unresolved
dilemmas at home. It is also worth noting Singer’s implicit faith in the technocratic—that is, that we can readily
quantify to a precise degree the good that particular charities can do. Although such a worldview is hardly
surprising from a utilitarian vantage point, and while few, if any, among us would deny the importance of
accountability, experience suggests that attempts to measure the eﬀectiveness of development in a highly
technical manner confront many a challenge, both conceptual (including what we mean by the very idea of
development itself ) and practical. See William P. Alford, Exporting the “Pursuit of Happiness,» 113 HARV. L. REV.
1677 (2000).

130 WORLD HEALTH ORG., WORLD REPORT ON DISABILITY 10 (2011). This may well undercount the number of persons
with a disability, as the World Report is a decade old, and disability is often deﬁned more narrowly in poorer
nations, given the greater challenges of conducting censuses and funding social services. See UN DEP’T OF ECON. &
SOC. AFFS., DISABILITY AND DEVELOPMENT REPORT: REALIZING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS BY, FOR AND WITH
PERSONS WITH DISABILITIES (2018); Nora Groce et al., Poverty and Disability—A Critical Review of the Literature in
Low and Middle-Income Countries (Leonard Cheshire Disability & Inclusive Dev. Centre, Working Paper Series
Non. 16, Sept. 2011); Sophie Mitra et al., Disability and Poverty in Developing Countries: A Snapshot from the
World Health Survey ( World Bank, Social Protection Discussion Paper No. SP 1109, 2011); Lena Banks et al.,
Poverty and Disability in Low and Middle-Income Countries: A Systematic Review, PLOS ONE (Dec. 21, 2017).
Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, who was Global Disability Advisor for the World Bank Group and previously
oversaw developmental assistance regarding disability at the United States Agency for International
Développement, suggests that as many as eighty percent of the world’s persons with a disability live in developing
nations. Ede Ijjasz & Charlotte McClain-Nhlapo, How Can the World Bank Better Support Persons with a
Invalidité?, VOICES (Nov. 12, 2015), https://blogs.worldbank.org/voices/moving-goals-action-disability-inclusive
-development.

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THE DISCORDANT SINGER

people without disabilities. This is partly because people with disabilities experience
barriers in accessing services that many of us have long taken for granted, y compris
health, éducation, employment, and transport as well as information. These diﬃcul-
ties are exacerbated in less advantaged communities. To achieve the long-lasting,
vastly better development prospects that lie at the heart of the 2015 Millennium
Development Goals and beyond, we must empower people living with disabilities
and remove the barriers which prevent them participating in their communities;
getting a quality education, ﬁnding decent work, and having their voices heard.131

Individuals with a disability in developing countries are, in the words of Alice Albright,
Chief Executive of the Partnership for Global Education, “the poorest of the poor”132—to
which I would add that individuals with profound intellectual disabilities are the most
vulnerable of the vulnerable. There is not enough research on this topic, with the result
that it is diﬃcult to describe causal mechanisms with absolute assurance, but the most
credible work concludes that disability is both a cause and consequence of poverty in
developing nations and that individuals with disabilities are among the most marginalized
worldwide.133 One might have thought, donc, that someone as interested as Singer is
in poverty alleviation would appreciate how addressing disability will concomitantly
advance what he describes as the responsibility we all bear to address poverty. To the
extent, cependant, that Singer’s message reaches developing nations or those in developed
nations who wish to alleviate global poverty, there is a danger that, along with his laudable
call for supporting development, he may also, without so intending, be aﬃrming harmful
assumptions about individuals with disabilities in general and severe cognitive disabilities
in particular. Given that “an estimated 90% of children with disabilities in the developing
world do not go to school,”134 presumably we want to be very careful to avoid suggesting,
however inadvertently, that in a context of extremely limited resources, such funds are best
not spent on those who might be perceived as a burden on society.

132

131 WORLD HEALTH ORG., supra note 130, at xi. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), adopted by the United
Nations in 2015, include disability much more directly than the Millennium Development Goals, as the SDGs
address education, employment, access, inequality, and acknowledgement in public records, among other
issues. See UN DEP’T OF ECON. & SOC. AFFS., supra note 130.
Alice Albright, Disabled People in Developing Countries Are the Poorest of the Poor, GLOB. P’SHIP EDUC. (Apr. 15,
2014), https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/disabled-people-developing-countries-are-poorest-poor.
See sources cited supra note 130. For a cogent argument demonstrating that poverty involves not only economic
deprivation but social isolation, see Kim Samuel et al., Social Isolation and Its Relationship to Multidimensional
Poverty (Oxford Poverty & Hum. Dev. Initiative, Working Paper No. 80, Nov. 2014).
Children with Disabilities Face the Longest Road to Education, GLOB. P’SHIP EDUC. (Dec. 3, 2016), https://www
.globalpartnership.org/blog/children-disabilities-face-longest-road-education.

134

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Surely, in the pool of approximately one billion people with a disability, there are
many individuals with talents that might beneﬁt any nation and, in particular, des pays
that are impoverished, if education and/or other opportunities were available to them (par exemple.,
someone with a serious degenerative disease might be a brilliant researcher or an inspiring
teacher).135 But to give Singer the beneﬁt of the doubt as to his intended focus (if not its
eﬀect), there is also much to be learned from individuals who have even the most severe
intellectual disabilities, and from their families. Their lived experience has the potential to
provide extraordinary lessons to those who have not a priori dismissed the possibility of
learning from them—about resilience, devotion, selﬂessness, and humaneness—qualities
that presumably will serve any nation, developing or otherwise, and that would, to use
Singer’s currency, promote utility for us all.136

135

136

Voir, par exemple., Stuart Clark, A Brief History of Stephen Hawking: A Legacy of Paradox, NEW SCIENTIST (Mar. 14, 2018),
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2053929-a-brief-history-of-stephen-hawking-a-legacy-of-paradox/;
Ashoka, Harnessing the Power and Resilience of Disabled Women Leaders, FORBES ( Juillet 15, 2013), https://www
.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/07/15/harnessing-the-power-and-resilience-of-disabled-women-leaders/.
See SHRIVER, supra note 84, at 171–75, for two extraordinary examples, among many: a young boy named Daniel
and a baby named Pearl whose courage was inspiring not only to their immediate families but to others as well.

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