Overview
Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics is a work of applied moral philosophy in which Peter Singer argues that the inherited Western ethic governing life and death — the ethic commonly summarised as “the sanctity of human life” — is no longer coherently held and is being replaced, piecemeal and often without acknowledgment, by a different set of principles. The book’s method is not to expound a system abstractly but to work through a series of concrete clinical and legal cases, showing how our actual practices already presuppose judgments that the traditional ethic forbids.
The traditional ethic and its five commandments
Singer frames the received ethic as a set of five commands, drawn principally from the Judeo-Christian tradition and absorbed into medical law and professional practice:
- Treat all human life as of equal worth.
- Never intentionally take innocent human life.
- Never take your own life, and always try to prevent others from taking theirs.
- Be fruitful and multiply.
- Treat all human life as more precious than any nonhuman life.
Much of the book is devoted to showing, case by case, that these commands are now widely and reasonably violated — in law, in hospitals, and in ordinary moral judgment — and that the violations are not mere lapses but responses to genuine moral problems that the traditional ethic cannot accommodate.
Brain death and the definition of death
Singer examines the reformulation of death in terms of “brain death,” developed in the late 1960s when resuscitation techniques made it possible to keep hearts and lungs functioning in patients whose brains had ceased to function. He treats the new definition not as a neutral medical discovery but as a moral and social decision, driven partly by the futility of prolonging such states and partly by the needs of organ transplantation. He presses the question of whether “brain death” is a medical fact or an ethical choice dressed in medical language, and notes the uneasy position of patients in a persistent vegetative state, whose brains retain some function but who have, on his account, no prospect of recovery of consciousness.
Newborns, disability, and the value of life
A substantial and controversial strand of the book concerns severely disabled newborns. Singer discusses the treatment of infants with Down syndrome and other disabilities, including cases in which doctors and parents allowed such infants to die, and the legal and professional responses these cases provoked. He considers anencephalic infants — born without a functioning cortex — and the question of whether organs may be taken from them, contrasting the moral unease about using such infants as organ sources with the comparative acceptance of using animals. His argument is that the traditional principle that all human life is of equal worth cannot survive honest reflection on such cases, and that what actually guides defensible judgment is a quality-of-life assessment together with the interests of the parents and others affected.
Abortion and the status of the fetus
On abortion, Singer argues that the slogan “a woman’s right to choose” is not by itself a sufficient moral argument, since the question at issue is precisely whether the fetus has interests or rights that would make choice insufficient. He defends a gradualist position grounded in the development of sentience and of the capacities associated with personhood, concluding that the early fetus lacks the morally relevant characteristics that make killing seriously wrong, while later stages of development carry increasing moral weight. He connects this to the broader claim that membership in the species Homo sapiens is not in itself what grounds moral status.
Euthanasia and the Dutch experiment
The book devotes close attention to voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide, and especially to the Dutch practice of the period, in which doctors publicly acknowledged performing euthanasia under guidelines and reported it to judicial authorities. Singer examines the empirical reports on Dutch practice — including the extent of reporting, the incidence of non-voluntary cases, and the operation of the “slippery slope” worry — and asks whether a comparable system could operate in the United States. He argues that the traditional prohibition on intentionally taking innocent life rests on a distinction between killing and allowing to die that cannot bear the moral weight placed on it, and that respect for a competent person’s expressed wishes supplies a firmer foundation for decisions at the end of life.
Animals and speciesism
The final strand extends the argument beyond the human. Singer contends that the fifth commandment — that human life is always more precious than nonhuman life — is a form of speciesism, an unjustified preference for members of one’s own species analogous to racism or sexism, and that the morally relevant criterion is not species membership but the capacity for suffering and, at a higher level, self-awareness. He uses the comparison between an anencephalic infant and a normal ape or other mammal to expose what he takes to be the inconsistency in common moral attitudes.
The new commandments
The book culminates in a proposed replacement ethic, stated as five new principles:
- Recognise that the worth of human life varies.
- Take responsibility for the consequences of your decisions.
- Respect a person’s desire to live or die.
- Bring children into the world only if they are wanted.
- Do not discriminate on the basis of species.
Underlying these is a distinction central to the whole argument: between being a member of the species Homo sapiens and being a “person” in the moral sense — a being with self-awareness, rationality, and a capacity to value its own existence. On Singer’s account, the former is a biological fact of no intrinsic moral significance, while the latter is what makes life worth protecting in the strong sense. The book accordingly replaces the sanctity-of-life ethic with a quality-of-life ethic, and treats the collapse of the old commandments not as a catastrophe to be lamented but as an opportunity to construct a more defensible morality for a world in which medical technology has made the old certainties untenable.
Brain death, persistent vegetative state, and the meaning of “life”
The book extends its argument into the definition of death. It contrasts the traditional cardiopulmonary criterion with neurological criteria, and examines why mechanical ventilation and intensive care make “death” something that can depend on a decision rather than a simple observation. It considers patients in a persistent vegetative state: biologically alive but, on Singer’s account, lacking the capacities that make a person’s life valuable in the strong sense. From this it raises questions about withdrawing artificial nutrition and hydration, surrogate decision-making, and organ procurement. The point is not merely terminological: if personhood rather than biological membership grounds moral protection, then “being alive” and “having a life worth protecting” can come apart.
Newborns, disability, and the birth boundary
Singer applies the same personhood framework to infants. He argues that birth is not a morally decisive line, because a newborn has not yet developed the self-awareness and future-oriented capacities of a person. The book therefore examines cases of severely disabled newborns and asks whether parents and clinicians may sometimes be justified in choosing death over a life of suffering. It treats such decisions as matters of responsibility and quality of life rather than as automatic violations of a taboo. This is one of the book’s most controversial moves: it presses the logic of abortion and euthanasia consistently across the birth boundary, while still insisting that the interests of the infant and the consequences of any decision must be taken seriously.
The old commandments and the shape of the argument
The book presents the received ethic as a set of commandments — roughly, that all human life is equally valuable, that innocent human life must never be intentionally taken, that suicide should be prevented, that reproduction is a good to be encouraged, and that nonhuman animals count for less than humans. Singer’s method is to show that these commandments conflict with one another and with common moral judgments in medicine. He tests intuitions against consistency, rejects species membership as a morally relevant boundary, and replaces absolute prohibitions with a framework centered on persons, sentience, autonomy, and consequences. The result is less a single new rule than a shift in moral attention: from biological life as such to the quality and meaning of a life for the being whose life it is.
