This statement is prompted by Novara Media’s decision to conduct and promote an interview with Peter Singer without any public acknowledgement or consideration of his well-known views on the value of disabled people’s lives. However, it also reflects a broader failure to engage in a sustained or meaningful way with disablism/ableism, with the brutal realities of disabled people’s experiences and oppression in this country today, and with disability activism and activists.
Peter Singer is a moral philosopher whose work on animal liberation is highly influential. His argument that the concept of ‘personhood’ should be extended to include primates is important. His work sets out to separate the moral category of personhood from the human. This enables him to argue that primates deserve to be recognised as moral subjects and protected. It also allows him to claim that not all humans meet the criteria he sets out for ‘personhood’ and therefore that not all humans deserve equal protection and recognition in a legal and political sense.
This argument has serious implications for disabled people and our rights. Singer’s work promulgates the kind of view of disabled people’s lives as “unworthy of life” that provided the ideological justification for euthanasia programmes such as Aktion T4 in Germany in the 1930s. For Singer, disability is viewed only as a cause of suffering and as representing an unjustifiable social and economic burden in a world of limited resources. Fundamentally his position is that disabled lives are burdensome, unproductive (in an economic sense), and unequal in value to non-disabled lives.
It is for this reason that Singer argues not simply for the infanticide of disabled infants (such as those born with conditions such as Spina Bifida) but that there is a moral obligation to end those lives. He argues for instance:
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 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. Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.
Throughout his work, he maintains a visceral distaste for the lives of people with learning difficulties in particular, comparing them to dogs and pigs, and most recently justifying rape on the basis that if someone is incapable of “informed consent” there is no moral harm in subjecting that person to non-consensual sex. His arguments are scaffolded by a utilitarian approach that reduces the value of a person’s life to a brutal economic logic. If you are someone who needs support in daily living, if you are someone who may not be able to engage in wage labour, if you are someone whose life is characterised by a strong difference, then, for Peter Singer, you are better off dead. (And everyone around you is better off too).
It is deeply upsetting that a left-wing media organisation such as Novara would make a decision to interview Singer without providing any counter-point to his views; by asking him about them and then letting him talk uninterrupted and unchallenged he was effectively given a platform to justify and disseminate his ideas. Novara has a reputation among disabled people both for ignoring disability-related issues and for an overall lack of disability awareness evident within general coverage.
The Singer incident was particularly unconscionable in the current context in which disabled people make up 6 out 10 deaths from Covid-19, in which 8 out of 10 recorded deaths of people with learning disabilities have been Covid-19 related, and in which conversations justifying the denial of critical care to disabled people are taking place.
Disabled people have never enjoyed equal human rights in fundamental areas such as the right to life and or the right to healthcare; in the pandemic situation the lower worth that society places on our lives has been explicitly framed and stated: blanket decisions have been taken by public bodies to exclude us from treatments on the grounds of ‘utility’ and the allocation of limited resource while an unprecedented number of unlawful DNACPRs (Do Not Attempt Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation orders) have been put on the medical records of autistic people and people with learning difficulties.
Any progressive movement committed to equality and social justice for all, should unequivocally challenge this logic and recognise that disablism is a structural feature of late capitalism with dire consequences for disabled and non-disabled people alike. There should always be safe spaces for rigorous debate, but to facilitate these assertions and positions without challenge further contributed towards the silencing of those most affected by these dangerous ideas.
Our recommendations:
Novara to apologise for not having provided a platform for on which for Singer’s views to be challenged and publicly commit to improving both the general understanding of disabled people’s oppression that is embedded within the organisation and its coverage in relation to disability-related issues.
Novara to provide a platform for criticism of Singer’s views on disabled people at the earliest opportunity and for discussion of topical right to life issues such as treatment rationing as well as the current global rush of States to legalise and expand access to assisted suicide [and we note the likelihood of a new Private Members Bill being introduced into the UK Parliament after May].
Create in-house access guidelines so that all staff are aware of basic accessibility – for example alt text for use of any images on social media.
Novara staff to undertake training in understanding disabled people’s oppression. There are free Disability Oppression 101 resources available on The World Transformed website. Suggested further reading is chapter 2 of The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and The Making Of a Human Catastrophe.
Social model of disability language guide to be disseminated around staff
Subscribe to Disability News Service weekly news stories as well as signing up to email alerts from the DPAC website to stay in touch with disability news.
Take up the offer of support from the NUJ on understanding the social model of disability.
We would also be happy to send a list of disabled writers and commentators with contact details. We note Novara’s point that you have struggled to find suitable disabled writers and interviewees but would suggest that if this is the case, you think around the issue, for example a system of additional editorial time or of allocating co-writers; also undertaking access and inclusion training to learn how to interview people with different forms of communication. We are happy to answer any questions you may have on this.
Reflect upon how the “Super Chats” system indirectly discriminates against disabled people who are statistically much more likely to be living in poverty than non-disabled people and whether there are any options for increasing access that don’t at the same time pick out disabled people/reinforce a charity model.
Dear DPAC,
Thank you again for the meeting between our organisations, and for all the time and thought everyone put into it. We felt the meeting was very constructive and we were pleased to hear contributions from such a wide range of DPAC members.
Since then we have had some productive meetings about next steps and we would like to present a roadmap outlining the work we intend to do to rebuild trust with disabled people. We’re sorry to say we have also had a few staff medical absences, including for coronavirus, which has slowed down the formulation of this response.
1. Article on Peter Singer’s positions on disabled people and statement on the Singer interview video.
We would like to commission an article from a disabled writer responding to Peter Singer’s positions on disability. As well as being a worthwhile article in its own right, we would also link to the article from the Singer interview in addition to a statement added to the video post.
We take onboard the criticisms both of the interview itself and the way the topics of disability and disabled infanticide were raised and framed within the interview, and accept we didn’t sufficiently challenge Singer’s views. We fully intend to learn from the feedback we’ve received and it will inform our future editorial decisions. We have considered whether to remove the interview or edit it to remove the section where Singer’s positions on disability are raised, however it has been our policy in the past to both make our mistakes and do our learning in public; as such, we think it would be more instructive to viewers to leave the video up but to present alongside it a response article and a statement both acknowledging the hurt the interview caused to disabled people and outlining the actions which have followed the publication of the interview.
2. NUJ webinar on the social model of disability and framing stories about disability.
We really welcome the invitation from Ann Galpin, chair of the NUJ Disabled Members’ Council, to an NUJ webinar on the social model of disability and framing stories about disability and would like to take her up on the offer. We will email her in the coming weeks.
3. Improving coverage of disability issues.
We fully recognise that over a sustained period of time Novara Media has failed to live up to its mission when covering disability and topics that matter to disabled people. We are keen to rectify this on an ongoing basis. We understand this isn’t something we can set right overnight, but we are committed to improving over coverage iteratively and building up our pool of disabled contributors across our sections. We therefore commit to finding more disabled writers and guests to include in our output. Meanwhile, if there are topics, campaigns and thinkers DPAC members feel we ought to be covering, we welcome further discussion with our editors.
4. Focus week on disability.
A ‘Focus’ is our term for a time-concentrated run of content around a defined theme, such as the future of work or climate. We would like to do a Focus on disability, which would both draw our audience’s attention to a range of disability issues within a focused period of time and seek to expand the range of disabled contributors to Novara Media. We would like to work with existing disabled contributors about curating and commissioning the content for this Focus, which would also help our editors develop coverage further into the future.
5. Accessibility.
We know there is much more we should be doing to ensure our website and social media posts are more accessible to Deaf and disabled people, and we are creating an accessibility budget and working group to make these improvements.
We have begun making some accessibility changes to the functionality of the Novara Media website and are in conversation with the digital design co-op Common Knowledge about doing an accessibility audit and developing both technical and editorial (ie best practice) recommendations, as well as testing technical changes such as making the website usable for screenreaders. Coincidentally, we are currently in the process of recruiting a digital designer and we will ensure accessibility is included within their onboarding briefing. We are also keen to improve our subtitling and transcription, and have opened a conversation about how best to do this. If you have any further specific recommendations we should follow up, please let us know.
We don’t view any of these suggested steps as a panacea for the hurt we’ve caused to disabled people, but it is our sincere hope they will put us on a path to rebuilding trust and reassuring people that disability and disabled people matter to Novara Media. We are grateful to everyone at DPAC for the generosity and comradeship with which we’ve been met, and we look forward to strengthening the working relationship between our organisations in the future.
Addendum
Dear DPAC,
Thank you for your statement and recommendations; we appreciate the time everyone in DPAC has put into this process and we’re glad to see most of the recommendations
chime with various elements of our roadmap, and other suggestions not included in our letter.
We are sorry for not having challenged Singer’s views sufficiently, and we hope the article we propose above (1) will be a medium through which criticisms of those positions can be properly explored.
We also hope points 2-4 go some way to reassuring people of our commitment to better understand disabled people’s oppression and improve our coverage of disability-related issues. In particular we’re excited to host a dedicated Focus on disability which will expand our coverage, convey the importance of disability-related issues to our audience, and provide a platform to numerous disabled writers and contributors.
We take on board the points raised about making the process of contributing to Novara Media more accessible, and as outlined in reference to our accessibility audit (5) we will make sure the process generates editorial best
practice guidelines for staff as well as technical changes.
Once again we’d like to express our thanks for the commitment and generosity DPAC has
shown to Novara Media over recent months, and we hope our actions over the coming months and years will build trust amongst disabled people.
In solidarity,
Novara Media
