Rethinking Life and Death

A victim of the Hillsborough Disaster in 1989, Anthony Bland lay in hospital in a coma being fed liquid food by a pump, via a tube passing through his nose and into his stomach. On 4 February 1993 Britain's highest court ruled that doctors attending him could lawfully act to end his life. Our traditional ways of thinking about life and death are collapsing. In a world of respirators and embryos stored for years in liquid nitrogen, we can no longer take the sanctity of human life as the cornerstone of our ethical outlook. In this controversial book Peter Singer argues that we cannot deal with the crucial issues of death, abortion, euthanasia and the rights of nonhuman animals unless we sweep away the old ethic and build something new in its place. Singer outlines a new set of commandments, based on compassion and commonsense, for the decisions everyone must make about life and death.

Peter Singer is Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. He is the author of the Oxford Reader on Ethics, and Applied Ethics in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy. He is best-known for his books Animal Liberation, and The Way We Live Now.