Howard L. Kaye O ver the last thirty years, Peter Singer has managed to achieve considerable prominence as a philosopher, at least in part through the controversial stances he has taken on a number of issues of practical importance, e.g., animal rights, infanticide, euthanasia, and world poverty. Vilified by some as"a public advocate of genocide and the most dangerous man on earth, "because of his extreme views on various life and death issues, Singer has served as a gadfly in both the philosophical and bioethical communities. While most philosophers studiously avoid the Piraeus of everyday life, Singer aspircs to change how people throughout the world think and live. While most bioethicists have moved towards an ever more narrowly focused and specialized consideration of issues, approached with the kind of ethical neutrality one expects from a mediation service, Singer remains one of the few practitioners who articulates a clear ethical position which he seeks to apply consistently across a broad range of issues in biomedicine and beyond. There is something admirable about Singer's intellectual courage and the moral aspiration that lies behind it: to livc a life rationaUy, consciously, coherently, and consistently ordered around a central ethical principle. Yet there is something chilling as well. Is it really possible to make one's way through life and to face up to all of its individual and communal challenges with the help of a single moral formula? For Singer, the guiding principle we ought to live by is utilitarianism, but a utilitarianism of a radically expanded sort. His version extends the equal respect for the interests and sufferings of each "person, "upon which utilitarianism is often said to be premised, beyond the human species to those other species (e.g., other primates, dogs, elephants, and pigs) where he believes rationality and self-awareness, and thus"personhood, "can be found. In the essay published here, Singer applies this radically egalitarian, cross-species utilitarianism to the treatment of the dying, and to infants born with severe disabilities, but with disturbing results. Agreeing with critics of the "whole brain" definition of death, developed in the late 1960s and since established in law, Singer argues that this new definition has proven inadequate to deal with changes in medical knowledge and technology and with the various dilemmas and temptations, which they create. Patients defined as brain dead can now be maintained in a "life-like" state for months, while those in a "persistent vegetative state" can be maintained for years at enormous cost, in terms of wasted medical resources, the deterioration of otherwise transplantable organs, the anguish of surviving family and friends, and the public's dread that such a fate may become its own. But whereas other critics of the whole brain deftnition of death have called for yet another redefinition of death to make the irreversible loss of higher brain function, i.e., consciousness, the new criterion of death, Singer strongly disagrees. "Solving problems by redefinition, "he has declared, "rarely works." Of greater import, as he rightly notes, is the fact that declaring someone dead who looks alive, and who can breathe without mechanical assistance, simply flies in the face of our common sense understanding of life and death. As Singer has argued elsewhere, "people already have difficulty in accepting that a warm body with a beating heart on a respirator is really dead, how much more difficult would it be to bury a 'corpse ' that is still breathing while the lid of the coffin is nailed down? That is simply an absurdity." Organs taken from such 'living' patients would certainly provoke enormous public outrage as well. Rather than risk such a reaction, Singer proposes a truly startling and contradictory solution: abandon the "convenient fiction" that such warm, pink, and breathing patients are really dead and instead acknowledge that it is not "always wrong intentionally to end the life of an innocent human being." By,