This is a biorethics bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton. Bioethics is made an association with Oxford's Uhero Center for Practical Ethics and made possible by a

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if a patient decides she doesn't want to live any longer

should she be allowed to die

should she be allowed to kill herself? If a patient is in no condition to decide,

perhaps she's in a coma, then should somebody else be able to decide for her whether or not she continues

to exist? Who should take on that role? Is there a

moral difference between killing and allowing someone to die? And is the role of the

doctor always to prolong life? Peter Singer, at Princeton University, is one of the world's leading bioethicists.

Peter Singer, welcome to Bioethics Spites.

Thanks, Nigel. It's good to be with you.

We're going to focus on questions about life and death decision making.

You're famous as a utilitarian.

How do you approach the issue of deciding in medical cases whether someone should live or die?

I think to answer that question you need to distinguish different cases.

Although I am a utilitarian, I think that generally we will bring about better consequences if we allow

competent adults to make their own choices on matters that primarily concern

themselves. This is a principle that John Stuart Miller,

a great utilitarian, certainly defended, and I think he was right on this. So if we're

talking about a competent adult, then I think in pretty much all circumstances you can imagine, that decision ought to be up to him or her.

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