In a senate hearing room, Christopher Reeve is testifying in support of embryonic stem-cell research. Sitting in his wheelchair, breathing with a ventilator, the former star of Superman films makes a sympathetic figure. And then someone raises an uncomfortable question: Is it ethical to take a life to save a life? Embryonic stem-cell research does, after all, destroy human embryos.

Reeve counters: “I thought it was the job of the government to do the greatest good for the greatest number.” Senators and reporters nod in agreement.

Obviously, they didn’t get it. If the government really embraced “the greatest good for the greatest number”, Reeve himself might be dead. After all, Reeve’s therapies, his doctors, his aides, and his motorized wheelchair cost millions — money that could, instead, fund basic medical care for hundreds of poor children.

Of course, Reeve can afford to pay for all of this himself — a fortunate fact should the government take his “greatest good” advice. But he’s still asking taxpayers to spend millions on research to treat spinal cord injuries. Given that vastly more Americans need immunizations than a cure for paralysis, wouldn’t a “greatest good” policy mean spending scarce research funds on immunizations instead of paralysis research?

I’ve used this vignette in speeches, and to my shock, I’ve found that even Christians nod in agreement with Reeve’s reasoning — until I explain just where this thinking leads. Have we all unthinkingly become practical utilitarians?

Reeve is echoing the arguments of Australian philosopher Peter Singer who has a chair at Princeton University. Singer is the quintessential moral utilitar­ian. He believes morality cannot be judged by any transcendent standard. Instead, he suggests we ask whether a particular action will increase the world’s sum total of happiness.

For example, Singer believes parents should, instead of spending money on lifesaving surgery for their child, send the money to save a hundred African children from starvation; doing so would increase the world’s total amount of happiness. Singer scorns traditional teachings about the sanctity of human life, believing that some people — encephalitic babies, for example — are not actually “persons”. He argues that parents should be allowed to kill their handicapped newborns (a healthy replacement baby would live a happier life), and favours euthana­sia for sick and elderly people who have lost the basic capacity for mental function­ing and who cre­ate a burden on others.

This is the “greatest good” philosophy that Christopher Reeve espouses. I wonder if he knows that Singer, on his first day at Princeton, was greeted by protesters from Not Dead Yet, a group of people who — like Reeve — are wheelchair-bound. Unlike Reeve, they understand exactly where Singer’s teaching leads: euthanasia for those considered burdens on society.

His philosophy also leads to absurdity. Rejecting the uniqueness of human life, Singer claims that drawing distinctions between humans and animals is “speciesism.” So — quite logically — he professes to find nothing morally objection­able about bestiality (sex with animals), a view that shocks even non-Christians. (When my colleague Nigel Cameron pressed him in a recent debate on the question of the animal’s consent, it put Singer on the defensive.)

In utilitarianism, we encounter a phi­losophy dramatically at odds with Christianity. The Scriptures teach that God created humans in his own image, giving each a unique moral character.

Christianity, as Mother Teresa used to say, is anti-statistical. Every human, at every stage in life, has intrinsic, not merely instrumental, worth.

This means it’s never right to create and then kill one person to find a cure for another. Of course, we all want to see loved ones relieved of their suffering. But it shows what we’re up against when even many Christians fail to grasp the implica­tions of practical utilitarianism.

In one sense, we can be grateful for Peter Singer. He does what Francis Schaeffer urged us to make secularists do — that is, take their reasonable-sounding philoso­phies and carry them to their logical and often preposterous conclusions. I’ve discovered that this tactic is the best way to penetrate the postmodern fog. If biblical revelation is true, any proposition that is inconsistent with it can be shown to be irrational.

Life and death issues like stem-cell research won’t go away. If we don’t make the case against utilitarianism, policies that today make most of us recoil may one day, as our moral sensibilities become anaesthetized, elicit nothing more than a shrug. And then, as the philosophy of “the greatest good for the greatest num­ber” takes hold, the Christopher Reeves of the world will be in peril — and so will the rest of us.