'Will We Let Jill Carroll Be Killed?"

By: E&P Staff A provocative opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times by Peter Singer asks, in the most urgent terms, "Will we let Jill Carroll be killed?" Her abductors in Iraq have imposed a Feb. 26 deadline to meet their demands--among them, the release of more female prisoners in that country--or they have promised to execute the freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.

Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University and the author of "Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics." In the most recent video to surface, Carroll herself says (or is forced to say) that demands should be met: "There is a very short time. Please do it fast. That's all."

Excerpts from Singer's commentary follow.

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What the kidnappers want is for the United States to free the female prisoners it is holding in Iraq, and they have made it clear that if the U.S. does not do so, Carroll will be killed. Given that other captives have been killed by Iraqi kidnappers, there can be little doubt that the threat to Carroll's life is real. Why then has there been so little discussion of whether we should meet the demands? With a human life at stake, is it right not even to debate her case?

Perhaps no one is talking about what we should do because there is a consensus that we should never yield to blackmail or threats of extortion. ...

But is the rule against dealing with kidnappers really absolute? Is it so black and white that we shouldn't even bother to discuss it?

Which of us would not seek to meet the kidnappers' demands if Carroll were our daughter? If one of President Bush's daughters were in a similar situation, do we believe he would not be thinking about whether to meet the demands? Indeed, wouldn't we think worse of him as a human being if he did not?

Admittedly, the duties of a president may override the duties of a father. The leader of a nation sometimes has to stand firm, and he may even be required to sacrifice his children for the good of the nation. But of course that would be a last resort and should not be done unless the stakes are truly momentous. Are the stakes that momentous in this case? They don't seem to be.

The kidnapper's demands, if indeed they are limited to the release of the five female prisoners being held by the military in Iraq, seem relatively modest, a small price to pay for saving the life of a young woman.

As far as we know, none of these female prisoners is a significant insurgent leader or someone whose release would pose a major threat. What's more, the U.S. released five other women on Jan. 26 (although it was careful to say that the release had nothing to do with the kidnappers' demands)....

It is not obvious to me that it would be wrong to release the female prisoners. It may well be the right thing to do, quite independently of the pressing moral requirement that we do everything possible to save Carroll's life.

But then, I don't know enough about the grounds on which these women are being held. The Bush administration could at least tell us that. Then we could begin to have an informed debate on what we should do. But as Carroll has said, we need to do it fast.