Today marks the 60th birthday of Peter Singer, one of the most famous and arguably the most controversial philosophers alive today. Singer is the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and has previously lectured at Oxford, New York University and Monash in Melbourne. At the same time, though, he’s been described as ‘the most dangerous man on earth’, has been likened to a Nazi and attracted criticism from Simon Wiesenthal, and has caused Steve Forbes to withdraw funding from Princeton, his own alma mater. Given the popular stereotype of philosophers as crusty dons arguing politely in their studies about the meaning of meaning, what is it about Singer in particular that elicits such extreme reactions?
He first came to prominence in the early 1970s with his book Animal Liberation. While it’s a bit of a stretch to describe it (as has been done) as the founding document of the animal rights movement, it’s equally difficult to overestimate the importance of this work in ensuring that the issue of animal welfare is taken seriously, both in philosophical circles and in wider public debate.
To understand Singer’s position on the ‘rights’ of animals (and we’ll return to the question of rights later one), it’s necessary to understand his broader philosophical or ethical position. Singer is a utilitarian, specifically a preference utilitarian. Simplistically put (indeed, too simplistically) utilitarianism is an ethical position which judges the morality of an action on the extent to which it maximises happiness or pleasure and minimises pain or suffering. It is fundamentally an egalitarian philosophy, in which (to use the old expression) everyone counts as ‘one’, and no one counts as ‘more than one’. Obviously this definition alone is so broad as to be almost meaningless, and a more sophisticated definition (of Singer’s preference utilitarianism specifically) is that ‘like interests should be treated with equal respect’. My need for food, shelter and other necessities is no more or less important than your need for the same things. My desire not to be punched in the face is, by the same token, no less significant than your desire to avoid the same pain.
The importance of this focus on interests themselves, rather than on the ‘person’ (often a contentious term in applied ethics) is that it transcends other categories which are often considered morally significant. In this worldview, it would be wrong of me to treat the interests of members of one particular group (e.g. of white people, or of men) as more important than the same interests of those in other groups (non-whites, or women, from the examples above) if the reason for the discrimination is solely based on their membership of those groups. I can of course differentiate between different people if the interests themselves are different; it would be ethical of me, for example, to give the price of a meal to a starving man instead of taking my well-fed friend to dinner, as the need of the first man is greater than that of the second. Similarly, my desire mentioned above not to be punched in the face outweighs your desire to hit me (at least, I hope it does).
Why this becomes important in terms of animal welfare, Singer would argue, is because he believes that the species barrier, like differences in race, nationality, sexuality or gender, should not in itself be considered morally significant. The best way to understand what this means in practice, perhaps, is to examine the rather contrived (but useful) term ‘speciesism’.
Just as racism can be seen as a tendency to judge someone’s worth or treat them differently on the basis of their race, and to consider those of other races as less deserving of consideration than those of our own, so too does speciesism make moral distinctions based solely on species, and sees the quality of being ‘human’ as being inherently important.
That is not to say, of course, that all species should be treated equally (as some would like to caricature this position as). No one is talking, for example, about giving cats the right to vote. But the reason behind this refusal is crucial; cat’s aren’t denied the franchise simply because they’re cats. It’s because, given their nature and the fact that they have neither the understanding of nor the capacity to vote, they have no interest (as the term is used above) in voting. Denying them this right, therefore, is permissible in a way it wouldn’t be if you denied it to someone based on their gender.
However, the equal treatment of interests doctrine does have some radical implications for our own relationship with animals (or, as Singer more correctly describes them, non-human animals). A dog mightn’t have the same interest in access to a primary education as a human, but both have an equal interest in avoiding pain. To avoid the trap of speciesism, we must acknowledge that the pain of the dog matters no less than the pain of a human (given what we know about canine physiology). If we seriously accept the significance of animal suffering, therefore, it’s very hard to see how the practices of factory farming can be justified. Does my preference for eating meat outweigh to costs inflicted on the animals used in its production? Remember, we’re not even talking about the pleasure I get from consuming animal products; it’s only the net difference between that and any pleasure or utility I would achieve from consuming vegetarian or vegan alternatives that I must balance against the suffering of the animals involved in the production of the dinner in front of me.
A clever reader will likely have thought through some of the implications of this position and will realise that it doesn’t necessarily prohibit the exploitation of animals in certain circumstances. If a cow is raised in an environment where it’s happy, comfortable and has all it’s need met, and has only been brought into the world in order to eventually be turned into beef, then is quickly killing it in a way that involves no suffering actually wrong? Not necessarily. Assuming that a cow has no knowledge of its own mortality and, therefore, has no real interest in avoiding death then no real harm has been done. Similarly, if the suffering of 30 pigs in scientific experiments leads to a medical breakthrough which saves the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, surely the interests of those people outweigh the pain of the pigs. It gets somewhat more complicated, though, if you’re talking about 10,000 pigs against the lives of 20 people.
This is why it’s a mistake to consider Singer an advocate of animal ‘rights’ (in the sense of inviolable moral duties we have towards other individuals); indeed, he’s a sceptic when it comes to this view of rights at all. In this, he comes into conflict with other philosophers like Tom Regan, who would hold very firmly to the rights perspective. That said, though, Singer is one of the founding members of the Great Ape Project, which seeks to have Great Apes recognised as persons and to have certain legal rights guaranteed.
Singer also applies the doctrine of equal consideration to the issue of development and global justice. His 1972 essay ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’, written, in part, in response to the Bengal Famine posits a very straightforward thought experiment. Suppose you are walking along a riverbank, and see a child drowning. You could wade in and rescue her, and the only suffering you’d endure would be to ruin your nice new shoes. Most of us would be repulsed by even the possibility of sacrificing the child for the sake of your shoes.
Singer’s argument, however, is that we do this all the time. Every time we spend money on a non-necessity, such as a fancy meal, a nice holiday, or a trip to the theatre (the examples of ordinary life chosen by philosophers, it must be said, do tend to underline their class background) when you could, instead, donate that money to a charity such as Oxfam, you are acting in a way that’s not substantially morally different from those of our friend in the example who’s more concerned about his shoes than about a child’s life.
There are some possible objections to this position, but it’s difficult to make them stick. One could point out that the child in question is right in front of you, rather than thousands of miles away. However if we judge the morality of an action on the extent to which it respects the interests of all involved, then it’s hard to justify treating the interests of someone in one location as more important than those of a person somewhere else. More substantially, many critics of Singer point out that this posits an obligation on people that few, if any, will be able to fulfill. Even Singer himself admits that he doesn’t live up to the injunction to ‘give ‘till it hurts’ (or, more technically, to give as much as you can up to a point where the negative consequences of your giving would outweigh the positive impact of the donation). But this does not in itself demonstrate that the proposition itself is flawed. If could perhaps be held up as something we should strive towards, which is surely preferable to doing nothing.
An interview with Singer where he discusses the ethical issues around global poverty can be found here, and his work One World looks at this and the ethical implications of other global issues, such as climate change and migration.
One particularly interesting issue raised in ‘Famine, Affluence and Morality’ is the view that there’s no substantial moral difference between deliberately killing someone and allowing them to die. Of course, from a consequentialist perspective, why should there be? In the example of the child in the pond (or other examples he uses which involve sports cars and train tracks and which are teased about in almost obsessive detail by Peter Unger in Living High and Letting Die, which is heavily indebted to Singer’s earlier work) the person dies as result of a choice I make. Given that inaction is no less a choice than action, there’s no compelling reason why I should be held less responsible if it was in my power to save someone’s life and I didn’t, than if I pushed her into the river myself.
It’s this position, or how this position has been presented when applied to bioethical issues, that has proven so contentious. Singer’s critics argue that he justifies the deliberate killing of newborns; rather startlingly, this is (strictly speaking) true. A little blog like this doesn’t have the space to tease out all the nuances of what is an extremely complicated argument and must, unfortunately, deal in broad stokes. Still we’ll give it a shot.
A key point to make is that the representation of Singer’s position above is, if not a distortion, certainly overly simplistic. While he does argue that the killing of infants can be justified, he does restrict this to very specific circumstances. He’s referring to cases where the infant has been born with an abnormality so severe that is makes life not worth living from the point of view of the person living that life. In such a situation he believes that killing the infant should be permitted. It’s for this reason that, and for the infamous and famously misrepresented quote – “killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all” – that he’s likened to Hitler.
Again, however, we must look at his underlying assumptions before labelling him a Nazi (which isn’t a very nice thing to say about someone whose grandparents died in the Holocaust). It’s clear from the quote that Singer wouldn’t consider the disabled infant to be a person. However, it is not the disability that means they are not a person, but the fact of their status as infants. No newborn is a person; she only has the potential to become one. A person, in this sense, is a being which has some kind of awareness of itself and of its own existence in time. Given that the infant doesn’t, therefore, have a desire to continue living it’s, therefore, not necessarily wrong to end her life.
The distinction between killing and allowing to die mentioned above is also a critical one in this context. Many are appalled at Singer’s view that profoundly disabled children could (with consent of their parents and doctors) be given an injection intended to bring about their deaths. However, there is less controversy over decisions to withhold certain treatments from the same infants in cases where (again, in the view of doctors and parents) their life has become a burden to them. Why make the distinction? Is it any more wrong to intentionally kill someone quickly than to take them off a respirator (which still results in death, but can take longer)? Decisions like this are made all the time, but (as Singer notes in of his work on euthanasia) the taboo around the deliberate, as opposed to indirect, ending of life remains.
It’s not hard to see why many groups, specifically disability activists are outraged by Singer’s position. Their objections, however, are based on a few misconceptions, in my view. One argument they tend to make is that Singer is believes that they should have been killed at birth and that this shows profound disrespect for their current existence. This is mistaken, as they’re failing to appreciate the distinction between potential persons and the actual persons that they are. A similar error is to confuse the person with the disability. Seeking to prevent or cure deafness does not imply that deaf people (as opposed to the condition of deafness) should not exist.
On one point of this argument I think criticism of Singer is valid. He does, at times, seem to fail to appreciate the socially constructed nature of disability itself. People are ‘disabled’ by virtue of their difference from the majority of the population. I am not ‘disabled’ because I’m unable to fly; similarly, if everyone was blind the inability to see wouldn’t be considered a disability at all. Recognising this is the first step toward creating a society where disabled people are able to live full and active lives. Singer, I think, doesn’t always take cognisance of the extent to which social structures, rather than the disability itself, can place the burden on the ‘disabled’ person (although, it does seem to be something he’s becoming more aware of since his early writing on the subject).
Before I finish this rather overlong tribute, which cannot do justice to the sophistication of his thought, or to the more problematic consequences of some of his beliefs (such as the replacability argument when it comes to infanticide, or Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion, it’s only fair to point to some areas where Singer does seem to have been a little wide of the mark. He has predicted, in works like Rethinking Life and Death a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in our understanding of ethics where archaic, quasi-religious assumptions about, for example, the sanctity of life or the moral exceptionalism of humans. That has yet to occur on any kind of substantial level. Indeed, irrational fundamentalist beliefs appear, if anything, to be on the ascendant.
By the same token, his attempts to address meta-ethical questions (i.e. ‘why should we behave ethically’ rather than ‘what is the ethical thing to do’) in works like How are we to live? have been far less convincing than his work on specific issues in applied ethics.
Still, as it’s his birthday (and I’m tired) perhaps we should gloss over those for now, and consider why Singer is important. Even if we disagree with his conclusions, he shows us how we can use reason to come to important moral conclusions. This is particularly useful when confronting a kind of soggy relativism that asserts that different values can and should be applied in different cultures. I must admit that I can think of very few people outside of academia who sincerely hold this belief, but at least we now know what to do when confronted by Madeline Bunting down a dark alley.
At the same time, he reminds us that sometimes our immediate response to something isn’t always the correct one. Unlike those who pride themselves on fighting the relativists wherever the raise their ugly heads, Singer reveals that the fact that the Truth might exist doesn’t mean that you necessarily know what it is.
Throughout this piece I’ve cited various different books of Singer’s. However, his most comprehensive work is Practical Ethics, which has become the standard textbook on applied ethics on many campuses. A useful introduction to his thought is Writings on an Ethical Life, a collection of some of most important pieces.
And if anyone has had the patience to read all the way through the end, here’s an interesting titbit: Peter Singer shares the same birthday as Sylvester Stallone, who also turns 60 today.
Just fancy that!
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 