Peter Singer: His Life and Applied Ethics

What are your ethics?

Ethical differences often lead to controversy and conflict. Just imagine a world where people can ethically differ without seeking to harm the other. It is interesting as we look across the world, if I pat a person’s head in Thailand that is disrespect and forbidden, in Australia it is fondness. If two people kiss in Saudi Arabia in public that is illegal, in Australia it is fine. If you spit on the street in Australia people don’t like it, yet in Asia it is common. In Afghanistan a man will shake hands and look down, in a western country they look you in the eye. In the western country it can be seen as deceptive, in Afghanistan it is seen as respect. A woman can be stoned to death in Afghanistan or Iran for adultery, in Australia it is called an affair and is perceived as a domestic matter. Women can sleep with whomever they choose. However, society doesn’t approve necessarily of affairs (men or women), yet there is an acceptance it happens. So ethics can change depending on where you live. Society decides what is ethical what is not.

I remember being invited by a friend to Peter Singer’s lecture. She was undertaking her doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Unfortunately the lecture was packed. I had heard a lot about Peter Singer through my friend who knew him personally. I am in support of questioning our ethics. We find with the advent of globalisation and predominantly media that is American (certainly here in Australia), our values are changing. I saw this as I travelled many countries, the Americanisation of the world was occuring. I am sure some American’s are also questioning the values and ethics of this current culture. Certainly here in Australia the older generations are quite disturbed by what is considered suitable. I think of violent video games here and movies that are packed full of violence. Also the sliding manners that used to be reinforced when I was young, such as saying ‘thank you’, or apologising if you are wrong or treating people with respect, offering them hospitality when they visit. These customs are changing as the ethics and values of previous generations are not being reinforced and media is offering to fill the gap. This is my view.

My own ethics and values are coming from my parents instruction, my schooling and in the latter part of my life a spiritual experience I am having. I desire to treat people as I would like to be treated. To not seek to hurt anyone but to try and understand differences. I try not to judge people by making myself approach people and talk to them, to get to know them or seek the truth. This for me, enables me to grow and become accepting of differences. Moreover, I work on speaking the truth without fear, as I believe truth sets myself and others free. I see it as being visible and the highest respect. Others may perceive it as confronting and disrespectful. So you can see how we differ. Yet if we were to understand these perceptions from the perspective of the ‘other’, perhaps we would be more open to different ways of seeing.

I might just point out the difference I perceive between values and ethics. The values I teach in REAL HOPES are intrinsic values that are universal e.g. love, truth, empathy, peace etc. Ethics I see as social conventions we are taught that are considered respectful, responsible and generally approved of. It is a collective agreement. Values I perceive are inherent. My spirituality links to my inner values that prompt me to look for truth. I am mindful that it is my truth and may not be yours. My inner feeling is that you have to find your own. How do you know you found it? It feels good and in harmony with yourself.

This outline is courtesy of Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer

Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective.

He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he ran unsuccessfully as a Green candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He has been voted one of Australia’s ten most influential public intellectuals.[1] Singer serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.

Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.

Life and career

Singer’s parents were Viennese Jews who escaped the German annexation of Austria and fled to Australia in 1938. They settled in Melbourne, where Singer was born. His grandparents were less fortunate: his paternal grandparents were taken by the Nazis to Łódź, and were never heard from again; his maternal grandfather died in Theresienstadt.[2] He has a sister, Joan (now Joan Dwyer). Singer’s father imported tea and coffee, while his mother practiced medicine. He attended Preshil[3] and later Scotch College. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, gaining his degree in 1967. He received an MA for a thesis entitled Why should I be moral? in 1969. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, obtaining a B.Phil in 1971 with a thesis on civil disobedience, supervised by R. M. Hare, and subsequently published as a book in 1973.[4] Singer names Hare and Australian philosopher H. D. McCloskey as his two most important mentors.[5]

After spending two years as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford, he was a visiting professor at New York University for 16 months. He returned to Melbourne in 1977, where he spent most of his career, aside from appointments as visiting faculty abroad, until his move to Princeton in 1999.[6] In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London, in addition to his work at Princeton.[7]

Animal Liberation
Main article: Animal Liberation (book)

Published in 1975, Animal Liberation[8] has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement.[9] The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that “the greatest good of the greatest number” is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to other animals. He popularized the term “speciesism”, which was originally coined by Richard D. Ryder, to describe the practice of privileging humans over other animals.[10]

Applied ethics

Singer’s most comprehensive work, Practical Ethics (1979),[11] analyzes in detail why and how living beings’ interests should be weighed. His principle of equal consideration of interests does not dictate equal treatment of all those with interests, since different interests warrant different treatment. All have an interest in avoiding pain, for instance, but relatively few have an interest in cultivating their abilities. Not only does his principle justify different treatment for different interests, but it allows different treatment for the same interest when diminishing marginal utility is a factor. For example, this approach would privilege a starving person’s interest in food over the same interest of someone who is only slightly hungry.

Among the more important human interests are those in avoiding pain, in developing one’s abilities, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, in enjoying warm personal relationships, in being free to pursue one’s projects without interference, “and many others”. The fundamental interest that entitles a being to equal consideration is the capacity for “suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness”. He holds that a being’s interests should always be weighed according to that being’s concrete properties. He favors a ‘journey’ model of life, which measures the wrongness of taking a life by the degree to which doing so frustrates a life journey’s goals. The journey model is tolerant of some frustrated desire and explains why persons who have embarked on their journeys are not replaceable. Only a personal interest in continuing to live brings the journey model into play. This model also explains the priority that Singer attaches to interests over trivial desires and pleasures.

Singer’s ideas require the concept of an impartial standpoint from which to compare interests. He has wavered about whether the precise aim is the total amount of satisfied interests or the most satisfied interests among those beings who already exist prior to the decision one is making. The second edition of Practical Ethics disavows the first edition’s suggestion that the total and prior-existence views should be combined. The second edition asserts that preference-satisfaction utilitarianism, incorporating the ‘journey’ model, applies without invoking the first edition’s suggestion about the total view. But the details are fuzzy and Singer admits that he is “not entirely satisfied” with his treatment.[12]

Ethical conduct is justifiable by reasons that go beyond prudence to “something bigger than the individual,” addressing a larger audience. Singer thinks this going-beyond identifies moral reasons as “somehow universal”, specifically in the injunction to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’, interpreted by him as demanding that one give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. This universalising step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare,[13] is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. Universalisation leads directly to utilitarianism, Singer argues, on the strength of the thought that one’s own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others. Taking these into account, one must weigh them up and adopt the course of action that is most likely to maximise the interests of those affected; utilitarianism has been arrived at. Singer’s universalising step applies to interests without reference to who has them, whereas a Kantian’s applies to the judgments of rational agents (in Kant’s kingdom of ends, or Rawls’s Original Position, etc.). Singer regards Kantian universalization as unjust to animals.[14] As for the Hobbesians, Singer attempts a response in the final chapter of Practical Ethics, arguing that self-interested reasons support adoption of the moral point of view, such as ‘the paradox of hedonism’, which counsels that happiness is best found by not looking for it, and the need most people feel to relate to something larger than their own concerns.

Practical Ethics includes a chapter arguing for the redistribution of wealth to ameliorate absolute poverty (Chapter 8, “Rich and Poor”), and another making a case for resettlement of refugees on a large scale in industrialised countries (Chapter 9, “Insiders and Outsiders”).

Although the natural, non-sentient environment has no intrinsic value for a utilitarian like Singer, environmental degradation is a profound threat to sentient life, and for this reason environmentalists are right to speak of wilderness as a ‘world heritage’.[15]
[edit] Abortion, euthanasia and infanticide

Consistent with his general ethical theory, Singer holds that the right to life is intrinsically tied to a being’s capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is intrinsically tied to a being’s capacity to feel pain and pleasure. In his view, the central argument against abortion may be stated as the following syllogism:

It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.[16]

In his book Rethinking Life and Death, as well as in Practical Ethics, Singer asserts that, if we take the premises at face value, the argument is deductively valid. Singer comments that defenders of abortion attack the second premise, suggesting that the fetus becomes a “human” or “alive” at some point after conception; however, Singer argues that human development is a gradual process, that it is nearly impossible to mark a particular moment in time as the moment at which human life begins.

Singer at MIT.

Singer’s argument for abortion differs from many other proponents of abortion; rather than attacking the second premise of the anti-abortion argument, Singer attacks the first premise, denying that it is necessarily wrong to take innocent human life:

[The argument that a fetus is not alive] is a resort to a convenient fiction that turns an evidently living being into one that legally is not alive. Instead of accepting such fictions, we should recognise that the fact that a being is human, and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being’s life.[17]

Singer states that arguments for or against abortion should be based on utilitarian calculation which weighs the preferences of a woman against the preferences of the fetus. In his view a preference is anything sought to be obtained or avoided; all forms of benefit or harm caused to a being correspond directly with the satisfaction or frustration of one or more of its preferences. Since a capacity to experience the sensations of suffering or satisfaction is a prerequisite to having any preferences at all, and a fetus, at least up to around eighteen weeks, says Singer, has no capacity to suffer or feel satisfaction, it is not possible for such a fetus to hold any preferences at all. In a utilitarian calculation, there is nothing to weigh against a woman’s preferences to have an abortion; therefore, abortion is morally permissible.

Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—”rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness”[18]—and therefore “killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living.”[19]

Singer classifies euthanasia as voluntary, involuntary, or non-voluntary. Voluntary euthanasia is that with the consent of the subject.

Singer’s book Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics offers further examination of the ethical dilemmas concerning the advances of medicine. He covers the value of human life and quality of life ethics in addition to abortion and other controversial ethical questions.

Singer has experienced the complexities of some of these questions in his own life. His mother had Alzheimer’s disease. He said, “I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult”.[20] In an interview with Ronald Bailey, published in December 2000, he explained that his sister shares the responsibility of making decisions about his mother. He did say that, if he were solely responsible, his mother might not continue to live.[21]

World poverty

In “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”,[22] one of Singer’s best-known philosophical essays, he argues that some people living in abundance while others starve is morally indefensible. Singer proposes that anyone able to help the poor should donate part of their income to aid poverty relief and similar efforts. Singer reasons that, when one is already living comfortably, a further purchase to increase comfort will lack the same moral importance as saving another person’s life.[23] Singer himself reports that he donates 25 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF.[24] In “Rich and Poor”, the version of the aforementioned article that appears in the second edition of Practical Ethics,[25] his main argument is presented as follows:

If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it; absolute poverty is bad; there is some poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance; therefore we ought to prevent some absolute poverty.

Singer’s most recent book, The Life You Can Save, makes the argument that it is a clear-cut moral imperative for citizens of developed countries to give more to charitable causes that help the poor. While Singer acknowledges that there are problems with ensuring that money goes where it is most needed and that it is used effectively, he does not think that these practical difficulties undermine his original conclusion (that people should make a much greater effort to reduce poverty).

For more information refer to wikipedia.