Peter Singer’s ideas aren’t just a
threat to society; they endanger the very existence of ethics and ethical
behavior. At least this is how Susan Lufkin Kranz sees it. Singer’s thinking
“is clearly an affront to our common humanity” (xiv). “Singer is not just
aiming to overthrow traditional ethics; he is undermining ethics itself” (13).
Adopting Singer’s ethical viewpoint would “spell the death of ethics and of
every human value” (15). Singer is threatening specifically because of his
theory of moral status. A theory of moral status outlines which entities
we have duties towards and which entities we don’t. Singer thinks that no
special status comes from being a member of the human species. What makes an
entity important is sentience, the capacity to feel pleasure and pain and form
preferences. This means that many nonhuman animals, such as chimpanzees, dogs,
and cats, are morally significant. Some humans, on the other hand, such as
fetuses and humans in a persistent vegetative state, are not. Most
controversially, this means that infants with anencephaly, a developmental
disorder where the child is born with just a brain stem and no mid-brain or
higher brain, have absolutely no intrinsic moral status. If the parents
consented, they can be used as a source of organs for transplant, even though
they are not dead. Hence the shocking aspect of Singer’s beliefs: it is wrong
to eat a cow, but it is sometimes ok to kill a baby. For Kranz, the claim that
being a member of the human species does not bring moral status is beyond the
pale of legitimate ethical systems: “Either humanity will retain its central
position in the ethical universe, or else human ethics will come to an end and
the values of the marketplace or some other horror will fill the vacuum” (15).

Kranz is hardly alone in finding
Singer so alarming. He has been shouted down by protesters at his talks and
sometimes physically prevented from speaking. Singer has also been the subject
of much more level-headed critique from the academic community. Kranz
contributes to the latter by attempting to show how Singer’s more abstract
ideas—for example, his conception of the nature of philosophical ethics, his
metaphysics of morals and his justification for preference utilitarianism,
etc.—have deep flaws that lead to his bizarre conclusion about the value of
being human. Many of her criticisms of Singer’s more theoretical principles are
well taken. However, when it comes to her primary goal, refuting Singer’s
thesis that being biologically human is of no moral import, she is reduced to
foot stamping. She also sometimes slips into the same kind of annoying mistakes
that have marred public criticism of Singer, including confusing valuing
species membership as such with valuing properties held by most members of that
species. While this book would make an accessible introduction for anyone
interested in why Singer causes such alarm, I am not sure it really moves the
debate forward.

One of Kranz’s effective
theoretical criticisms is her critique of Singer’s use of human evolution and
human history. Part of Singer’s project is to undermine our traditional ethical
instincts, and one tactic he has used to do this is to show how our ethical
instincts are accidental products of natural selection and the vicissitudes of
human history. Our tendency to favor our own kin, for instance, is a clear
product of natural selection. This is not a new argumentative strategy. It has
long been known that explaining the history of an idea or social structure can
remove the illusion of inevitability that idea or structure might have, paving
the way to undermining belief in it. Kranz rightly points out, though, that
facts about an idea’s history do not logically undermine its legitimacy.
Singer’s mistake here is the inverse of the fallacy of the old social
Darwinists, who assumed that because competition is natural it must be good. Charitably,
we might say that Singer’s intent here is more rhetorical than argumentative.
Singer has never been above backing his arguments with emotional appeals—think
of the pictures of factory farms in Animal Liberation. His use of human
evolution and history to undermine conventional ethics might be more of a piece
with this kind of move. It is also worth noting that his most recent treatment
of human evolution, A Darwinian Left, does not repeat the arguments
Kranz criticizes.

Kranz is also on solid ground in
Chapter 3 when she criticizes part of the backbone of Singer’s utilitarian
ethical theory: the idea that there can be no basis for ethics other than the
subjective preference of sentient organisms. Singer, on Kranz’s reconstruction,
believes the world consists of matters of fact and individual preferences. The
only way ethics can achieve anything like objectivity is by taking into account
the preferences of as many organisms as possible. Kranz points out, however,
that preferences are not formed arbitrarily, but can be rationally criticized.
Therefore, she claims, preferences can be right or wrong, and there must be
more to ethics than the satisfaction of them. Kranz is surely right to claim
that subjective preferences can be rationally criticized. Kranz’s account of
how we criticize preferences, however, is quite unsatisfactory. Kranz believes
in a kind of Husserlian eidetic intuition, where we simply “know” that certain
preferences are wrong. There is a tradition of calling this sort of immediate
grasping rational, but I never understood it. No reason is being given for
one’s views, only dogmatic assertion.

Kranz’s argument begins to fall
apart when it focuses on her core target: Singer’s claim that simply being
human has no moral worth. Let’s be clear about what he is saying. Singer is not
denying the moral worth of people on the basis of their race, creed, or gender.
He is denying the moral worth of infants born without a brain and humans in an
irreversible coma. Such creatures are alive and human, but they will never
achieve consciousness. For Singer, they have the moral worth of a cabbage,
which will also never achieve consciousness. Kranz, it turns out, doesn’t have
much to say when it comes to criticizing the claim that species membership
makes no moral difference. She summarizes her argument like this: “Moral
deliberations ought never to disregard the human, however, because the human
good is exactly what moral deliberation is primarily about” (105). In other
words, removing humans from the center of the ethical system will lead to the
end of human ethics. It is ambiguous, however, whether she thinks that removing
humans from the center of the ethical system will mean that the system will
cease to be human, or that it will cease to be ethical. The former charge is
hollow. Singer would no doubt happily admit that his ethic is no longer human.
The accusation is like calling Osama bin Laden un-American. Kranz’s second
possible charge, that a system of rules without humans at the center would no
longer be ethical, is question begging. In order to declare that a system of
rules without humans at the center is not ethical, you have to assume the truth
of the principle of human dignity. Moreover, this move has intuitive
counterexamples. Numerous normative systems around the world do not put special
value on being human, but at least on the surface seem quite noble. According
to some Buddhist and Hindu systems, humans can be reincarnated as animals and
vice versa. Life is valued, not the particular species it is incarnated in. The
Hindu notion of ahimsa, or nonviolence, demands that all life be
protected but does not put a premium on human life. If this isn’t an ethical
system, I don’t know what is.

Another argument that Kranz makes
repeatedly is that Singer’s ethic is psychologically unsound. Drawing on the
work of neurologist Antonio Demasio, Kranz argues that any ethic that requires
us to put aside natural human sympathies, such as our preference for kin and
conspecifics, would unhinge us psychologically. This point is no doubt true,
but its impact is muted by the fact that Singer accepts Hare’s distinction
between the intuitive and the critical level of ethics. The critical level is
the realm of abstract reflection where ethical truths can be found. The intuitive
level is the level of day-to-day thinking where actual ethical decisions are
made. While it may be that on the critical level, all sentient beings are
equal, it would be good on the intuitive level to cultivate caring
relationships, which prejudice us to particular individuals. The need for this
intuitive bias can actually be proved on an unbiased critical level. In a 1995
essay with Kuhse and Cannold entitled “William Godwin and the Defense of
Impartialist Ethics,” Singer endorses this idea and traces it back to Godwin.
It is important to note, though, that this argument does more to justify a
prejudice in favor of one’s family and friends than a prejudice for one’s
species. After all, the kind of caring bond that is described is a bond to
people one has a history with, not to a species as such.

Kranz also falls into the classic
mistake made by too many opponents of the animal liberation movement: she
equivocates between valuing species membership as such and valuing properties
like intelligence, which are possessed by some but not all members of a
species. When she defines the value of humanity, she makes it clear that she is
talking about humanity as such: “For the value and the uniqueness of human
beings are grounded in their very being and not reducible to any quantitative
facts about them (1.6% of DNA) nor to any qualitative features such that their
loss would involve the loss of human value (for instance, artistic ability, or
facility with language, or even ‘normal’ intelligence)” (17). But when she
turns around and criticizes the rights of apes and chimpanzees, suddenly higher
mental properties are important again: “How many articles have the great apes
written about us? How many chimpanzees are trying to teach their languages to
human beings? How many gorillas care about the human beings starving in
sub-Saharan Africa? How many orangutans are concerned about human beings on
death row in Texas?” (15). She does nearly the exact same thing on pages 52–52,
first defending the value of an embryo in a Petrie dish on the grounds that it
is human, and then criticizing the value of apes on the grounds that they
cannot reason as humans do. In other words, Kranz ignores what Narveson has
labeled the “argument from marginal cases.” Basically, this argument says that
for every animal whose moral status one wishes to deny, one can find a human
with roughly the same cognitive ability. But cognitive ability can’t both be
relevant to the moral evaluation of animals and not relevant to the moral
evaluation of “marginal” humans. Therefore those who invoke the importance of
cognitive ability must either respect both the animal and the marginal human,
or neither the animal nor the marginal human. Kranz discusses the argument from
marginal cases (although not under that name) when she recapitulates the
argument of Animal Liberation in Chapter 4. However, she seems to forget
it in other places in her argument, consistently using cognitive measures to
deny moral status to animals, while saying cognitive measures are not relevant
to the moral status of humans.

Despite my criticisms, I recommend
this book to anyone interested in practical ethics. People who perhaps have
read about Singer in the popular media and want to learn more should read it.
(You should also, of course, read Singer himself, starting probably with Animal
Liberation.) If a cheap paperback edition of Kranz’s book were
available, I would use it in an ethics class that covers animal ethics or
medical ethics. For the more knowledgeable reader interested in criticisms of
Singer, however, I would still recommend Singer and His Critics edited
by Dale Jamieson.

©
2002 Rob Loftis

Rob Loftis received his Ph.D. in
philosophy from Northwestern University in 1999 and currently teaches at Auburn
University. He is currently working on the evaluation of pain in nonlinguistic
organisms.

Categories: Ethics