It is very likely that among living philosophers Peter Singer is the
most read; it is a virtual certainty that he is the most controversial. He is,
barring historical figures such as Marx, one of the few academic types who had
an impact on social movements by means of his own work. Noam A. Chomsky,
probably the most prominent of socially active academics denies any linkage
between his scientific work and his political views and commitments. Singer on
the other hand claims explicitly that philosopher ought to understand up to a
point, and that point reached they should act to change beliefs and behaviors
that are shown wrong by their arguments.

The two main points here made are simple to state: “We have to bring
nonhumans within the sphere of our moral concern and cease to treat them purely
as means to our ends. At the same time, once we realize that the fact that
severely and irreparably retarded infants are members of the species Homo
sapiens is not in itself relevant to how we should treat them, we should be
ready to reconsider current practices which cause suffering to all concerned
and benefit nobody.” (p. 225)

The conclusions made Singer famous (infamous to many). He is one of the
creators of the animal liberation movement. He is also the very despised
supporter of euthanasia for very many cases, including the sick, the aged, the
imbeciles. All of those with proper qualifications, about which anon.

His conclusions do follow, in the opinion of this reader anyway, from
his premise. The main premise is the utilitarian one: the main moral imperative
is to maximize happiness for the highest possible numbers. I do not want to
enter a debate over first principles. There may be reasons not to be
utilitarian, but they are of interest mostly to moral philosophers. Minimally
everyone is able to see there are reasons, perhaps not wholly conclusive, to
accept utilitarian principles. Any time one takes into account the consequences
of a possible course of action and makes choices that maximizes some perceived
utility, one gets at least a dose of utilitarianism in her system. So I won’t
dwell on the philosophical premises.

Let us get to the heart of Singer’s views. Animals share well beyond my
species the capacity to suffer, hence we should not inflict pain on animals.
This is very often the case. Most notably for the purposes of testing
cosmetics, horrific experiments are carried out. They discover virtually
nothing other than some commonplace truth of the form “animal eyes injected
seven times daily with shampoo hurt.” It may be retorted that there are cases
like medical experiments where the needs are far more stringent than those
dictates by the consumers and producers of cosmetics. Singer has much of
interest to say. His own view (see in particular “The great ape project”) is
that some animals have already the status of persons, and should on that ground
alone excluded from being used in medical experiments. Once one makes the step
of granting primates the status of persons, one ought to recognize that the
healthy, say, gorilla is far more worthy of personhood than damaged members of
the Homo sapiens groups. So brain damaged children, spina bifida
cases, Alzheimer victims, etc. do not count as persons in Singer’s moral
theory. Euthanasia follows logically. Given that medical resources are limited,
it is moral to maximize their allocation. A delicate and sophisticated argument
(see pp. 225 and ff.) to the effect that even considerations of quality of life
militate for the termination of certain kind of elderly patients, given a
notion of quality of life that relies also on expected or forecasted length of
life. Singer is extremely good in rebutting a very popular slippery slope
objection (“once demean life soon we’ll make laws to kill people who….. are
gay, who do not play the stockmarket, wear weird wigs, who do not agree with
the privy council, etc.”) In fact we have no evidence that this is the case
(see pp. 230-231.)

The book is excellent, with certain minor provisos. One is that is
probably best to avoid rhetorical devices 
such as “look how intelligent gorillas are: they can talk!” Such claims
are hotly disputed and though they may serve a purpose in swinging current
opinion, they may turn out to be false. In fact nothing more than the claim
that a healthy primate can and does in fact suffers more than a brain damaged
human animal is required to reach the conclusion that we have no reason
whatsoever to be cruel to animals. Whether this entails vegetarianism is
debatable, but a case can be made on grounds on economy and better use of
resources. The jury on vegetarianism is still out, in the opinion of this
writer.

The second qualification is more difficult to state, but it cuts
deeper. In order to agree with Singer one has to accept a very important
stance. He calls it, following William Godwin, impartiality. There is nothing
special in the word “my” that makes my mother more morally relevant than
anybody else. There is no special anything, morally, that singles out the
members of my group, community, political party, family, or what have you, as
more important than anybody else. Moral considerations are objective in the
sense of being impartial, they carry no “pro” bias in direction of anything
that I call “mine”. It seems to many, myself included, that impartiality is
part and parcel of morality. In a slogan like fashion one can say that it is an
essential property of a moral perspective on anything.

Singer is acutely aware that humans are animals shaped by evolution,
much as bugs or E. coli bacteria (see in particular the excellent essay “Darwin
for the left”, p 358 and ff.) Now the evidence seems to me preponderant in the
direction of something seriously built in human nature that structures our
concerns on an extremely local scale. We are more shocked by the nine miners
trapped in the mine near home, or in the few thousands who die in Palestine
than by the millions who die in Rwanda. The issue is complicated and I do not
think there is a simple metric to decide how local our concerns are. The fact
is that we do care more for a spouse here (indexical) than for an orphan there
(indexical), no matter how much technology and communication does to bring the
“there” closer to home. The Palestine case is interesting: for whatever reason
people, millions of people are more outraged one way or another by a relatively
minor conflict, than by an entire war in the Congo. This is not a political
point: there are excellent reasons to care for the possibility of a peaceful
solutions of conflicts in places we are interested in, for religious, familiar,
traditional, and other reasons. The difficulty, and I want to posit this purely
as a question to consider, is that if we are really local in a serious way, we
are bound to be partial. If that is true, and I take it to be an empirical
psychological fact, morality in the Singerian, impartial mood, may be a step
too long for us to contemplate. It may be a very long shot utopian hope. Singer
is, to his credit, aware of this: “ For the first time since life emerged from
the primeval soup, there are beings who understand how they have come to be
what they are. In a more distant future we can still barely glimpse, it may
turn out to be the prerequisite for a new kind of freedom: the freedom to shape
our genes so that instead of living in societies constrained by our
evolutionary origins, we can build the kind of society we judge best.” (p. 366)

I am less of a sanguine optimist.

I have not done justice to all aspects of a book, which is a must read
for those who care about ethics, beyond the academic debates. In particular I
skipped over for lack of space over Singer’s position about the morally correct
amount of charity one should give. I advise all readers to look at it. If
nothing else, barring dishonesty, it gives one pause.

© 2002 Adriano
Palma

A. P. Palma, Univ. Paris-X and
Inst. J Nicod, Paris

Categories: Ethics, Philosophical