Ten Reasons Why I Love/Hate Peter Singer | Issue 59 (2024)

Articles

Mark Coffey puts forward five reasons to love and five reasons to loathe the man who has been called “the most influential living philosopher”.

Born in Australia in 1946, Peter Singer studied at the universities of Melborne and Oxford. He haslectured at Oxford, New York University, La Trobe, and Monash. In 1999 he moved to Princeton to becomeIra W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the Centre for Human Values. Singer’s works have been publishedin 15 languages and he is author or editor of 30 books, including Animal Liberation, (knownas ‘the Bible of the Animal Liberation Movement’) which has sold over 500,000 copies. Hisbook Practical Ethics has become the textbook of choice for many university ethics courses,andis Cambridge University Press’s most profitable philosophy text to date.

Five Reasons To Love Singer

1) Because his main aim is to reduce the suffering of sentient beings in the world, human or non-human. “Ifa being suffers there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.No matter what the nature of the being, the principle of equality requires that its suffering be countedequally with the like suffering – insofar as rough comparisons can be made – of any otherbeing.” (Animal Liberation) As a negative utilitarian, for whom reducing paintakes priority over the pursuit of pleasure, he writes, “My position on infanticide is motivatedby the same thing that motivates my views about obligations to the poor: that is, a desire to avoid unnecessarysuffering.” (Third Way Magazine, Vol 15, no 6.) On animal welfare, abortion, euthanasia,the ecology, global trade and Bush’s war against terror, this impetus runs throughout Singer’swork. In pursuing a consequentialist ethic with universal moral principles such as maximizing the abilityof all sentient beings to satisfy their preferences, Singer assures his readers that “to live anethical life is not self-sacrifice, but self-fulfilment.” (How Are We To Live?) His writingshave persuaded many to give up meat-eating, or to give a percentage of their income to the world’spoorest, so he has undoubtedly done much personally and professionally to reduce pain and suffering inthe world and promote the living of an ethical life.

2) He’s a practical as well as a theoretical philosopher. Singer is fond of Marx’s remarkthat “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point however is tochange it.” (Theses on Feuerbach) Singer confesses that whilst at Oxford he was more concernedwith the practical issues of Vietnam and the atomic bomb than with R.M.Hare’s lectures on the ‘Is-Ought’ distinction.His first book, Democracy and Disobedience, about the ethical issue of disobedience to unjustlaws, was in part a response to the issues raised by the Vietnam War, which Singer had protested againstwhilst an undergrad in Melbourne. In a landmark 1973 essay for The New York Times entitled ‘Philosophersare Back on the Job’, Singer signalled his intention to bring the “clarification and rigor” thatphilosophy can provide to issues considered the domain of “clergymen, politicians, and leader-writers.” BertrandRussell said that he wrote to a popular audience as an ordinary citizen, but Singer unashamedly writesand acts as a Practical Philosopher. He gives 20% of his income to charity and doesn’t eat or wearany animal products. He has sat in a cage to draw attention to the plight of battery hens, and has beenphysically assaulted and vehemently condemned by disabled rights protesters angered by his comparisonsbetween the capacities of intellectually disabled humans and nonhuman animals, and by his advocacy ofvoluntary euthanasia and infanticide. He has been arrested for attempting to photograph confined sowson a pig farm partly owned by Australia’s Prime Minister, and stood as a Green candidate for theAustralian Senate. When he arrived in Princeton (where he’s inspired students to start a chapterof UNICEF), proctors [university police] had to escort him around campus out of fear he’d be attacked.

3) He shakes Christians up with bracing criticisms of their historical track record in animal welfare,care of the environment, and the needs of the poorest of the poor. In an interview with Third WayMagazine he commented that, “In terms of ethical foundations, Christians are all over theplace... you can’t find anything about genetic engineering in Scripture… and things thatyou do find in Scripture, like the idea that it’s extremely difficult for a rich person to go toheaven, Christians ignore.” He chastises the myopia of right-wing Christianity in America and Bush’sChristian rhetoric that doesn’t square with his environmental policies or miserly 0.15% commitmentto the UN Aid programme. Having enjoyed privilege in the Christianized world for generations, he urgesChristians to put their religious beliefs to one side and instead discuss on the basis of ‘publicreason’, as befits their place in a modern secular democracy. To this extent he’s willingto listen to religious thinkers (up to a point), because although ethics is logically prior to religion(as Plato’s Euthyphro dilemma establishes), nonetheless, “Religious traditions oftenhave long histories of dealing with ethical dilemmas, and the accumulation of wisdom and experience thatthey represent can give us valuable insight into particular problems.” (Bioethics, An Anthology)On a personal level, with openness and goodwill towards others Singer engages in a constructive spiritof co-operation. He shows a willingness to understand the positions of those with whom he disagrees,including those from religious traditions who are willing to set aside the confessional premises of theirarguments and speak in terms of public reason – increasingly so since moving to America.

4) He is a fascinating writer – engaging, thoroughly researched, provocative and impassioned.He is also a populariser who is frequently found in the media, from The New York Times to TVtalk shows. He generally keeps his references unobtrusive at the back of his books, and offers case studiesand illuminating scenarios to consider (try Bob and his Bugatti in ‘The Singer Solution to WorldPoverty’ and see if you feel obligated to give more to Oxfam). In short, he would not be the textbookwriter of choice for many university ethics courses, the best-selling philosophy writer for C.U.P. todate, or the single most significant thinker in persuading people to become vegetarian, if he was nota gifted and persuasive communicator. The clarity and rational focus he brings to the issues of globalizationand Bush’s ethics in his most recent books make them hard to put down. One introduction to Singerdescribes its task as “selling water by the river,” such is the accessible style and clarityof thought which Singer offers his readers.

5) He shows us where we’re heading as a society. In the tradition of Nietzsche he challengesthe practically secular but nominally religious to think their position through to its logical conclusion,thus dispensing with the sanctity of human life and maximizing the satisfaction of sentient preferences.Consistent, and unafraid to drive logic off a cliff and say what other philosophers are thinking butdaren’t put down on paper, I think it’s fair to say that the radical current of his ideashas flowed from marginal tributaries to the mainstream of academic life. In an era where a commitmentto individual freedom of choice is one of the few values people share in common, Singer’s ‘thin’ accountof ethics which sets aside ‘thicker’ accounts rooted in distinctive traditions, shows ushow a pluralist society of radically differing moral beliefs will be likely to do business, particularlyin public policy making and the allocation of limited resources. He is evidently eager to acceleratea Copernican revolution in the ethical deliberations of the world’s legislative and judicial bodies:one can’t help agreeing with The Times’ assessment that Singer has a “penchantfor provocation” through certain statements, as for example when he claims that experiments shouldbe carried out on brain dead humans prior to on higher primates, or that killing a fish is worse thankilling a foetus prior to three months. Yet as the concept of ‘Quality Adjusted Life Years’ attemptsto find a practical solution to the allocation of scarce medical resources and begins to be employedin health budgeting, and as caps are put on treatment of certain conditions in the (British)NationalHealth Service, the logic of Singer’s position will seem all the more persuasive and reasonable.

Five Reasons To Hate Singer

1) Because by ‘public reason’ Singer means ‘utilitarian exchanges in logic.’ Unlessyou trade in his currency, he won’t do business with you. He sees all goods (life, knowledge, beauty,justice, etc) as exchangeable in the common currency of pleasure and pain or personal preferences tothis effect. However articulately the incommensurate nature of goods is argued (is morality really sosimple as to weigh up justice against compassion, or promise keeping with truth telling?), these differentgoods are tossed onto Singer’s scales of utility and weighed. But the polymorphous nature of pleasureand pain has proven to be a perennial problem for utilitarians, and one which John Stuart Mill’sfamous distinction between higher and lower pleasures does not satisfactorily resolve. Happiness, itturns out, is too subjective and indeterminate a basis on which to completely assess morality. Singeradmits as much when he acknowledges that “if happiness is regarded not as the sole ultimate good,but only as one among ultimate goods, then we need, in practice, to compare and balance these goods witheach other, and how we are to go about doing this is a problem to which no-one had produced a coherentanswer.” (Unsanctifying Human Life p45.)

No-one doubts that utilitarianism offers an effective if somewhat pragmatic exchange-rate-mechanismin a world of conflicting preferences, but Singer mistakes this for the basis of a substantive ethicto live by. Thus for Germain Grisez, utilitarianism confuses practical judgements with moral ones, employingbureaucratic techniques to settle claims among rival goods (it is little wonder that the values of ourcommercial and industrial culture should become a paradigm for ethical thinking). Grisez comments inhis book Choice and Consequentialism that “humankind today is not making progress, butrather is abandoning humanity, subjugating human persons and communities to a mode of judgement whoseproper role belongs to the technical sphere.” Charles Taylor sees a “breathtaking systematisation” aboututilitarian logic such as Singer’s, arguing that “There is no guarantee that [different]universally valid goods should be perfectly combinable…” (Sources of the Self)It may indeed be argued that utilitarianism has some responsibility for the inconclusiveness of modernmoral debates, in leading us to believe that we share more values than we do. As it turns out, much ofthe language of moral traditions has no equivalent in the impoverished vocabulary of utilitarian moralEsperanto. As the late Bernard Williams put it, this new ‘thin’ language of ethics has “toofew feelings and thoughts to match the world as it really is.” (Utilitarianism: For and Against)For another prominent modern ethicist, Alasdair MacIntyre, whilst the utilitarian pseudo-concept of thegreatest happiness of the greatest number may have been instrumental in implementing public health measuresand universal suffrage, “the use of a conceptual fiction in a good cause does not make it any lessof a fiction.” (After Virtue)

2) Singer has taught a generation to think of ethics as rooted in dilemmas, in calculations of felicity,and in the consequences of their actions, as opposed to being concerned with the development of virtuouscharacter and moral sentiment. For example, he still bangs on about criteria for personhood and whetheror not the foetus is a person or has potentiality as being the central questions of the abortion debate,when statistics show that the key determinant in whether a foetus is carried through to term or not isthe quality of the parental relationship. And ‘practical ethics’ should be about shapinggood dispositions of character rather than ratiocinative cleverness. As Robert Solomon writes in hisessay entitled ‘Peter Singer’s Expanding circle’, “My argument, in a sentence,is that Singer, in his emphasis on reason… underestimates the power of compassion… Reason,according to Singer, adds universal principles to the promptings of our biologically inherited feelings.The danger however, is that reason will also leave those feelings behind, as evidenced by any numberof philosophers who simply ‘talk a good game’. [Morality requires] not reason (in the technicalsense of the calculation on the basis of abstract principles), but rather… what many moral theoristscall ‘empathy’ or ‘feeling with’… and it requires care and concern, theemotional sense that what happens to others matters.” (Singer and his Critics). Solomonargues that moral theorizing can warp and restrict intuitive moral sentiments, recalling that Americansoldiers in Cambodia in the 60s who were not college educated “typically remained sensitive toand repulsed by the war crimes” they saw, whereas college recruits “were able to rationalizethese handily, using familiar utilitarian arguments, cutting themselves off quite effectively not onlyfrom guilt and shame but from the human tragedies they caused and witnessed.”

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a wheelchair-bound lawyer and disability rights activist who is herself severelyparalyzed, comments that “Even as I’m horrified by what he says, and by the fact that I havebeen sucked into a discussion of whether I ought to exist, I can’t help being dazzled by his verbalfacility… He is so… focused on the argument.” (The Sunday Telegraph Magazine,06.04.03.) A member of the pressure group Not Dead Yet, who protested at Singer’s professorialappointment at Princeton (where 14 arrests were made), she says, “As a shield from the terriblepurity of Singer’s vision… To justify my hopes that Singer’s theoretical world – andits entirely logical extensions – won’t become real, I’ll invoke the muck and the messand undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived.” In the end, such lives call into questionthe old assumption that abortions can be justified by the projected pain and purposelessness of futurelives. Such projections tell us less about the prognosis of medical science and more about the valuesand judgments we make over lives ‘not worth living’ and the age-old faith of consequentialistsin being able to predict the future. Whether this shift from Aristotle’s agent-based ethic to theaction-based ethics of utilitarians like Singer serves society well or not, time alone will tell; butmany think it will lead to a colder, less cohesive society where interdependence gives way to a moreatomized existence.

3) Life is not lived in abstract case studies, but in personal ties and attachments. Yet in his emphasison impartiality Singer has uprooted people from the privileged relationships that are the very nurseryof ethical character and virtue. In an interview with Marianne Macdonald, Singer admits that he wouldsave his children from a fire rather than a bunch of strangers who maximised the interests at stake,confessing “but I don’t know that I would have done the right thing.” (Herald Sun,29.07.01) In reply to questions about the tens of thousands of dollars spent by Singer in providing privatehealth care for his mother, Singer acknowledges that his own criteria – by which she is no longera person and would suffer no wrong, indeed may be treated more compassionately, were she killed – determinethat the money could probably be put to better use, yet he comments, “it is more difficult thanI thought before, because it is different when it is your mother.” But filial obligation, the sanctityof life, the intrinsic dignity of human beings and other principles such as natural rights cannot beinvoked according to Singer. (He is fond of quoting Jeremy Bentham’s remark about natural rightsbeing “nonsense on stilts.”) Such personal dilemmas highlight the complexity of negotiatinglife consistently with only utilitarian instrumental goods as one’s guide. Peter Berkowitz extendsthis critique of Singer with the observation that by his own standards, Singer has failed. In PracticalEthics Singer says, “an ethical judgement that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoreticaldefect as well, for the whole point of ethical judgement is to guide practice.” This violationof his own moral theory may represent the triumph of filial love over utility, but as Berkowitz concludes, “itis hard to imagine a more stunning rebuke to the well-heeled and well-ensconced academic discipline ofpractical ethics than that its most controversial and influential star, at the peak of his discipline,after an Oxford education, after twenty five years as a university professor, and after the publicationof thousands of pages laying down clear cut rules on life-and-death issues, should reveal, only as theresult of a reporter’s prodding, and only in the battle with his own elderly mother’s suffering,that he has just begun to appreciate that the moral life is complex.” (in ‘Other Peoples’ Mothers’, TheNew Republic online.) As Stephen Mulhall comments, “It is not as if we develop a concept ofa person … and then relate to those we identify as persons in ways we judge appropriate to theirmetaphysical genus... Personhood is not the metaphysical foundation of an interpersonal ethics; it isitself an ethical notion. The attempt to analyse it while remaining morally neutral is bound to produce… madconceptual science… We do not strive (when we do strive) to treat human infants and children,the senile and the severely disabled as fully human because we mistakenly attribute capacities to themthat they lack, or because we are blind to the merely biological significance of a species boundary.We do it (when we do) because they are fellow human beings... because there but for the grace of Godgo I.” (‘Morality by Numbers’ in London Review of Books, August 2002.)

Despite his remarks about his family circ*mstances, Singer has the intuition that intuitions don’tmake sense, and that very soon we need to reason at a deeper ‘critical’ level, rather thanrelying on the training of our inclinations by habit of character. Yet as Mill learned through the hard-earnedexperience of his mental breakdown, “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings… whenno other mental habit is cultivated, and the analyzing spirit remains without its natural complementsand correctives… Analytic habits [are] a perpetual worm at the root of the passions and the virtues.” (FromMill’s Autobiography.) Mill recognizes that “the pleasure of sympathy with humanbeings, and the feelings which made the good of others, and especially the good of mankind on a largescale, the object of existence” were those that his education “had failed to create…insufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis.” The same can be said of theeducation Singer has given to the current generation of ethicists, for whom case studies and the computationsof utility take precedence. Yet as Paul Tournier wrote, “Medicine is not practiced in a world ofthings, but of persons, fellowship, and sympathy.” (Quoted in David Ford, The Prenatal Person,Ethics from Conception to Birth.)

‘The Singer Solution to World Poverty’ is a wonderful article whose rationally persuasiveargument works on me. But I never cease to find that it falls on deaf ears with sixth formers. The factis that the best ethics courses are taught relationally in the home, or where roles and responsibilitiesallow us to exercise the virtues. For this reason, sixth formers will be far more likely to do somethingabout extreme poverty as a result of doing community action in a local nursing home or caring for a disabledsibling or parent at home, than if they read a hundred guilt-eliciting articles by utilitarian philosophers.More often than not, our actions and will are motivated by underlying intuitions and dispositions ofcharacter rather than by dispassionate reason.

4) Singer is parasitic upon conventional morality whilst at the same time accelerating its decline.The dependency of Singer’s practical ethics upon the very tradition it purports to supersede maybe seen from his borrowing R.M. Hare’s distinction between ‘intuitive’ and ‘critical’ levelsof thinking. Unsound as rules and principles may be at the critical level of thought, Singer argues thatin applying them “people will do better on the whole if they stick to… principles than ifthey do not.” The contradiction of such a position is that only by being parasitic upon conventionalmorality, with its traditional moral goods and virtues, can society maximize utility. Yet inadmitting this, society loses its moral naivety and comes clean that conventional morality is only atool of utility – an instrumental means to the end of satisfying preferences. Thus utilitarianmorality reduces itself to absurdity. Singer acknowledges that a more rigid principle-based systemof ethics has a certain practical rationality of its own, since we could “be calculating in lessthan ideal circ*mstances. We could be hurried or flustered. We might feel angry or hurt, or competitive...Or we might just not be good at thinking about such complicated issues as the likely consequences ofa significant choice.” (Practical Ethics) Yet within the limits of his own system he isunable to provide the resources to develop dispositions of character and will. Thus moral character traitsare borrowed and berated, used and eroded simultaneously.

A further example of his tacit dependency on conventional values is evident in respect of Singer’sidea that infanticide up to 28 days after birth is morally justifiable in the case of severely disablednewborns, as their sentience and self-awareness don’t reach the watermark of ‘personhood’.Yet as Peter Berkowitz points out, there is “no good utilitarian reason to confine the killingto severely disabled newborns... [Singer] dodges the logical implications of his newfangled utilitariancalculus, and seeks to build a fence around the sweeping license to take newborn human life so obviouslyauthorised by his ethical outlook. Yet Singer cannot articulate the actual justifications for the restrictionsthat he would impose... He would be forced to acknowledge the dependence of his own ethical conclusionson the doctrine of the dignity of man that his ethical theory is designed rigorously to replace.” (In ‘OtherPeoples’ Mothers’.)

5) Singer’s style of argument often owes more to the tactics of a debating chamber than thedispassionate logic of a philosophy class. As Roger Scruton points out, amidst Singer’s crystal-clearlogic, in “statements such as ‘Mere differences of species is surely not a morally significantdifference,’ the ‘mere’ and the ‘surely’ smooth away the very thing atissue – namely, the relevant distinctions between me and my dog – and so shift the burdenof proof unnoticeably from the one who attacks common morality to the one who lives by it.” (TheNew Statesman, 22.01.01.) In the same vein Berkowitz claims that “Singer frequently attemptsto discredit the views of opponents by taking their arguments to a logical extreme, while ignoring theextreme implications that inhere in the logic of his own doctrine.” He loves attacking straw menand “treating as settled matters issues over which reasonable people disagree,” or “proceedingas if atheism – which may be true, but certainly requires argument – were a self-evidenttruth, an unrebuttable assumption...” (‘Other People’s Mothers’) In the traditionof logical positivists, Singer takes his atheism to be self-evident, quoting with approval Frank Ramsey’sstatement that “Theology and absolute Ethics are two famous subjects which we have realized tohave no real objects.” (in How Are We To Live?) Thus Singer is content to assume his atheism,offering only minimal premises to back it up: “There is unnecessary and indefensible evil in theworld. Therefore the God of traditional Christian belief does not exist.” (in The Age 14.02.1994)If he confined himself to the ethical implications of belief, Singer’s assumed atheism would beacceptable; but at times he lets slip just how illiberal his secularism is: “There is a cost tobe paid for inculcating religious belief. It could diminish the inquiring spirit that is the basis ofscientific investigation and technological progress. It leads to forms of belief that are potentiallydivisive and dangerous, because they are beyond argument and outside public reason.” (The Presidentof Good and Evil)

Furthermore, Singer’s treatment of Biblical texts regularly reveals a willfully wooden literalism(e.g. taking the flood of Genesis 11, and Jesus’ sending of the Gadarene Swine into the sea aslicensing the flooding of river valleys and exploitation of animals to mans own ends). His deliberateuse of quotations from the Authorised Version of the Bible reinforces his desire to paint themas archaic relics from a remote past. He makes no serious attempt to explain the weaknesses of the Judeo-Christiantradition on anything but his own terms. However, to his credit, Singer is aware that some Christianshave emphasised the stewardship rather than the dominion dimensions of Genesis, and he does appear tohave encountered articulate religious thinkers in both Christian and Buddhist traditions worth listeningto (even more so since moving to Princeton), although he generally confines them to the reference sectionof his books.

Conclusion

It was Wittgenstein who said that philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our reason bylanguage [see ‘Bewitched’ in this very issue - Ed]. Just sucha bewitchment can be seen in the fact that Singer’s logic should appear so reasonable. Once ourmoral judgement used to be embedded in traditions which provided richer accounts of virtue, of how rivalgoods should be assessed, and of the ends for which individuals and society should strive. Now the logicof utilitarianism seems the only discourse of exchange in a world where so little in the way of principlesand values is shared in common. You can have your dearly-held personal beliefs, so long as you set themaside when you come to trade at the counter of ‘public reason’. Yet as Nietzsche pointedout, if you begin by bracketing your beliefs out, you will soon dispense with them altogether. So itis that ‘preference utilitarianism’ starts as a peculiar moral Esperanto, which we becomeaccustomed to speaking, and very soon we’re thinking in terms of its instrumental logic and impersonalidioms. Yet it turns out that the moral life is more complex than Singer’s streamlined languageallows us to express. How would Aristotle have responded to the suggestion that the ethical life couldbe reduced to a simple formula such as ‘the pursuit of pleasure or preferences and the avoidanceof pain’ or ‘the greatest good of the greatest number’? My guess is that he’dhave stressed that one’s intuitions arise out of rigorous training with role models of an ethicaltradition who ingrain dispositions of character in their followers. To subsume such intuitions into criticalthinking is to presume the moral self to be purely rational. Perhaps this is an error to which academicphilosophers are peculiarly prone.

When good consequences result from the optimising techniques of the bureaucratic manager, we shouldnot confuse this with a substantive morality, or an ethic to stir our will and dispose our characterto act altruistically. My assessment is that the good that results from Singer’s moral reasoning(reduction of poverty or of animal suffering, for example) in practice catches a free ride on the conventionalmorality which spawned and motivated it. Singer’s Copernican revolution in medical ethics appealsbecause it aligns well with our consumerist world of individual choice. Yet just as we satisfy our ‘choice’ inselecting from co*ke, Sprite, or Lilt whilst in reality paying the same company for a variant on theirformula, so we select our moral ‘preferences’ in a ‘consumer utilitarian’ societythat shapes the terms in which we may think about them. 180,000 abortions a year would have seemed inconceivablewhen David Steel put forward his abortion act in Britain in 1967 – especially terminations forthe most trivial of disabilities. Yet the ‘tyranny of normality’ has rendered the parenta quality control manager for their offspring. Similarly, the handful of hospices in Holland, togetherwith the Dutch figures for euthanasia, set the framework in which these citizens select their preferencesfor death, establishing ‘default’ options. In Singer’s utilitarian Legoland there areno unscrupulous relatives or vulnerable old people who feel they are a burden to society. But as it movesout of the academy into legislation and policy-making, Singer’s logic cannot but lead to a colder,less cohesive society. The irony is that it may be those who stand to lose most who are first to usherin his Copernican shift, such is the bewitchment of Singer’s persuasive logic. It was Einsteinwho said that things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. In my assessment, this isprecisely what Singer is guilty of.

© Mark Coffey, 2007

Mark Coffey teaches Religion and Philosophy at the Manchester Grammar School. He did a researchMaster’s degree at Leeds University on Peter Singer in 2001-3.