Had there been no protest rallies at the gates of Princeton University, had the superrich aspiring presidential candidate Steve Forbes not vowed to freeze his donations to his alma mater until it got rid of me, had my appointment as DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton not turned into what The New York Times called the biggest academic commotion since an American university tried to hire the notorious advocate of free love, Bertrand Russell, the book you now have in your hands would not have existed. For without those events the media would barely have noticed my arrival in the United States, my controversial views on a variety of ethical issues would not have become the topic of conversation around the country, and it could never have occurred to Daniel Halpern at The Ecco Press that while everyone was discussing Peter Singer’s views, the discussions were based largely on short quotations and secondhand summaries. Many had strong opinions about my work but few had actually read any of my books or articles. They did, however, have the excuse that my writings are scattered across a number of books and journals, not all of them easy to obtain. What people needed, Dan thought, was a handy, one-volume selection that would present my central ideas, in my own words and with sufficient context to enable them to be understood. So here it is.
What are the ideas that have caused so much controversy? They are to be found in the pages of this book, and I would prefer them to be read in their context, not in bald summary. I have spent close to thirty years working in practical ethics, which means that when I began there was no such field. The study of ethics, in philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, was then focused on the analysis of moral language and was supposed to be morally neutral; that is, it did not lead to any judgments about anything’s being right or wrong, good or bad. A moral philosopher, so the standard view went, is not in any way an expert on moral issues. The short essay entitled “Moral Experts” that immediately follows this introduction was written to challenge this conception of the subject matter of ethics. Since its appearance in 1972, the field has changed dramatically, though not, I am fairly sure, because of any influence that essay may have had. More probably, the article was a sign of times that were already changing. The momentous issues of civil rights, racial equality, and opposition to the war in Vietnam had made the subject matter of most university ethics courses seem dry and insignificant and to spend time studying them, self-indulgent. There were more important things to do. Students were demanding “relevance,” and philosophers began to realize that their area of expertise did, after all, have something to say on how we can find answers to such fundamental and perennially important questions as why racial discrimination is wrong, whether we are under an obligation to obey an unjust law, and what, if anything, can make it right to go to war.
The issue on which I have made my most significant contribution to ethical thinking took a little longer to become prominent. Claims that I am “the most influential living philosopher” generally refer to my work on the ethics of our relations with animals. There is an element of media hype in such claims, of course, but the grain of truth in them is the fact that my book Animal Liberation played a significant role in kicking off the modern animal rights movement, and very few living philosophers have had their ideas taken up in that way. In contrast, my views on the obligation of the rich to help the world’s poorest people are potentially as significant as my thinking about animals, but they have, unfortunately, had much less influence. The issues raised by the critical work I have done on the idea of the sanctity of human life, including the discussion of euthanasia that has aroused such hostility, are in one respect less important than those two topics, simply because the treatment of animals and maldistribution of wealth affect far more people (or in the case of the animals, sentient beings), and relatively simple changes in those areas could relieve so much suffering. It is my critique of the sanctity of human life that gets the media headlines, however, because it can easily be made to sound quite shocking and there is no problem in finding people who will strenuously oppose it. Hence it provides the controversy on which the media feed.
All of these views have a common core. They rest on four quite simple claims:
1. Pain is bad, and similar amounts of pain are equally bad, no matter whose pain it might be. By “pain” here I would include suffering and distress of all kinds. This does not mean that pain is the only thing that is bad, or that inflicting pain is always wrong. Sometimes it may be necessary to inflict pain and suffering on oneself or others. We do this to ourselves when we go to the dentist, and we do it to others when we reprimand a child or jail a criminal. But this is justified because it will lead to less suffering in the long run; the pain is still in itself a bad thing. Conversely, pleasure and happiness are good, no matter whose pleasure or happiness they might be, although doing things in order to gain pleasure or happiness may be wrong, for example, if doing so harms others.
2. Humans are not the only beings capable of feeling pain or of suffering. Most nonhuman animals—certainly all the mammals and birds that we habitually eat, like cows, pigs, sheep, and chickens—can feel pain. Many of them can also experience other forms of suffering, for instance, the distress that a mother feels when separated from her child, or the boredom that comes from being locked up in a cage with nothing to do all day except eat and sleep. Of course, the nature of the beings will affect how much pain they suffer in any given situation.
3. When we consider how serious it is to take a life, we should look, not at the race, sex, or species to which that being belongs, but at the characteristics of the individual being killed, for example, its own desires about continuing to live, or the kind of life it is capable of leading.
4. We are responsible not only for what we do but also for what we could have prevented. We would never kill a stranger, but we may know that our intervention will save the lives of many strangers in a distant country, and yet do nothing. We do not then think ourselves in any way responsible for the deaths of these strangers. This is a mistake. We should consider the consequences both of what we do and of what we decide not to do.
To most people these claims are not, in themselves, shocking. In some respects they seem like common sense. But consider the conclusions to which they point. Put together the first and the last, and add in some facts about the suffering caused by extreme poverty in the world’s least developed countries, and about our ability to reduce that suffering by donating money to organizations that assist people to lift themselves out of this poverty. Consider, for example, the fact that the sum that buys us a meal in a fine restaurant would be enough to provide basic health care to several children who might otherwise die of easily preventable diseases. It follows from the first of my claims that the suffering of these children, or their parents, is as bad as our own suffering would be in similar circumstances, and it follows from the last claim that we cannot escape responsibility for this suffering by the fact that we have done nothing to bring it about. Where so many are in such great need, indulgence in luxury is not morally neutral, and the fact that we have not killed anyone is not enough to make us morally decent citizens of the world.
From the first and second premises I draw the conclusion that we have no right to discount the interests of nonhuman animals simply because, for example, we like the taste of their flesh. Modern industrialized agriculture treats animals as if they were things, putting them indoors and confining them whenever it turns out to be cheaper to do so, with no regard at all paid to their suffering or distress, as long as it does not mean that they cease to be productive. But we cannot ethically disregard the interests of other beings merely because they are not members of our species. Note that this argument says nothing at all about whether it is wrong to kill nonhuman animals for food. It is based entirely on the suffering that we inflict on farm animals when we raise them by the methods that are standard today.
The third premise is probably the most controversial because we are so used to thinking of the killing of a member of our own species as invariably much more serious than the killing of a member of any other species. But why should that be? Mere difference of species is surely not a morally significant difference. Suppose that there were Martians, just like us in respect of their abilities to think and to care for others, in their sense of justice, and in any other capacities we care to name, but of course, not members of the species Homo sapiens. We surely could not claim that it was all right to kill them, simply because of the difference of species. We might, of course, try to find some other differences, of greater moral relevance, between humans and members of other species. If, for example, we think that it is more serious to kill a human being than it is to kill a nonhuman animal, and we hold this view because we believe that every human being—and no other earthly creature—has an immortal soul, then our position is not contrary to the third premise, for it is taking the view that there is a characteristic—possession of an immortal soul—that makes it worse to kill some beings than others, and that happens to be possessed by all and only members of our species. My disagreement with that position is simply that I see no evidence for belief in an immortal soul, let alone one that happens to be the exclusive property of our species.
The third premise helps to explain what is true and what is misleading in the common assertion that I think the life of a human being is of no greater value than the life of an animal. It is true that I do not think that the fact that the human is a member of the species Homo sapiens is in itself a reason for regarding his or her life as being of greater value than that of a member of a different species. But, as I argue in more detail, in the extracts from Practical Ethics and Rethinking Life and Death, human beings typically, though not invariably, do have desires about going on living that nonhuman animals are not capable of having, and that does make a difference. Thus, I have no doubt that the events that we read about all too often in our newspapers, when someone gets a gun and starts randomly killing people in a school, church, or supermarket, are more tragic than the shooting of a number of animals in a field would be.
Though the third premise must be part of any full grounding of my views about why it is worse to kill some beings than others, some of my claims about euthanasia could be derived from the first and fourth premises alone, combined with widely accepted medical practice. Many doctors and theologians, including those who are quite conservative in their moral thinking, agree that when a patient’s prospects of a minimally decent quality of life are very poor, and there is no likelihood of improvement, we are not obliged to do everything we could to prolong life. For example, if a baby is born with severe disabilities incompatible with an acceptable quality of life, and the baby then develops an infection, many doctors and theologians would say that it is permissible to refrain from giving the baby antibiotics. But these same people think that it would be wrong to allow the doctor to give the baby a lethal injection. Why? The motives, the intention, and the outcome may be the same in both cases. If it is sometimes right deliberately to allow a baby to die when a simple medical intervention could save its life, then it must also sometimes be right to kill the baby. To deny this is to refuse to take responsibility for deciding not to act, even when the consequences of omission and action are the same.
That this final conclusion is contrary to widely shared moral views, I readily concede. But the aim of practical ethics is not to produce a theory that will match all of our conventional moral responses, and thus confirm us in the views we already hold. Those responses come from many different sources. Sometimes they vary according to the customs of the society that we come from. Even when they are more or less universal among human societies, they may be no more than a reflection of the interests of the dominant group. That was true of justifications of slavery that for centuries were predominant in European slave-holding societies. It remains true, in many parts of the world, of the view that a married woman should obey her husband. It is not too big a step to see the same self-interested factors at work in our common moral views about the ways in which we may use animals. Here, as on many other moral issues, Christianity has for two thousand years been a powerful influence on the moral intuitions of people in Western societies. People do not need to continue to hold religious beliefs to be under the influence of Christian moral teaching. Yet without the religious beliefs—for example, that God created the world, that he gave us dominion over the other animals, that we alone of all of his creation have an immortal soul—the moral teachings just hang in the air, without foundations. If no better foundations can be provided for these teachings, we need to consider alternative views. So it is with the question of euthanasia, which, along with suicide, has in non-Christian societies like ancient Rome and Japan been considered both a reasonable and an honorable way of ending one’s life. The shock with which some people react to any suggestion of euthanasia should therefore be not the end of the argument but a spur to reflection and critical scrutiny.
In choosing the passages that follow I have tried to convey what is essential to my thinking, leaving out a number of other works—for example, my first book, on whether there is an obligation to obey the law in a democracy; my short introductions to Hegel and Marx; and my writings on new reproductive technology. The omissions are not because I am no longer content with what I did in those books. On the contrary, I still think that, for example, being able to convey the gist of Hegel’s philosophy to the general reader in less than one hundred pages is an achievement. But it does not mark me out from other skilled expositors of the great philosophers of the past. In the case of Making Babies, my coauthored book on the revolution in reproduction, the field has moved on since 1984, when it was first published, and the book needs to be rewritten rather than reprinted.
The fourth section of this book reflects an interest that I do think is essential to my work, though it has received less attention than my writings on animals, world hunger, or the sanctity of human life. The first substantial piece of work I did in philosophy, a thesis I wrote for the degree of master of arts, was on a question that is about ethics, rather than within ethics. Given that ethics can be very demanding, what are we to say to the amoralists, who ask why they should act ethically at all? I never felt that I had answered that question satisfactorily in my thesis, and I have returned to it on various occasions, but most fully in my book How Are We to Live? The question leads us to think about the ultimate values, the deepest goals, by which we live our lives, and here we tend to run up against the limits of philosophical argument. Is it still possible, at this fundamental level, to give reasons for choosing one way of life in preference to another? Is it all a matter of what will make us happier, or live a more meaningful and fulfilling life? Here we move across the ill-defined border between philosophy and psychology, and can no longer find chains of reasoning that should persuade any rational person. Were we incapable of empathy—of putting ourselves in the position of others and seeing that their suffering is like our own—then ethical reasoning would lead nowhere. If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent.
Most of the extracts here come from works that I wrote with a general reader in mind, while trying to be sufficiently rigorous to be of interest to my philosophical colleagues. Animal Liberation has been by far my most successful book, in terms of reaching a wide audience, having sold close to half a million copies. It has also, in my admittedly partisan view, stood up well against extensive probing by philosophers, in journal articles too numerous to keep track of, and in several books, for example David DeGrazia’s fine study of the field, Taking Animals Seriously. But the path that is trodden both by general readers and by academic philosophers is a narrow one, and I may have fallen off it from time to time, on one side or the other.
A similar tension exists in a more acute form when it comes to campaigning for a cause, while remaining true to the philosophical vocation. During the past twenty-five years there have been few times when I was not heading at least one organization struggling to improve the situation of animals, and I have also been involved with groups working to protect wilderness, aid some of the poorest people in the world, and legalize voluntary euthanasia, as well as standing for the Australian senate as a candidate of the Greens. From the point of view of a campaign, the complexities of a defensible ethical position can often be an obstacle. A friend in the animal movement once told me that I am not a street fighter. It is true that the most effective campaigners are often people of uncompromising temperament who take their stand on a principle to which they will allow no exceptions. They see only one side of any argument and regard their opponents as evil incarnate. The atmosphere of campaigning organizations is conducive to this kind of temperament. Take, for example, the use of animals in research. As the extracts from Animal Liberation to be found in this book illustrate, a great many experiments on animals cause them enormous suffering and do nothing more for humans than allow another detergent or food preservative to be marketed. But what if an experiment offered some hope of finding a cure for a major disease? For a group campaigning against animal experiments, everything becomes much simpler if we believe that no experiment on an animal can ever be justified, whatever the benefit to humans might be. Then there can be no awkward questions about the conditions under which an experiment might be justifiable. It is also easier to campaign against experimenters if one can convince oneself that they are all sadists who get their jollies from cutting up fully conscious kittens. Unfortunately, reality is not so black-and-white. Seeing the more complex picture leaves me liable to be attacked from both sides—by those who exploit animals, because I threaten what they do, and by the more hard-line members of the animal movement, for not taking the party line. The temptation is, then, to leave the campaigning to others and retreat to my desk. But I think it important, not just to write and teach but to try to make a difference in more immediate ways as well. That point is made in the extract in this collection from my recent book, Ethics into Action.