the expanding circle
At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world.
W.E. H. Lecky
Me and my clan against the world;
me and my family against my clan;
me and my brother against my family;
me against my brother.
Somali saying
Belief in God, or in many gods, prevented the free development of moral reasoning. Disbelief in God, openly admitted by a majority, is a very recent event, not yet completed. Because this event is so recent, Non-Religious Ethics is at a very early stage.
Derek Parfit
At the outbreak of the Second World War, the English actor David Niven abandoned his newly acquired Hollywood stardom to return home and volunteer for the war effort. ‘Young man,’ said Winston Churchill to him one evening, ‘you did a very fine thing to give up a most promising career to fight for your country…Mark you, had you not done so it would have been despicable.’1 According to Churchill, there was no neutral land between right and wrong where one could live a morally quiet life, yet such a life is what most individuals believe they are living. Few of us go to great personal lengths to alleviate the suffering of the Third World, but neither do many of us feel that we inflict that suffering. We are, we believe, neither praiseworthy nor blameworthy. We are not interested in morality – much as we are not interested in politics. However, to the philosopher Peter Singer, we are all as culpable as the young Niven. Morality is pervasive, and by neglecting to do good we each commit egregious acts of omission.
Peter Singer is the greatest contemporary exponent of utilitarianism, the doctrine that actions should aim to maximize the greatest happiness for the greatest number of individuals. Since our every action has consequences that aid or hamper this end, we are truly immersed in morality. With his lean build and exhausted demeanour, the Australian academic seems to embody the unmanageable pressure of this outlook. ‘We must follow the argument where it leads,’ said Socrates, and Singer – during a career at Melbourne, Oxford and now Princeton where I paid him a visit one wet day in spring – has obeyed this advice at the expense of tradition, sentiment and, some would say, common sense. It was in a lunch queue at Oxford that he was converted to vegetarianism. He soon took up the cause of animal rights and in 1975 published Animal Liberation – a work that sold over 500,000 copies and provided the intellectual force for an entire movement. It was in this and other books that he set out his most ambitious expansion of our ethical life – the multiplication of morally relevant individuals to include nonhuman animals.
In 2003, the South African novelist J.M. Coetzee wrote in Elizabeth Costello that due to the slaughter of animals for food on an industrial scale ‘we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of’. Unlike the ordinary German people who went about their daily lives while the Nazis rounded up the Jews from their neighbourhoods, carnivores are actively participating in the mass murder of the present day. According to Singer, our descendants may one day look upon us as savages for this ‘crime of stupefying proportions’. Professor Singer is associated with the animal rights movement, although, as a utilitarian, he does not believe in rights as such. What matters is that things work out for the best, and rights are valid only insofar as they promote that end. Nevertheless, the prospect of rights for animals has been with utilitarianism since its birth. In the eighteenth century, Jeremy Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism, wrote of the wickedness of deeming the colour of someone’s skin to be justification for enslaving them, adding:
The day may come, when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny…It may come one day to be recognized, that the number of legs, the villosity of the skin, or the termination of the os sacrum, are reasons equally insufficient for abandoning a sensitive being to the same fate. What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason, or perhaps, the faculty for discourse?2
The answer is no, for ‘a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant’. The important question, Bentham decides, is ‘not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?’ Few would deny that at least the higher animals can feel the sensation of pain as humans do, and if they did not then there would be no point in cosmetics researchers testing their products by applying them to the eyes of rabbits.
I asked Singer if it made any difference that the animals slaughtered for food would never have lived had they not been bred for that purpose. He replied. ‘I think it would be better for factory farmed animals if they did not exist. Their lives do not contain any positive qualities.’ But some animals live far better, longer lives on farms than they would in the wild, where they might lack regular access to food, warmth and shelter. Even their slaughter under humane conditions might be less unpleasant than a slow death from disease or the agony of being devoured alive by a predator. Singer is relaxed about these objections, though also eager to stress that most meat production is not humane. He does not condemn those he calls ‘conscientious carnivores’, who consume only those animals who have led lives of natural bliss on organic farms. When I remarked that his sweater looked like it was made of wool, he looked down at its cuffs and shrugged, ‘It might be. Look, I’m not a fanatic. I wouldn’t go out and buy wool, but there’s no point in throwing out what I’ve been given over the years. Because I’m a consequentialist I think about where it is going to make a difference.’
It is difficult to criticize the position of a utilitarian rationalist, for if you should point out a way in which their thesis leads to an unwelcome result, they simply modify the thesis – for their position is defined as whatever leads to the best result. Singer is not insensitive to the important differences between humans and other animals – one of which is our greater ability to anticipate our suffering:
Suppose we decided to perform lethal scientific experiments on normal adult humans, kidnapped at random from public parks for this purpose. Soon, every adult who entered the park would become fearful of being kidnapped for experimentation. The resultant terror would be a form of suffering additional to whatever pain was involved in the experiment itself. The same experiments carried out on non-human animals would cause less suffering overall, for the non-human animals would not have the same anticipatory dread. This does not mean, I hasten to add, that it is all right to experiment with animals as we please; but only that if the experiment is to be done at all, there is some reason, compatible with the equal consideration of interests, for preferring to use nonhuman animals rather than normal adult humans.3
It is not that Singer loves animals or hates people. He writes:
The assumption that in order to be interested in such matters one must be an ‘animal lover’ is itself an indication of the absence of the slightest inkling that the moral standards that we apply among human beings might extend to other animals. No one, except a racist concerned to smear his opponents as ‘nigger lovers’, would suggest that in order to be concerned about equality for mistreated racial minorities you have to love those minorities, or regard them as cute and cuddly. So why make this assumption about people who work for improvements in the conditions of animals?4
Singer demands that we practise the Socratic virtue of consistency. So, if medical researchers wish to experiment on live animals, they must also consider practising on brain-damaged humans with equivalent faculties. In Singer’s ethical calculus, what matter are preferences, interests and the ability to suffer, and humans are not the only creatures to possess all three. On the other hand, some humans – such as those in a persistent vegetative state – lack the requisite traits for personhood, and we need treat such unfortunates no better than the unenlightened presently treat beasts. Whatever rights we give to humans, we cannot deny them to animals just because they are not human (though there may be other reasons). The idea of animal rights is sometimes casually dismissed on the grounds that rights imply duties. Indeed they do, but there is no implication that the recipient of the right and the holder of the concomitant duty must be one and the same individual. We accord rights to infants even though we do not expect them to fulfil their end of any ‘bargain’.
For Singer, the privileges of animals even include the right to have sexual intercourse with their owners. The professor wrote a notorious defence of bestiality in a review of the book Dearest Pet. When I asked if he had been serious, he responded as if there was nothing remarkable about the thought: ‘A dog can lick a woman’s genitals if it wants, or it can walk away. There’s nothing wrong with that if there’s no coercion involved.’ It would be easy to criticize here – what about a young puppy that didn’t know what it was doing, was induced by dog biscuits or told that it could play with some boys and girls? However, Professor Singer’s point is that we, too, are part of the animal kingdom, and that our ethics should reflect that realization.
Singer hopes for a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in ethics that takes account of Darwin’s ideas – a new moral universe in which human life is no longer at the centre. But even if God is taken out of the moral picture, it is far from clear that there would be a demand for universalism, the view that one can recognize no ‘special interests’, such as attachments to family and friends over strangers, in an ethical decision. The problem that most philosophers have with Singer is his refusal to provide a foundation for his strident views. When I talked to Sir Bernard Williams about Peter Singer, he described the Australian’s ideas as ‘a ghastly form of quasi-religious dogmatism’. The man he referred to as ‘the dreaded Singer’ isn’t ‘even interested in the foundations of the principle of utility. The question of why we should think that our entire lives are guided by one simple principle gets swept away in a few pages, and then we get on to explaining with great enthusiasm how, if we adopt this principle, then almost everything we do is wrong.’
Singer’s reluctance to concentrate on first principles is understandable given his view of what morality consists in. According to his ‘Preference Utilitarianism’, the morally right thing to do is that which satisfies the preferences of the greatest number of people (as opposed to Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Hedonistic Utilitarianism’, under which the utilitarian goal is the maximization of pleasure for the greatest number). However, if indeed there is no more to morality than satisfying people’s preferences, it adds nothing to say that such conduct is ‘morally correct’. So the force of the utilitarian principle cannot come from the realization that it is the ‘moral truth’, but from our existing agreement that this principle is always morally right. In a sense Singer is not trying to convince us of anything, but rather attempting to work within what he thinks we already, latently, believe. Since there is no transcendent source of goodness in Singer’s utilitarian ethics, right is a matter of following through on our rational judgements, which are based upon premisses. Although he is a fierce critic of the idea of following our instincts, these premisses are themselves instincts of a kind, even if they are located in the head rather than the heart. Once the principle of utility is spelled out, it seems we are supposed to think that this is what we have been trying to articulate through our actions all along. Unfortunately for Singer, this is not the universal reaction to his efforts.
Philosophical arguments for utilitarian principles are necessary, because some of the consequences of Singer’s ideas will strike most of us as absurd and unrealistic. If we had the option of saving either a four-year-old girl or a family of cats from a burning building we would not hesitate to rescue the girl. This is a brute instinctual preference, and whether we should maintain it depends on what we identify as the purpose of ethics – to put prejudices in coherent order or to decide what beliefs we should have. Consideration for animals is one thing, but granting them equal status with humans is another. There are some individuals to whom we have a special moral relation, such as our friends, family and those we have taken into our care. When Singer hears such objections he notes their similarity to a remark made by Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring: ‘I think with my blood.’ It was gut instinct that built the death camps, not rationality as is often supposed by those who distrust the Enlightenment.
Singer does not believe that anyone should have a special weight in terms of preferential treatment within the utilitarian calculations – not even the person doing the calculating. However, he has his work cut out if he wishes to extend his care to everything that suffers. The English philosopher Roger Scruton writes that:
Abstracting from my interest does not mean consulting yours. It is the duty of a judge to set aside his own interests in order to do justice. But this does not mean that he arrives at the just solution by considering the interests of anybody else, still less the interests of everyone – otherwise, he would never arrive at a judgment.5
We need to cut out many individuals’ interests if we are not to become bogged down in the simplest ethical decision – for we can never predict all the consequences of all of our actions. Immanuel Kant’s principle that ‘where there is no can there is no ought’ would seem to absolve us of any wrongdoing here but, as Scruton would point out, Kant was not a utilitarian like Professor Singer. Singer’s world is one of moral hopelessness, where we seem doomed to do wrong, though we are obliged to attempt the impossible task of doing right. The professor assured me that that there is no paradox, and that we need only do our best, because: ‘We cannot be blamed if, for reasons impossible to foresee, our attempts to do what will have the best consequences go astray.’ But it is precisely the foreseeable, and unmanageable, that Scruton has in mind.
Singer’s attempt to navigate the moral maze presented by utilitarianism has led him to make enemies more dangerous than Roger Scruton. Although we cannot predict the future, we can at least, he believes, be clear about the present. He writes that: ‘There is no rule that says that a potential x has the same values as an x or has all the rights of an x. There are many examples that show just the contrary. To pull out a sprouting acorn is not the same as cutting down a venerable oak.’6 If we are untroubled by boiling an egg where we would not dream of doing the same to a live adult chicken, this should tell us something about the so-called ‘right to life’ of the unborn fetus. Indeed, one could say that Professor Singer, in famously infanticidal moments, has considered abortion to be permissible several weeks after birth should the child be severely disabled. For these views Singer has received more than the bile of rival thinkers. His appointment to a Professorship at Princeton in 1999 led to several days of angry protest outside the faculty, and wealthy business tycoon Steve Forbes vowed not to donate any more money to the college. During a lecture on disabled children in Germany in 1989, he was shouted down by his audience, one of whom took to the stage and smashed his glasses. There, as on many other occasions, he was accused of Nazi sympathies, even though his parents were Austrian Jewish refugees and three of his grandparents died in concentration camps. He protests that he has nothing against the disabled, but points out that by bringing up such a child, a couple with limited resources are, as it were, depriving a future, healthy child of a far more fulfilled life. It may seem strange to consider individuals who do not actually exist yet, but as a utilitarian he is at least being consistent in desiring a world with as many satisfied preferences as possible.
For a would-be fascist, Singer locates himself very much on the political left. Although he has little sympathy for certain core beliefs of the left, such as collective ownership, he favours systematic charity towards one’s fellow humans. He urges American households to give away 70 per cent of their income to the poor and spends little on luxuries himself. The fount of social problems, he argues, is that human morality grew out of the natural principles of tit-for-tat and mutual backscratching. If the poor become so weak that nothing they do can affect the wealthy, any incentive for cooperation will break down – threatening to take society with it:
If nothing you do really makes much difference to me, tit for tat will not work. So while equality is not required, too great a disparity in power or wealth will remove the incentive for mutual cooperation. If you leave a group of people so far outside the social commonwealth that they have nothing to contribute to it, you alienate them from the social practices and institutions of which they are part; and they almost certainly become adversaries who pose a threat to those institutions.7
In a sense he is not asking for anything new, merely appealing to our rationality – for distance does strange things to our moral sense. According to the ‘3,000-mile rule’, some individuals believe that there is nothing wrong with committing adultery if they are away from home – as if this is somehow better than conducting an affair with one’s next-door neighbour. The same thinking means that we can sit unmoved by the knowledge that someone on the other side of the world does not have enough food to eat, even though we would never allow someone to starve to death on our own doorstep. Yet, by declining to send money to the poor overseas, we are condemning them no less than we would those nearer to home if we abolished the welfare system. These are natural reactions common to almost all of us even though the infrastructure of the modern world enables us to extend our charity around the globe if we wish. Yet we would never assert that the number of miles between ourselves and someone who needs our help should be a moral consideration. To act as if it does betrays ‘distancism’.
Singer’s brand of utilitarianism constitutes a paternalistic leftism. It acknowledges only the preferences that people would have in ideal conditions. So a peasant woman’s preference to remain chained to her kitchen stove is to be discounted in favour of the contrary preference she would have if she had had access to a Western education. The utilitarian abacus is to be operated by those in the know, who are aware of people’s ‘best interests’ and are prepared to act on them, even though the beneficiaries of their goodwill might not be. In Singer’s society, this would not be achieved by riding roughshod over the preferences of the ‘ignorant’, but would involve gently coaxing them to the point where they realize the need for change. Hopefully, they will not be like a good part of the world’s population and be too stubborn to see sense soon enough.
Singer is confident that such prospects are good, for he appears to have history on his side. In looking forward to a day when the prejudice of what he calls ‘speciesism’ will go the way of sexism, classism and homophobia, he is imagining the obvious next step in a historical process: the famous ‘expanding circle’ of the historian W.H. Lecky that has brought moral parity to an ever greater variety of agents. The supposed endorsement of history has perhaps given Singer a shield against the personal abuse to which he has been subjected. It has also given a serenity to his arguments – there is none of the self-righteous hectoring that typifies so many of those with whom he agrees in the animal rights lobby. However, he does not seem to consider that the expanding circle may have a dark interior. The process can be seen as a positive development or it can be viewed cynically as a levelling down, wherein peoples and species end up as equally worthless. It depends whether animals acquire the value of humans or humans are reduced to the status of animals. Values derived from human whim will be held less inviolate than when they were taken to represent the will of God expressed via our consciences.
As our sphere of concern has become broader we have begun to witness the phenomenon of ‘moral thinning’. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once suggested that the roots of moral observance lay in legal concerns, that it was originally a kind of living repayment to creditors who had died. We can hardly be surprised if today morality is returning from whence it came and collapsing into a mere concern for the laws of the land. This process is well under way in the West if the recent history of the insurance industry is indicative. Personal injury claimants feel no shame if the letter of the law enables them to extract huge punitive damages from companies that could not reasonably have prevented their injury. Moral dilemmas are ‘settled’ by recourse to the United States Constitution every time a sick, elderly relative is abandoned in a state retirement home by a family who does not wish to look after them. Politicians guilty of heinous moral failures routinely defend their right to continue in their posts on the grounds that they ‘did nothing illegal’. In nations obsessed by law, it is perhaps to be expected that where one has not broken any laws one is thought to have done no wrong. Singer’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ may not lead to the enlightenment he imagines. In the short term, however, things seem to be on course. I once asked the prominent American moral philosopher Christine Korsgaard whether she believed that studying ethics made those in her profession better people. ‘Well,’ she replied after thinking for a moment, ‘most of us are vegetarians.’