Life and career Essay

Singer’s parents were Viennese Jews who escaped the German annexation of Austria and fled to Australia in 1938. His grandparents were less fortunate; they were taken by the Nazis to Lodz, and were never heard of again. [1] Singer’s father imported tea and coffee, while his mother practised medicine. He attended Scotch College. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, gaining his degree in 1967. He received an MA for a thesis entitled Why should I be moral? n 1969. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, obtaining a B. Phil in 1971 with a thesis on civil disobedience, supervised by R. M. Hare, and subsequently published as a book in 1973. [2] After spending two years as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford, he was visiting professor at New York University for 16 months. He returned to Melbourne in 1977, where he has spent most of his career, apart from many visiting positions internationally, and until his move to Princeton in 1999. Animal LiberationPublished in 1975, Animal Liberation[3] was a major formative influence on the animal liberation movement. Although Singer rejects rights as a moral ideal independent from his utilitarianism based on interests, he accepts rights as derived from utilitarian principles, particularly the principle of minimizing suffering. [4] Singer allows that animal rights are not exactly the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that â€Å"there are obviously important differences between human and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have. [5] So, for example an animal does not have the right to a good education as this is meaningless to him, just as a male human does not have the right to an abortion. But he is no more skeptical of animal rights than of the rights of women, beginning his book by defending just such a comparison against Mary Wollstonecraft’s 18th-century critic Thomas Taylor, who argued that if Wollstonecraft’s reasoning in defense of women’s rights were correct, then â€Å"brutes† would have rights too. Taylor thought he had produced a reductio ad absurdum of Wollstonecraft’s view; Singer regards it as a sound logical implication. Taylor’s modus tollens is Singer’s modus ponens. In Animal Liberation, Singer argues against what he calls speciesism: discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration, and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their having wings or fur is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely retarded humans show equally diminished mental capacity, and intelligence therefore does not provide a basis for providing nonhuman animals any less consideration than such retarded humans. Singer does not specifically contend that we ought not use animals for food insofar as they are raised and killed in a way that actively avoids the inflicting of pain, but as such farms are few and far between, he concludes that the most practical solution is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet. Singer also condemns most vivisection, though he believes animal experiments may be acceptable if the benefit (in terms of improved medical treatment, etc. ) outweighs the harm done to the animals used. [6] Due to the subjectivity of the term â€Å"benefit†, controversy exists about this and other utilitarian views. But he is clear enough that humans of comparable sentience should also be candidates for any animal experimentation that passes the benefit test. So a monkey and a human infant would be equally available for the experiment, from a moral point of view, other things being equal. If performing the experiment on the infant isn’t justifiable, then Singer believes that the experiment shouldn’t happen at all — instead, the researchers should pursue their goals using computer simulations or other methods. Applied ethics His most comprehensive work, Practical Ethics,[7] analyzes in detail why and how beings’ interests should be weighed. His principle of equality encompasses all beings with interests, and it requires equal consideration of those interests, whatever the species. The principle of equal consideration of interests does not dictate equal treatment of all those with interests, since different interests warrant different treatment. All have an interest in avoiding pain, for instance, but relatively few have an interest in cultivating their abilities. Not only does his principle justify different treatment for different interests, but it allows different treatment for the same interest when diminishing marginal utility is a factor, favoring, for instance, a starving person’s interest in food over the same interest of someone who is only slightly hungry. Among the more important human interests are those in avoiding pain, in developing one’s abilities, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, in enjoying warm personal relationships, in being free to pursue one’s projects without interference, â€Å"and many others†. The fundamental interest that entitles a being to equal consideration is the capacity for â€Å"suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness†; mice as well as human beings have this interest, but stones and trees do not. He holds that a being’s interests should always be weighed according to that being’s concrete properties, and not according to its belonging to some abstract group such as a species, or a set of possible beings, or an early stage of something with an as yet unactualized potential. He favors a ‘journey’ model of life, which measures the wrongness of taking a life by the degree to which doing so frustrates a life journey’s goals. So taking a life is less wrong at the beginning, when no goals have been set, and at the end, when the goals have either been met or are unlikely to be accomplished. The journey model is tolerant of some frustrated desire, explains why persons who have embarked on their journeys are not replaceable, and accounts for why it is wrong to bring a miserable life into existence. Although sentience puts a being within the sphere of equal consideration of interests, only a personal interest in continuing to live brings the journey model into play. This model also explains the priority that Singer attaches to interests over trivial desires and pleasures. For instance, one has an interest in food, but not in the pleasures of the palate that might distinguish eating steak from eating tofu, because nutrition is instrumental to many goals in one’s life journey, whereas the desire for meat is not and is therefore trumped by the interest of animals in avoiding the miseries of factory farming. In order to avoid bias towards human interests, he requires the idea of an impartial standpoint from which to compare interests. This is an elaboration of the familiar idea of putting oneself in the other’s shoes, adjusted for beings with paws or flippers. He has wavered about whether the precise aim is the total amount of satisfied interests, or instead the most satisfied interests among those beings who already exist prior to the decision one is making. Both have liabilities. The total view, for instance, seems to lead to Derek Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion[8] — that is, it seems to imply that it’s morally better to have an enormous population with lives barely worth living rather than a smaller population with much happier lives. The prior-existence view, on the other hand, seems questionably indifferent to the harm or benefit one can do to those who are brought into existence by one’s decisions. The second edition of Practical Ethics disavows the first edition’s suggestion that the total and prior-existence views should be combined in such a way that the total view applies to sentient beings who are not self-conscious and the prior-existence view applies to those who are. This would mean that rats and human infants are replaceable — their painless death is permissible as long as they are replaced — whereas human adults and other persons in Singer’s expanded sense, including great apes, are not replaceable. The second edition dispenses with the requirement of replacement and the consequent high population numbers for sentient beings. It asserts that preference-satisfaction utilitarianism, incorporating the ‘journey’ model, applies without invoking the first edition’s suggestion about the total view. But the details are fuzzy and Singer admits that he is â€Å"not entirely satisfied† with his treatment of choices that involve bringing beings into existence. Ethical conduct is justifiable by reasons that go beyond prudence to â€Å"something bigger than the individual,† addressing a larger audience. Singer thinks this going-beyond identifies moral reasons as â€Å"somehow universal†, specifically in the injunction to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’, interpreted by him as demanding that one give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one’s own interests. This universalizing step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare, is crucial and sets him apart from moral theorists from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who regard that step as flatly irrational. Universalization leads directly to utilitarianism, Singer argues, on the strength of the thought that my own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others. Taking these into account, one must weigh them up and adopt the course of action that is most likely to maximize the interests of those affected; utilitarianism has been arrived at. Singer’s universalizing step applies to interests without reference to who has them, whereas a Kantian’s applies to the judgments of rational agents (in Kant’s kingdom of ends, or Rawls’s Original Position, etc. ). Singer regards Kantian universalization as unjust to animals. It’s their capacity for suffering/happiness that matters morally, not their deficiency with respect to rational judgment. As for the Hobbesians, Singer attempts a response in the final chapter of Practical Ethics, arguing that self-interested reasons support adoption of the moral point of view, such as ‘the paradox of hedonism’, which counsels that happiness is best found by not looking for it, and the need most people feel to relate to something larger than their own concerns. Abortion, euthanasia and infanticide Consistent with his general ethical theory, Singer holds that the right to physical integrity is grounded in a being’s ability to suffer, and the right to life is grounded in, among other things, the ability to plan and anticipate one’s future. Since the unborn, infants and severely disabled people lack the latter (but not the former) ability, he states that abortion, painless infanticide and euthanasia can be justified in certain special circumstances, for instance in the case of severely disabled infants whose life would cause suffering both to themselves and to their parents. In his view the central argument against abortion is It is wrong to kill an innocent human being; a human fetus is an innocent human being; therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus. He challenges the second premise, on the grounds that its reference to human beings is ambiguous as between human beings in the zoological sense and persons as rational and self-conscious. There is no sanctity of human life that confers moral protection on human beings in the zoological sense. Until the capacity for pain develops after â€Å"18 weeks of gestation†, abortion terminates an existence that has no intrinsic value (as opposed to the value it might have in virtue of being valued by the parents or others). As it develops the features of a person, it has moral protections that are comparable to those that should be extended to nonhuman life as well. He also rejects a backup argument against abortion that appeals to potential: It is wrong to kill a potential human being; a human fetus is a potential human being; therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus. The second premise is more plausible, but its first premise is less plausible, and Singer denies that what is potentially an X should have the same value or moral rights as what is already an X. Against those who stress the continuity of our existence from conception to adulthood, he poses the example of an embryo in a dish on a laboratory bench, which he calls Mary. Now if it divides into two identical embryos, there is no way to answer the question whether Mary dies, or continues to exist, or is replaced by Jane and Susan. These are absurd questions, he thinks, and their absurdity casts doubt on the view that the embryo is a human being in the morally significant sense. Singer classifies euthanasia as voluntary, involuntary, or non-voluntary. (For possible similar historical definitions of euthanasia see Karl Binding, Alfred Hoche and Werner Catel. ) Given his consequentialist approach, the difference between active and passive euthanasia is not morally significant, for the required act/omission doctrine is untenable; killing and letting die are on a moral par when their consequences are the same. Voluntary euthanasia, undertaken with the consent of the subject, is supported by the autonomy of persons and their freedom to waive their rights, especially against a legal background such as the guidelines developed by the courts in the Netherlands. Non-voluntary euthanasia at the beginning or end of life’s journey, when the capacity to reason about what is at stake is undeveloped or lost, is justified when swift and painless killing is the only alternative to suffering for the subject.