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ETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD
Peter Singer
ISBN 978-0-691-23786-2
Singer begins by asking if moral judgements can be objective, a view
rejected by the logical positivists. He gives the example of “You
ought not to hit that child.” This, he claims, is purely subjective.
There is no objective position from which we can say that hitting a
child is wrong. What about killing a child? If we can claim there is
some objective, that is universal, objection to killing children,
why not hitting them? What do we mean by objective? Everything in
any human mind is subjective in the sense of being experienced by
that mind, ie personally, which is what subjective means.
Objectivity applies to whatever can be confirmed by all
subjectivities. One add one is two is objective because no
subjectivity can deny it (except maybe Donald Trump’s). That Mr X
likes beetroot is subjective. No one can gainsay him, though he may
be lying. However, if Mr Y says beetroot is bad for your health,
that’s a matter of evidence. Whether you like borsch or don’t makes
no difference to the question of the effects of beetroot on human
physiology. There is, therefore, an objective position from which we
can say hitting a child is wrong; evidence that it will give the
child pain, damage her emotionally, teach her that violence is
acceptable. These things can be assessed. People use all sorts of
excuses to justify bad behaviour (in essence, behaviour which
damages others) but an excuse doesn’t nullify evidence. “Spare the
rod and spoil the child” was the slogan of Victorian hypocrites who
sent children up chimneys and under looms. It was based on no
evidence but served a tendentious position. A personal advantage
from hitting children is no argument in its favour, in fact, the
opposite.
In discussing the issue of moral progress, which he’s right to
assert is real, he claims no country today openly accepts racist
doctrines. Is that true of Israel, Myanmar, China? Is it even true
of the USA? Perhaps what he means is that States which want to
appear liberal pretend to have ditched racism, but the breadth and
depth of hatred on the ground of skin colour, of what should
properly be called white supremacism, tells another story. His
argument in favour of moral progress is sound, but he undermines by
such a cavalier assertion, as he does by the naïve use of data about
IQ tests: apparently if today’s young sat the test from early last
century, they would have readings of 130. The explanation is
advanced that scientific thinking has been transformational: the
truth is IQ tests are nonsense. IQ as defined by Eysenck, Burt (a
fraud) and co, doesn’t exist. Burt falsified his evidence in favour
of his vile hypothesis that the rich are clever and the poor stupid.
I suppose that’s why Donald Trump was in the White House.
“The moral intuitions which evolved during
many millennia of living in small, face-to-face societies are
no longer adequate”, he writes in asking if we have a moral plan.
Suppose we changed “moral intuitions” for “language faculty”. If we
don’t have an instinct for justice, what’s to stand in the way of
people being moulded in any fashion the powerful choose?
Of course, our moral faculty
has to work in changing circumstances, like our language faculty,
but the idea what we evolved with is inadequate is very dubious.
Only we have language and a capacity for moral choice, and the
language faculty came into being at the same time as abstract
thought, which makes moral choice possible, about 50,000 years ago.
The problem isn’t that our moral faculty is out of date, it’s that
the powerful behave in morally despicable ways. Singer’s suggestion
that thousands of years ago people weren’t concerned for future
generations is just wrong. People always have been, and when our
ancestors lived in very small groups, a disaster which might wipe
them out was never far away. We now have the capacity to wipe out
the entire species and seem to be heading straight for disaster. Our
evolved moral faculty can deal with that perfectly well, if only the
rich and powerful would stop being so greedy and purblind.
The meaning of a life doesn’t end with that life. This is true of
everyone. Think of your family, no doubt someone who died twenty,
thirty, fifty a hundred years ago, or more, still influences your
life, and it turn that will influence the lives of those who come
after you, offspring or otherwise. Singer explores the idea of a
happy life and produces a rather foolish check list. What matters is
what Diderot was getting at when an interlocutor wondered why he
permitted his books to be burnt and himself
thrown in prison when, as a highly intelligent man, he could
have ensured riches, fame, all the women he wanted by complying with
authority, and the philosopher replied he wasn’t interested in being
a time-server but in pursuing truth and was confident there would
always be people like him who would read his works in centuries to
come. His interlocutor protested
this would be of no use to him as he’d be long dead, at which
Diderot responded he was making a terrible mistake because to know
you will be well judged by posterity is a present pleasure
(something Donald Trump should reflect on).
Should we reproduce? David Benatar believes doing so benefits no one
because while bringing a child into the world who will suffer is
dubious, doing so for a child who will have a good life is not a
benefit. That depends on whether you believe that having been alive
is a benefit, which depends on whether you think life is worth
living. It’s odd that Singer can raise such a question about us
while at the same time arguing vigorously for animal rights. If
bringing a human child into the world brings no benefit, how much
less does the birth of a rat? Why not wipe out all the rats? Some of
us worry about climate change and try to reduce our carbon
footprint, but its future generations who will be worst affected. If
we refuse to breed, we can avoid the suffering. It’s a bizarre
solution to the problem’s life throws up to want to put an end to
life. If we have responsibility towards animals, don’t we have the
same towards life as such? The physicist, Eddington, remarked: “We
are bits of stellar matter that got cold by accident, bits of a star
gone wrong.” Yes, but life is full of wonder and delight as well as
suffering and Singer likes it so much he holds a professorship and
publishes books. Why deny that to future generations?
Singer thinks veganism a good idea. There’s good evidence for health
and planetary benefits but it’s also well-known that B12 is easy to
get from meat, as is heme iron and certain other substances,
creatine, carnosine. Vegans need to take supplements, which raises
an ethical question about who profits from providing them. Cows, and
other animals we breed for food, emit methane; but if we don’t raise
them for food any more, why will there be cows? Should we let them
disappear? Wouldn’t that be a form of cruelty? If we keep them,
they’ll still produce methane. How much methane is too much? It
hangs around in the atmosphere for a short time compared to CO2.
There are perfectly good arguments for going vegan, but if your
doctor diagnosed serious anaemia and told you the quick way to
remedy it would be to eat plenty of meat, what would you do?
Pets don’t exist for your pleasure. They have, Singer says, lives of
their own to lead; but if they weren’t pets, would they have a life
at all? He’s right that we shouldn’t treat them cruelly and should
respect their natures and some people have ludicrously sentimental
notions about their pets, but pets bring psychological and emotional
comfort to millions. They may contribute to the avoidance of a
collapse in mental health. He recommends rats as “loveable” and
“clean”. Just which rats he means he doesn’t specify but the people
who died of bubonic plague in the Middle Ages might doubt his
confidence. Rats like sewers. They carry several serious diseases.
Maybe he means rats bred as domestic pets, but encouraging people to
bring rats into their homes without specifying the difference is
surely somewhat irresponsible.
Wrasse fish, Singer argues, have self-awareness because they pass
the mirror test, but its originator Gordon Gallup questions the 2019
experiment which is the basis of the claim. He thinks the fish may
have taken the mirror image for another of their species and the
mark placed on it as some form of parasite. The evidence for
self-awareness isn’t conclusive. Just what it might be is a tortured
matter: consciousness is our greatest puzzle and we are a long way
from understanding. It may prove to be beyond our cognitive
capacities, as David Hume suggested. Singer is concerned about
factory fishing, which is laudable. Over-fishing and inflicting
unnecessary pain on fish should be avoided, but once again, if you
had to choose between starvation and fishing, what would you do?
Singer pushes a little too far and begins to be tendentious. If
fishing were banned, it would give rise to a black market in
sardines and the rise of piscine gangsterism. There’s something to
be said for the golden mean.
Kangaroos are killed annually by the millions. Singer doesn’t
explore what proportion of the culling is necessary but his
arguments in favour of treating the animals thoughtfully are
excellent. He ends his little essay, however, with the idea that
appropriating land from animals is akin to invading another country.
Take that seriously, and how could we have survived? Even other
animals compete for living space. There is no animal international
law, no UN, nor animal armies, States, simply, no animal history. No
other creature has evolved with our capacity to create and re-create
our social conditions. We are historical by nature, as we are
linguistic and moral. Whatever signs there may be of something
vaguely akin to these capacities among animals, they are nowhere
near ours. Take language: animal communication is very various, but
communication isn’t language: only we have an internal language
faculty, a rule-dependent system, the capacity to generate an
infinite array of sentences from a finite set of rules. These are
not petty differences. Nor is that fact that only we have an evolved
moral faculty. This is what makes Singer’s use of “invading”
somewhat slippery. When the US invaded Vietnam it did so
deliberately in order to continue its pursuit of global dominance,
in defiance of international law (as it has many times) and it
dropped napalm on peasants who were no credible threat to its own
security. How is that comparable to anything we have done to
animals? It’s true we have behaved recklessly towards other
creatures and the planet, but no other animals suffer moral offence,
however great their physical suffering.
Insects, Singer argues, may be conscious. Without question they are,
but in a very limited way. He uses a curious argument: “If a being
is capable of having subjective experiences, then there is something
that it is like to be that being.” Just what this means is difficult
to work out. He writes that human subjective experience arises from
the mid-brain not the cortex; but without a cortex our “subjective”
ie personal experience would be unrecognisably different. It seems
this notion of there being “something that it is like to be that
being” is presumed to establish some boundary. Just how this works
isn’t explained and is somewhat baffling, but there is a suggestion
of Singer trying to deny the fundamental differences between
ourselves and other creatures. That we are moral by nature is
significant. It makes us capable of evil ie doing what we know to be
wrong. No other creature does that. If a scorpion stings you it is
doing what nature dictates; there can be no question of moral
choice.
Singer defends abortion, in certain circumstances and within legal
limits. His position is rational but he cites the “scientifically
accurate claim that the fetus is a living individual of the species
Homo Sapiens”. This does not confer the right to life because
it is mere potential for “rational self-awareness”. What does he
mean by an “individual”? A foetus is not viable as an independent
organism, at least before a certain level of development. Singer
dismisses the woman’s right to choose as means of evading the issue
of the moral status of the foetus. What he doesn’t discuss is
abortion as form of the maternal instinct. The moral status of the
foetus can’t be considered apart from the moral status of the child
it will be if it goes to term and is born; when a woman knows she
doesn’t want or can’t care for the child, there is a clash of moral
claims. The foetus may
be self-aware, but is, as yet, unable to express its wishes, to make
a choice, to weigh advantages and disadvantages. Doesn’t that tip
the balance to the woman? Who has the right to tell a woman she must
bear a child? Is the foetus an individual in a social and moral
sense? Singer’s is a sensible position, in contrast to the
over-zealous views of the pro-lifers, but just what is meant by an
individual is moot and the question of what the pregnant woman wants
a moral knot.
Whether people pay to fulfil their sexual fantasies or fulfil them
at no cost, doesn’t tell us whether they are good people, fit for
high office. First of all, who ever said high office goes to good
people? A cursory review of history would point to the opposite:
good people tend to get it in the neck and sociopaths often do very
well. Secondly, the matter of people paying prostitutes illuminates
a naivety present in Singer’s thinking: employing a prostitute is
like employing anyone, a moral outrage. Paying someone to clean your
house or dig your garden, or even more pertinently, tend to the
needs of an old person with dementia, isn’t morally too problematic
if you treat them with care, and pay them well; but that’s not how
employment as a social fact works. It’s a system in which most
people are required to work for others in order to live and the
others they work for profit greatly. How is employment morally
superior to slavery? Most prostitutes are run by pimps. The system
floats on money. The motivation is enrichment. Paying for sex in
such a system is highly morally questionable. There is the added
matter of hypocrisy: Singer is examining the matter of Randall
Tobias resigning after admitting using an escort service. Was he
trying to hide it? By and large men in high office who do such
things tend not to admit them. That is evidence
they are not “good” people. Singer is right to point up the
irrationality of prostitution being illegal in most US States. The
Swedish position is more rational: make the men who use prostitutes
pay; but no one can pay for sexual services if money doesn’t exist.
The real moral issue is the money system and this is where Singer
tends to fear to tread. He takes the existing economic and social
system for granted.
In that regard, he claims the idea of all children being educated in
public (not in the UK sense) schools, has been lost in most advanced
societies. Perhaps for the time being. He doesn’t discuss why: we
have lived through a long period of reaction, driven by the failure
of the left to elaborate a feasible alternative. No small part of
that is the mistaken idea that we are merely products of our social
circumstances, that we have no given nature; a view which has played
a crucial role in both left totalitarianism and the more or less
automatic notion of State provision as the sole alternative to the
capitalism. An understanding of our given nature provides a better
possibility: as it’s characteristic for us to choose how to act,
people should have real autonomy; workers should control production
and its product; communities should be self-governing. Neither
capital nor the State should rule people’s lives. This is an obvious
moral question, yet untouched by Singer.
There is, he claims, a flaw in our emotional make-up which inclines
us to make charitable donations when we see pictures of a suffering
child, but to be less willing when we’re told of millions in
trouble. Why is that a flaw? From which perspective can it be seen
as such? In the circumstances in which our biological ancestors
evolved, an intense response to the suffering of those close to you,
might have been the difference between survival and disappearance.
It’s only a flaw when we’re trying to compensate for injustice by
prising money. The real flaw is not in our nature, but in our
economic system which grants inordinate wealth to some individuals
and societies and leaves others in destitution. People in Burkina
Faso aren’t asked to contribute when a tornado hits Florida.
In discussing whether money makes us happy, Singer mentions the
Beatles who, he says, remind us money can’t buy us love. That’s
what they sang, but they didn’t believe it. They sang it to make as
much money as possible, deliberately tailoring their songs to the
largest market. Insincerity is the hallmark of popular culture,
because it’s part of the propaganda system of thought-control and
what might be called emotional control. Singer also mentions Adam
Smith who called the pursuit of personal wealth a “delusion”. Smith
is a contradictory thinker whose major book rests on its
predecessor, the first sentence of which is: “Howsoever selfish man
may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature
which interest him in the fortune of others, and make their
happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it but
the pleasure of seeing it.” Smith was able to countenance capitalism
because he believed its greed was bound to be tempered by our moral
nature; the world was ruled by a beneficent deity and total evil
was, therefore, impossible. “Partial evil” must contribute to the
general good. Had he lived a little longer he might have
changed his mind. Singer is right, accumulating money doesn’t
increase our happiness. Poverty is miserable, but optimum wealth is
what makes us content. Yet he ends his piece by suggesting Warren
Buffet can enjoy his wealth contributing to Bill Gates’s Foundation.
Surely this is to miss the point: if wealth wasn’t concentrated in a
few hands, we wouldn’t need the Gates Foundation. Letting people
become rich beyond the dreams of avarice so they can fund charities
is a mad way of providing for people’s needs. Once again, this is an
example of how Singer’s ethical thought holds back from criticism of
how the world is organised.
In his discussion of Marx, Singer remarks: “Most humans… continue to
seek power, privilege and luxury for themselves…”. It’s interesting
that he says “humans” rather than people, as if he’s outside the
species, but it’s a remarkably wrong assertion. Capitalism functions
because most people aren’t capitalists. If everyone got up in the
morning asking how much money they could make for themselves in the
next twenty-four hours, we’d be in real trouble. It’s because most
people put making a contribution, doing a good job, helping others
or simply enjoying their day above power, privilege and luxury that
the system limps along. The minority who behave as Singer suggests
are often unhelpful: Donald Trump for example.
The discussion of Marx makes some obvious points and one good one:
Marx’s mistake in denying a given human nature. It’s worth wondering
if Marx genuinely believed this, but it has been an enormously
damaging idea. The essay is too brief to give any idea of Singer’s
understanding. He recognises that much done in Marx’s name he may
well have objected to, but he has nothing to say about the moral
power of the workers’ movement; the movement, that is, not for State
control, but for worker autonomy, a movement made use of by Lenin,
Trotsky, Stalin and many more political manipulators who kicked the
workers in the face as they claimed only they had the capacity to
make important decisions. There is perhaps no more important moral
issue in the modern world.
Singer makes the extraordinary and dangerous claim that “most of the
opposition to freedom of thought and discussion comes from the
left”.His example is the opposition to Rebecca’s Tuvel’s “In Defense
of Transracialism”. 800 people called for her article to be
withdrawn and there were also demands for her to be sacked. He’s
right that this is foolish, but in what way does it represent the
“left”? There may have been many signatories who aren’t socialists.
“Left” should be reserved for what it really means: a belief in
worker autonomy. Many on the left by that definition would not
support the calls for Tuvel’s article to be suppressed, including
the author of this review. Transgender rights are a highly
contentious matter and
quite distinct from views about economic justice. No doubt there are
some, or will be some, very rich transgender people who will be in
favour of economic conservatism. As the world makes haste to
authoritarianism, it’s irresponsible of Singer to characterise the
left as the enemy of free speech and thought. Who would you trust to
defend them, Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders? It’s also pertinent
that Tuvel’s article is essentially frivolous in conflating gender
and race. The latter doesn’t exist. The former has a physiological
and a psychological form and they don’t necessarily match.
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