Peter Singer
Just about every day an expert is happily giving the rest of us advice on what we need to do. The proposal is often embedded in pieces of persuasive writing, leaving us with two challenges: first, which of all the various suggestions on offer should we follow; and second, how can we be certain they are the right or the best things to do? When it comes to ethical issues, I like logic. I believe actions should be based on clear analysis rather than persuasive writing, but it must be a justifiable analysis too. It’s for this reason I often return to Peter Singer, who makes his reasoning clear, and even when I disagree with him, as I do on some issues, I have to do so by responding the logic of his position. However, before turning to some of Peter Singer’s views, two recent examples of advice illustrate how easy it is to be swept along by propositions that rest on troublesome, even contestable assumptions.
Oxford philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord, from the university’s Future of Humanity Institute, coined the word ‘longtermism’ several years ago. Their approach is based on utilitarian thinking about morality. According to utilitarianism, famously advocated by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century, we should act in a way that maximises overall, aggregate well-being, adding points for every extra moment of happiness, and subtracting them for suffering, taking account of probability as we do so. The maths of long-termism can become astonishing: if we assume humans will survive for a million years, and even with a smaller average global population, there could be at least 8 trillion humans yet to be born. Imagine this choice: save a million lives today or shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of premature human extinction, a one in a million chance of saving at least 8 trillion lives, the utilitarian logic is you should do the latter, and allow a million people to die.
Really! Utilitarianism is fundamentally impersonal. It is based on the principle we cannot give more weight to our own interests or the interests of those we love than to the interests of perfect strangers. In other words, we must make sacrifices for the greater good. Worse, it suggests we should do so by any effective means. Using those earlier statistics, MacAskill states that if we can shave 0.0001 percent off the probability of human extinction by killing a million people, we should. The moral mathematics of aggregate well-being may not be the whole of ethics, but altruism plays a part. When asked what we should do to benefit others over the long term, he points out those in the future may vastly outnumber those who occupy the present, and, uncomfortably, we should accept their very existence depends on us. Yes, that is extreme but is only about logic? What about priority between various alternatives?
MacAskill and Ord helped establish Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge at least 10 percent of their income to charitable causes. With our tithe, they argue, we should be utilitarian, aggregating benefits, subtracting harms, and weighing odds. Our ten percent should be directed to the most effective charities, assessed by impersonal empirical measures, Effective Altruists argue. MacAskill a leading figure, Peter Singer is another.
Effective Altruists don’t need to be utilitarians about morality (although many are), and they do respect the rights of others. However, some are like MacAskill in being determined quantifiers. Their altruistic calculations can lead to long termism and to fairly radical arguments about future generations. “Future people count,” MacAskill writes, “There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better. This is the case for longtermism in a nutshell. The premises are simple, and I don’t think they’re particularly controversial. Yet taking them seriously amounts to a moral revolution.”
The utilitarian logic is clear. Most people concerned with the effects of climate change would accept we should act to maximise well-being. Yet MacAskill pursues this logic to unexpected ends, offering uncompromising views. As of 2022, the Doomsday Clock, which measures our proximity to doom, was set at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. Despite this, according to a study commissioned by MacAskill, even in the worst-case, a nuclear war that kills 99 percent of us, society would probably survive. The future trillions would be safe. The same goes for climate change. MacAskill is upbeat about humanity’s chances of surviving seven degrees of warming or worse: “even with fifteen degrees of warming,” he contends, “the heat would not pass lethal limits for crops in most regions.”
When I read this, I was stunned. First, it conflicts with almost everything else I’ve read. The last time the temperature was six degrees higher than preindustrial levels was 250 million years ago, at the time of the Permian-Triassic Extinction, the most devastating of the five great extinctions. This was when deserts reached almost to the Arctic, and more than 90 percent of species were wiped out. Environmental journalist Mark Lynas summarises current research: “at six degrees of warming the oceans will become anoxic, killing most marine life, and they’ll begin to release methane hydrate, which is flammable at concentrations of five percent, creating a risk of roving firestorms” (in Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, 2020). How we could survive this, let alone fifteen degrees hotter than now?
More to the point is how MacAskill values survival in the long term over a decrease of suffering and death in the near future. “Most of us agree that (1) world peace is better than (2) the death of 99 percent of the world’s population, which is better in turn than (3) human extinction. But how much better? Where many would see a greater gap between (1) and (2) than between (2) and (3), the longtermist disagrees. The gap between (1) and (2) is a temporary loss of population from which we will (or at least may) bounce back; the gap between (2) and (3) is ‘trillions upon trillions of people who would otherwise have been born.’” (this from Kieran Setiya’s recent review of MacAskill’s book in the Boston Globe).
I understand the maths, but I simply can’t accept it. I can’t sacrifice people now for the sake of trillions in the distant future because, as far as I am concerned, the long-term future is both uncertain and unknowable, while the challenges for people now are evident and pressing. I have always remembered and agreed with Carol Gilligan’s comment in In a Different Voice, “I have a very strong sense of being responsible to the world, that I can’t just live for my enjoyment, but just the fact of being in the world gives me an obligation to do what I can to make the world a better place to live in, no matter how small a scale that may be on.”
Nor can I get overly excited about some other proposals. Gaia Vince is a freelance British environmental journalist, broadcaster and non-fiction author. She tells us a great upheaval is coming. Climate-driven movement of people will add to a massive migration already under way to the world’s cities. The number of migrants has doubled globally over the past decade, and the issue of what to do about rapidly increasing populations of displaced people will only become greater and more urgent. To survive climate breakdown will require a planned and deliberate migration of a kind humanity has never before undertaken.
She suggests how we manage this global crisis, and how humanely we treat each other as we migrate will be key to whether this century of upheaval proceeds smoothly or with violent conflict and unnecessary deaths. “Managed right, this upheaval could lead to a new global commonwealth of humanity. Migration is our way out of this crisis. Climate change is in most cases survivable; it is our border policies that will kill people. Human movement on a scale never before seen will dominate this century. It could be a catastrophe or, managed well, it could be our salvation.” She may be right, but is migration the only answer?
Why am I concerned about MacAskill and Vince? It’s not because of the issues they discuss. It’s their confidence in offering solutions. I don’t believe there are ‘solutions’, only strategies to help us move forward. Unlike solutions, strategies are approaches to be adopted, and unlike solutions, they are always tentative and under review. In contrast to these two, people like Peter Singer focus on immediate problems and their consequences, rather than positing longer-term solutions to distant issues. He recognises it is much ‘easier’ to develop solutions for the long run, but doing so skates over the shorter-term, pressing issues these ignore.
Peter Singer has written several important books about living an ethical life. People who do this “adopt – to use Henry Sidgwick’s memorable phrase – ‘the point of view of the universe’. This is not a phrase to be taken literally, for unless we are pantheists, the universe itself cannot have a point of view at all. I shall use Sidgwick’s phrase to refer to a point of view that is maximally all-embracing, while not attributing any kind of consciousness or other attitudes to the universe, or any part of it that is not a sentient being. From this perspective, we can see that our own sufferings and pleasures are very like the sufferings and pleasures of others; and that there is no reason to give less consideration to the sufferings of others, just because they are ‘other’. This remains true in whatever way ‘otherness’ is defined, as long as the capacity for suffering or pleasure remains.”
Singer is well aware that people who take on the point of view of the universe can be daunted by the size of the task that faces them. Many issues pose uncertainties about how to go about achieving their objectives, and how far to pursue them. There are no easy answers, no ‘final’ solutions, but ongoing debate and analysis while remaining aware of change and uncertainty. As Singer says “we are part of this world and there is a desperate need to do something now about the conditions in which people live and die, and to avoid both social and ecological disaster. There is no time to focus our thoughts on the possibility of a distant utopian future … We have to take the first step. We must reinstate the idea of living an ethical life as a realistic and viable alternative to the present dominance of materialist self-interest.”
Singer is also tough minded, and his analyses are often uncompromising. To take one example from Practical Ethics (1991), he considered the ethical issues in infanticide: “Infants are sentient beings who are neither rational nor self-conscious. So, if we turn to consider the infants in themselves, independently of the attitudes of their parents, since their species is not relevant to their moral status, the principles that govern the wrongness of killing non-human animals who are sentient but not rational or self-conscious must apply here too … the most plausible arguments for attributing a right to life to a being apply only if there is some awareness of oneself as a being existing over time, or as a continuing mental self. Nor can respect for autonomy apply where there is no capacity for autonomy. … So, the issue of ending life for disabled newborn infants is not without complications, which we do not have the space to discuss adequately. Nevertheless, the main point is clear: killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.”
This might be somewhat less controversial than when he wrote 30 years ago. Singer writes carefully and clearly about euthanasia.: “Infanticide includes considering justifiable killing for beings who have never been capable of choosing to live or die. Ending a life without consent may also be examined in the case of those who were once capable of choosing to live or die, but now, through accident or old age, have permanently lost this capacity, and did not, prior to losing it, express any views about whether they wished to go on living in such circumstances.” In 1991 Singer gave the example of Rita Greene, a hospital patient in Washington for thirty-nine years without knowing it. She’d been in a vegetative state since undergoing open heart surgery in 1952. Today, most hospitals have procedures to follow to end support for people like Rita Greene if it’s clear they are beyond resuscitation, that they have no experiences at all and can never have any again. Singer suggests, “Their life’s journey has come to an end. They are biologically alive, but not biographically.”
It becomes more challenging when we move on to voluntary euthanasia. Less the case now than when Singer was writing Practical Ethics, many existing laws back then had the effect that people suffering unrelievable pain or distress from an incurable illness and who begged their doctors to end their lives were asking their doctors to risk a murder charge. Advocates of voluntary euthanasia wanted any laws of this kind changed so doctors can legally act on patients’ desire to die without further suffering. They can do this in several countries today, as long as they comply with certain conditions. Singer points out the case for voluntary euthanasia has some common ground with the case for non-voluntary euthanasia: death is a benefit for the one killed. They differ, however, in that voluntary euthanasia involves the killing of a rational and self-conscious person and not a merely conscious being. Are the ethical issues different when the ‘being’ is capable of consenting, and does consent?
Singer is blunt and clear. Suppose a person suffering from a painful and incurable disease wishes to die. First, killing takes place only with the genuine consent of the person; if we do not wish to be killed, we simply do not consent, but if voluntary euthanasia is prohibited, we may fear that our death will be needlessly drawn out and distressing. Second what about the ‘right to life’? He points out an essential feature of a right that we can waive our rights if we so choose. “I may have a right to privacy; but I can, if I wish, film every detail of my daily life and invite the neighbours to my home movies. Neighbours sufficiently intrigued to accept my invitation could do so without violating my right to privacy, since the right has on this occasion been waived. Similarly, to say that I have a right to life is not to say that it would be wrong for my doctor to end my life if she does so at my request. In making this request I waive my right to life.” Finally, respect for autonomy means we should allow rational agents to live their own lives according to their own choices, free from interference or coercion. If rational agents choose to die, then we should allow them to do as they choose.
Singer is an unashamed rationalist. There are other objections to infanticide and euthanasia, as well as cultural and religious beliefs, and he acknowledges departing from the traditional sanctity-of-life ethic carries a very small but real risk of unwanted consequences. Against this he argues we must balance the harm to which the traditional ethic gives rise, harm to those whose misery is needlessly prolonged. His views deserve respect, even if we disagree.
As I was finishing these comments I read about Happy, an elephant in New York’s Bronx Zoo. Elephants are social, family-oriented and clearly intelligent animals, with large brains. Their mental capability has been shown in many studies, including Happy demonstrating her ability to recognise herself in a mirror. However, living in her zoo enclosure Happy’s life has been one of effective solitary confinement for several years. Singer would argue Happy is a ‘rational and conscious person’ with a right to live freely. Incarcerated, we are infringing on her rights, and she deserves to be released to enjoy a social life with other elephants. We are cruel to animals in solitary captivity like Happy, just as we are cruel to impose life on people who wish to put an end to an existence dominated by extreme and untreatable pain. In both cases, what gives us the right to be cruel gods? Certainly not a defendable logic.
