Peter Singer
Peter Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian professor of bioethics at Princeton University, and is generally considered to be the intellectual great-granddaddy of the animal rights movement. He is an atheist and a utilitarian - who takes utilitarianism to levels which make some people uncomfortable.
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[edit] Views
[edit] Animal rights
Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation (published in 1975) which has been cited as one of the most influential texts in the animal rights movement. His central message in the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that action is right if it promotes happiness of everyone affected by it. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to other animals - utilitarianism takes into account only pain and pleasure and animals can also experience pain and pleasure. As such, Singer completely rejects the idea that humans are a "special" animal.
Nevertheless when asked:[1]
- "If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?"
He replied.
- "Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being. But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens."
Although Singer is a professed vegetarian, he does not believe it is wrong in principle to kill animals for food. Since most animals likely have no concept of death, they cannot have a desire to go on living. Therefore, in and of itself, killing animals is not wrong. Nonetheless, Singer still opposes meat-eating, since although the animals have no preference to not die, they do have a preference to not feel pain - and the processes of farming and slaughtering will inevitably cause them pain, thus violating their preferences.
[edit] Infanticide
Singer is too moral to eat hamburgers, but he doesn't find anything unethical about killing disabled newborn babies.[2]
He claims that foetuses are full human beings,[3] but he thinks that it does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being's life. Similarly, he argues - via utilitarianism - that a period of 28 days after birth might be allowed before an infant is accepted as having the same right to life as others, because newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood — "rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness".
More specifically, Singer is a preference utilitarian - he believes that every being's preferences should be treated equally, and we should aim to fulfill as many being's preferences as possible. This leads to the conclusion that it is wrong to kill any being that does not want to die. However, since infants do not have any desire to live or not to die - they have no concept of what life or death are - according to Singer, it is not wrong in itself to kill an infant. Now, although the infant does not have any desire to live - there are others who would normally want it to go on living, such as its parents. So, Singer concludes, it normally is wrong to kill infants - but the wrong is not committed against the infant, but against their parents who want the child to go on living. But, in circumstances where the parents do not want the child to live - such as euthanasia for a severely disabled infant - Singer concludes that killing the infant is not wrong. As the child grows older, it will begin to learn what death is, and will form a preference to go on living and not to die. At that point, but according to Singer not earlier, killing the child becomes a wrong against the child itself, as opposed to just a wrong against others who love the child.
[edit] External links
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Human or mouse?
- ↑ Peter Singer. Taking Life: Humans. Excerpted from Practical Ethics, 2nd edition, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 175-217
- ↑ "In a strictly biological sense, the opponents of abortion are right to say that abortion ends a human life." - Abortion, the Dividing Lines