Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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“There is a point in every philosophy,” wrote Friedrich Nietzsche in 1886, “when the philosopher’s ‘conviction’ appears on the stage—or to use the language of an ancient Mystery: The ass arrived, most beautiful and most brave.”

For Peter Singer, the radical moral philosopher, the ass arrives with astonishing frequency.  He has proposed the killing of hemophiliac infants, and suggested that we ought to consider a twelve-week-old fetus according to the same moral standards by which we treat a fish. Last year, Singer advocated in The New York Times Magazine that Americans donate every penny they earn above $30,000 to charity, and that they redirect all expenditures on non-necessities—including, presumably, subscriptions to the Times—to the poor in third-world countries.  Just a few months ago, he asserted in the online journal Nerve that sex with animals is all right (as long as it’s consensual). 

It’s not surprising that Singer’s notoriety—as evidenced by the uproar over his appointment to Princeton’s bioethics faculty in 1999—has resulted mostly from these incendiary conclusions, which, of course, supply excellent grist for the sound-bite mill.  The ass, not the philosophy, has dominated our understanding of Peter Singer: the reasoning which produced his radical conclusions has received little public attention. 

Hence Singer’s newest book, Writings on an Ethical Life, a compendium of his work over the past thirty years.  This volume is, in fact, the child of the Princeton controversy: “while everyone was discussing Peter Singer’s views, the discussions were based largely on short quotations and secondhand summaries,” he writes of the storm over his appointment.  “Many had strong opinions about my work but few had actually read any of my books or articles.”

Well, now we have the chance—and what find we but that Singer’s philosophy is a lot like the practical imperatives at which he arrives: occasionally worthwhile, often outrageous, usually erroneous.

“My own interests cannot, simply because they are my interests, count more than the interests of anyone else,” says Singer.  This is the basis of his radical utilitarian claims: the idea that ethics ought to take a universal point of view, that our own interests matter only as part of the sum of everybody’s.

The problem with this view—namely, its coarse paving-over of everything that is complex and inarticulable about moral relationships—emerges as soon as we apply it to a few Singerian situations.

If a mother has $10 to feed either her own starving child, or a child starving in Somalia, her obligation to both is equal: after all, both children have the same interest in eating.  Her utilitarian obligation considers the interest alone; whether that interest is held by her flesh and blood or by a perfect stranger matters not.

But there is a complex set of moral factors that influences a mother’s responsibility to her child: to begin with, the intuitive love she feels, which presents imperatives that only begin with basic nourishment.  Then there is the degree to which she is equipped—biologically, economically, and geographically—to further her child’s interests; the extent to which caring for her child furthers the interests of her community; the close link between physical nourishment of the child and the other kinds of nourishment—moral, aesthetic, emotional—that she is equipped and expected to offer as the person responsible for bringing him into the world.

This is exactly where instinct and the complex fabric of human relationships run up against Singer’s philosophy.  “Since most people are self-interested to some degree, very few of us are likely to do everything that we ought to do,” he grandly understates.  “It would, however, hardly be honest to take this as evidence that it is not the case that we ought to do it.”  But where does that leave us?  It is “hardly honest” of Singer to claim, as he appears to, that self-interest is always bad, that we ought to make the kinds of transgressions against love, intuition, and the force of simple proximity that his philosophy requires.

Consider another consequence of Singer’s belief that “my own interests cannot…count more than the interests of anyone else.”  This view somewhat arbitrarily invests interests with moral weight.  So if a particular agent has no interests, then it’s out of luck.

Readers will be unshocked to discover that Singer considers a questionably broad collection of creatures to be “without interests”—including newborn babies.  He justifies infanticide by espousing, first of all, a certain theory of rights: “to have a right one must have the ability to desire that to which one has a right, so that to have a right to life one must be able to desire one’s own continued existence.”  A screaming newborn has no capacity for desiring to go on living; it has no “interest” in life; so it doesn’t figure into the calculation of interests at the heart of Singer’s utilitarianism.  The interests of, for example, the parents take over.  Hence the Replaceability Hypothesis, which suggests that a hemophiliac child be killed at birth, to be replaced in nine months or so by a second, normal child, who will no doubt further the parents’ interest in having an easier kid.

Singer forgets that newborn children have potential; that in the course of a few months or years all infants, hemophiliacs too, develop a concerted interest in living.  More profoundly, though, this potential is really a potential to develop interests according to Singer’s definition.

Singer equates “having interests” with “articulating those interests.”  But a creature doesn’t lack interest in living simply because it’s not actively declaring otherwise.  By the same token, a developing child certainly becomes more capable of verbally articulating his interest in living, but who’s to say that he didn’t have that interest from the beginning?  Perhaps Peter Singer sprang fully formed from his mother’s head, demanding wholesome vegetarian products; the rest of us, though, screamed until we got milk.  Surely we were expressing an interest of some kind.

In Singer’s view, a being has “interests”—and therefore deserves to live—only insofar as it is suspiciously like himself: a sentient, relatively bright creature capable of articulating his desires.  But when interests begin to look, smell, and act like the faculty of intelligence, Singer stops looking so utilitarian and starts looking a bit Nietzschean.  Perhaps this is why he offers no account of why “interests,” as he defines them, have any special moral weight.  But without that account, his system collapses.

 In 1973, Singer made his name with the book Animal Liberation, which launched the modern animal-rights movement.  It’s hard to define this book, liberally excerpted in Singer’s latest volume, as an “animal-rights tract,” though; it’s really a repudiation of the last several thousand years of thinking about what it means to be human.  In effect, Singer dispenses with the idea that human life is more valuable than other forms of life.  Speaking of some doctors’ opposition to the killing of brain-dead infants:

The life of every human being is sacred.  Yet people who would say this about the infant do not object to the killing of nonhuman animals.  How can they justify their different judgments?  Adult chimpanzees, dogs, pigs, and members of many other species far surpass the brain-damaged infant in their ability to relate to others, act independently, be self-aware…With the most intensive care possible, some severely retarded infants can never achieve the intelligence level of a dog.

  What Singer is proposing, in essence, is that we redraw the boundary of the “sanctity of life” doctrine: life is sacred not by virtue of membership in a species, but because of certain objective external qualities that it possesses.  A human being does not deserve to live simply because he is part of the species Homo sapiens; he deserves to live because he has desires and interests, many of which are shared by certain non-human animals.  The desire not to suffer, for example: “The capacity for suffering and enjoyment is a prerequisite for having interests at all, a condition that must be satisfied before we can speak of interests in a meaningful way,” Singer writes.

Stones don’t suffer; stones don’t have interests.  But human beings can suffer, and so can veal calves stuffed into cells and deprived of iron, to the point where they lick the metal posts of their stalls—thus Singer suggests that we rethink the entire way in which we treat non-human animals.

The doctrine is deeply convincing; no one who reads Singer’s articles on the gory details of animal testing and the treatment of animals on industrial farms will be able to dismiss it outright.  And Singer persuasively argues that our treatment of animals amounts to “speciesism.”  The distinction between “higher” and “lower” forms of animal life, Singer believes, is made along the boundary of the human species—not according to qualities that human beings share with many animals, such as the capacity to suffer.  In this sense, “speciesism” involves an act of differentiation that is akin to racism and sexism.

But the argument, despite the power and truth of many of its practical obligations, is itself speciesist.  Singer’s insistence that we redraw the boundaries of “sanctity of life” according to a set of rational standards that he himself has dreamed up—namely, the “interests” doctrine—ends up as nothing but an expression of the attitude that human rationality is best, that ethics must be based on reasoned philosophical arguments; in other words, that ethics must be a specifically human invention.  Singer himself expresses this view in the introduction to his Practical Ethics, where he declares the intention to divorce ethical reasoning from our presumably baser “emotions” and “instincts.”  But it’s precisely the dominance of reason over the baser instincts which is invoked to declare human beings superior to other members of the animal kingdom.

In the introduction to Animal Liberation, too, Singer writes, “Nowhere in this book…do I appeal to the reader’s emotions where they cannot be supported by reason,” and, having described a gruesome set of Nazi experiments, declares that “the ultimate justification for opposition to both these kinds of experiments, though, is not emotional.  It is an appeal to basic moral principles which we all accept.”

Basic moral principles which we all accept: veal calves, dogs, brain-dead infants, too?  Or is Singer really appealing to the supposed rational moral principles of human beings a lot like himself?  In the end, Singer’s attempt—on every level, and in every moral situation—to divorce his directions from moral emotion, to appeal to our intellects and rational ethical senses, is, I think, deeply hypocritical.  It repudiates the difference between advanced human beings and dogs, but its very instruments are rational tools that affirm that difference.

More fundamentally, Singer makes the signature mistake of many modern ethical philosophers: he grasps at a rational solution to a problem that, as he himself demonstrates, has no such solution.  The moral life cannot be reduced to calculations of interest; it is a complex set of relationships and personal instincts and communal obligations, involving emotion and reason and aesthetics and one’s particular social arrangements.  These complexities are inherent in the lives of human beings, but they are also inherent to animal life in general; “moral emotion” complicates and frequently indicts “moral reasoning” precisely because it is mysterious, intuitive, learned inside the air of everyday life rather than abstracted from it.

The ass has appeared—and it isn’t in the form of Peter Singer’s thoughts about sick babies, our financial obligations to distant strangers, or sex with gorillas.  It’s the premise from which all of these beliefs are derived: the supposed power of moral rationality and coarse equations of interest.  Singer’s attempt to reduce the ethical life to a set of rational maxims is not only vastly inadequate; it is, I believe, itself deeply immoral.