Is it moral to spend millions on art when some people are starving? Should conscious robots have rights? Is it OK to sell kidneys?
According to Peter Singer’s new book, the answers are: “no,” “yes,” and “maybe.”
That book, Ethics in the Real World (Princeton University Press), is a collection of 82 short essays on an array of hot-button topics. It follows his 2015 book The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas About Living Ethically (Yale University Press). And that followed his 2014 book, The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics (Oxford University Press), co-written with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek.
Singer, who just turned 70, keeps busy. He’s best-known for his 1975 book, Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals (HarperCollins), the bible of the animal-rights movement. While he may be the most famous philosopher alive, he’s not universally beloved: Disability activists called for his resignation from Princeton last year over his views on euthanasia, and he routinely pops up on socially conservative websites as an example of a vile, godless academic.
If any of that flusters Singer, he doesn’t show it. He just keeps writing.
I spoke with him recently about his new book, how he’s shifted his take on utilitarianism, and the joys of surfing.
Your book on effective altruism, The Most Good You Can Do, just came out in paperback. It seems that this idea has some momentum. Are you encouraged by what you see?
I think it’s exciting that the movement is really taking off. A lot of people are involved, and there’s starting to be a significant amount of money flowing to highly effective charities. If you’re trying to do good in the world, it makes a huge difference how you do it and where you do it, and previously there hasn’t been a lot of thought about effectiveness among donors.
What are some of the next steps you’d like to see taken to get that message out to a broader audience?
I’d really like to see it get out into the mainstream, even if people don’t have that much to give. I’ve been in touch with a guy in Brazil who’s decided to give 10 percent of what he earns to effective charities. And he owns so little that recently he moved houses and everything he owned he packed into a backpack and a suitcase.
That story makes me wonder what your email inbox is like. Do you get a lot of communication from strangers who want your opinion on this or that?
I can’t answer all of them. I have a disclaimer on my site, but people write to me anyway. There are a lot of people who just want give me comments on my views. Many of them are positive. A small number are hostile or even abusive. There are people asking for advice about what to do in various situations, often to do with their career choices.
Your views don’t fit neatly into any ideological box. There are social conservatives who would have a beef with you over quote-unquote sanctity of human life, and you break rank with the left on some issues. Do you feel besieged by both sides?
I never feel besieged. Most of the hostile things do come from essentially the Christian right, though they are certainly not the only ones. It tends to go in waves. There will be something that appears about me on some right-wing website, and that will get circulated around, and then I will get quite a few abusive emails, and then that will disappear.
Those on the political left tend to see themselves as more rational when it comes to moral issues. I wonder what you think liberals get wrong.
The use of genetically modified crops is one where there’s a party line. Obviously I’m very strong on environmental issues in general. A lot of my essays are about climate change and how this is one of the huge moral challenges for the 21st century and we’re not doing enough about it. But when it comes to GMOs, I guess I take an empirical line, and so far there isn’t a strong, persuasive case either that they’re harmful to our health or that they’re damaging to the environment.
You’ve long described yourself as a preference utilitarian, but more recently you’ve said you find so-called hedonistic utilitarianism more compelling. What prompted that shift?
My support for preference utilitarianism was based on the idea that ethics has to be built on universalizing our own preferences. That was something I held since I was a graduate student. But I’ve been looking for ways to get a stronger basis for ethics. Eventually I became persuaded that there were objective moral standards in terms of judgments, for example, about the wrongness of inflicting suffering on people unnecessarily or animals, and that they didn’t just have to be seen as universalized prescriptions but could be seen as self-evident truths. So, on that basis, it opened up various other possibilities beyond simply preference in terms of what we might argue.
The hedonistic view, which essentially talks about reducing pain and suffering and increasing pleasure and happiness, is one very obvious candidate for something that is objectively good. It may not be the only candidate, and that’s why, although I’m willing to describe myself as a hedonistic utilitarian, I keep an open mind on whether that’s enough to account for all the things that we ought to be valuing.
You’re someone who has written for a long time for both a specialist audience and for the general public. What have you learned about writing for a broader audience?
As an academic, there’s an occupational hazard of thinking like an academic and assuming your reader knows things that you and all your colleagues know. So you have to constantly remind yourself, Will people know what this means? Is this something people are going to get? Not patronizing your reader, but just saying that your reader may need some knowledge that you take for granted in order to understand it.
That really goes back to my first book, even before Animal Liberation, which was Democracy and Disobedience, a rewritten version of my Oxford thesis, which was about civil disobedience in the time of the Vietnam War, and I did want it to reach a wider audience even then. It doesn’t mean I want that for all of my work. The Point of View of the Universe is a more academic work which I never expected to reach a wide audience. But it’s important for much of my writing that it does.
Do you see any difference between students who show up to your classes now than those 20 or 30 years ago when it comes to their interest in what they should be doing, what they should be eating, what their charitable giving should be?
I think there is more interest in those issues. I don’t want to exaggerate. It’s not like all students are interested in those issues. But there are a significant number who are taking the course in order to think about their own lives and their own behavior, and there are a number of students who change. I see that each time I teach a large undergraduate course in practical ethics.
I think it’s really interesting the way a philosophy course, given that in the past people thought of philosophy as very abstract, and philosophers as being out of touch with the real world, it’s interesting the way that philosophy courses touch people’s lives in significant ways.
What do journalists or activists or maybe even your colleagues often get wrong about your work?
There are a number of things like that. One of them is the suggestion that I think that all animals are equal in the sense that it’s just as bad for somebody to kill a mouse as it is to kill a child. Obviously, although I do support equal consideration for similar interests, I don’t think that the interests of humans and animals are always similar.
People often say something like “Singer holds a philosophy of personism and thinks that what is morally crucial is to be a person.” That’s not true either. I’ve always been concerned with any being that can suffer as the basic requirement for having moral status. While I have talked about what it is to be a person in relation to the wrongness of killing, most people get wrong the significance I attribute to that.
In this new book, there’s an essay about surfing, which is something you took up rather late in life. I’m curious if you still surf now.
Yes, sure. I did over the summer and early fall. It’s a little cold out here for that now, so I haven’t been in the water lately. I’m hoping to be next year. It’s a break, a form of relaxation, getting outside, doing something physical — which is important to do as well as sitting at your laptop.
Tom Bartlett is a senior writer at The Chronicle. This interview has been edited and condensed.
