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9781497645585

Publisher: Open Road Media
Publication date: 04/14/2015
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Pages: 374
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Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and laureate professor at the University of Melbourne’s School of Historical and Philosophical Studies. The most prominent ethicist of our time, he is the author of more than twenty books, including Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, and The Life You Can Save. Singer divides his time between New York City and Melbourne, Australia.

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Writings on an Ethical Life

By Peter Singer

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Copyright © 2000 Peter Singer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4558-5

CHAPTER 1

Moral Experts

FROM Analysis

The following position has been influential in recent moral philosophy: there is no such thing as moral expertise; in particular, moral philosophers are not moral experts. Leading philosophers have tended to say things like this:

It is silly, as well as presumptuous, for any one type of philosopher to pose as the champion of virtue. And it is also one reason why many people find moral philosophy an unsatisfactory subject. For they mistakenly look to the moral philosopher for guidance.

or like this:

It is no part of the professional business of moral philosophers to tell people what they ought or ought not to do.... Moral philosophers, as such, have no special information not available to the general public, about what is right and what is wrong; nor have they any call to undertake those hortatory functions which are so adequately performed by clergymen, politicians, leader-writers ...

Assertions like these are common; arguments in support of them less so. The role of the moral philosopher is not the role of the preacher, we are told. But why not? The reason surely cannot be, as C. D. Broad seems to suggest, that the preacher is doing the job "so adequately." It is because those people who are regarded by the public as "moral leaders of the community" have done so badly that "morality," in the public mind, has come to mean a system of prohibitions against certain forms of sexual enjoyment.

Another possible reason for insisting that moral philosophers are not moral experts is the idea that moral judgments are purely emotive, and that reason has no part to play in their formation. Historically, this theory may have been important in shaping the conception of moral philosophy that we have today. Obviously, if anyone's moral views are as good as anyone else's, there can be no moral experts. Such a crude version of emotivism, however, is held by few philosophers now, if indeed it was ever widely held. Even the views of C. L. Stevenson do not imply that anyone's moral views are as good as anyone else's.

A more plausible argument against the possibility of moral expertise is to be found in Ryle's essay "On Forgetting the Difference between Right and Wrong," which appeared in Essays in Moral Philosophy, edited by A. Melden. Ryle's point is that knowing the difference between right and wrong involves caring about it, so that it is not, in fact, really a case of knowing. One cannot, for instance, forget the difference between right and wrong. One can only cease to care about it. Therefore, according to Ryle, the honest man is not "even a bit of an expert at anything" (p. 157).

It is significant that Ryle says that "the honest man" is not an expert, and later he says the same of "the charitable man." His conclusion would have had less initial plausibility if he had said "the morally good man." Being honest and being charitable are often—though perhaps not as often as Ryle seems to think—comparatively simple matters, which we all can do, if we care about them. It is when, say, honesty clashes with charity (If a wealthy man overpays me, should I tell him, or give the money to famine relief?) that there is need for thought and argument. The morally good man must know how to resolve these conflicts of values. Caring about doing what is right is, of course, essential, but it is not enough, as the numerous historical examples of well-meaning but misguided men indicate.

Only if the moral code of one's society were perfect and undisputed, both in general principles and in their application to particular cases, would there be no need for the morally good man to be a thinking man. Then he could just live by the code, unreflectively. If, however, there is reason to believe that one's society does not have perfect norms, or if there are no agreed norms on a whole range of issues, the morally good man must try to think out for himself the question of what he ought to do. This "thinking out" is a difficult task. It requires, first, information. I may, for instance, be wondering whether it is right to eat meat. I would have a better chance of reaching the right decision, or at least a soundly based decision, if I knew a number of facts about the capacity of animals for suffering, and about the methods of rearing and slaughtering animals now being used. I might also want to know about the effect of a vegetarian diet on human health, and, considering the world food shortage, whether more or less food would be produced by giving up meat production. Once I have got evidence on these questions, I must assess it and bring it together with whatever moral views I hold. Depending on what method of moral reasoning I use, this may involve a calculation of which course of action produces greater happiness and less suffering; or it may mean an attempt to place myself in the positions of those affected by my decision; or it may lead me to attempt to "weigh up" conflicting duties and interests. Whatever method I employ, I must be aware of the possibility that my own desire to eat meat may lead to bias in my deliberations.

None of this procedure is easy—neither the gathering of information, nor the selection of what information is relevant, nor its combination with a basic moral position, nor the elimination of bias. Someone familiar with moral concepts and with moral arguments, who has ample time to gather information and think about it, may reasonably be expected to reach a soundly based conclusion more often than someone who is unfamiliar with moral concepts and moral arguments and has little time. So moral expertise would seem to be possible. The problem is not so much to know "the difference between right and wrong" as to decide what is right and what wrong.

If moral expertise is possible, have moral philosophers been right to disclaim it? Is the ordinary man just as likely to be expert in moral matters as the moral philosopher? On the basis of what has just been said, it would seem that the moral philosopher does have some important advantages over the ordinary man. First, his general training as a philosopher should make him more than ordinarily competent in argument and in the detection of invalid inferences. Next, his specific experience in moral philosophy gives him an understanding of moral concepts and of the logic of moral argument. The possibility of serious confusion arising if one engages in moral argument without a clear understanding of the concepts employed has been sufficiently emphasized in recent moral philosophy and does not need to be demonstrated here. Clarity is not an end in itself, but it is an aid to sound argument, and the need for clarity is something which moral philosophers have recognized. Finally, there is the simple fact that the moral philosopher can, if he wants, think full-time about moral issues, while most other people have some occupation to pursue which interferes with such reflection. It may sound silly to place much weight on this, but it is, I think very important. If we are to make moral judgments on some basis other than our unreflective intuitions, we need time, both for collecting facts and for thinking about them.

Moral philosophers have, then, certain advantages which could make them, relative to those who lack these advantages, experts in matters of morals. Of course, to be moral experts, it would be necessary for moral philosophers to do some fact-finding on whatever issue they were considering. Given a readiness to tackle normative issues, and to look at the relevant facts, it would be surprising if moral philosophers were not, in general, better suited to arrive at the right, or soundly based, moral conclusions than nonphilosophers. Indeed, if this were not the case, one might wonder whether moral philosophy was worthwhile.

About Ethics

FROM Practical Ethics

What Ethics Is Not

Some people think that morality is now out of date. They regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people from having fun. Traditional moralists claim to be the defenders of morality in general, but they are really defending a particular moral code. They have been allowed to preempt the field to such an extent that when a newspaper headline reads BISHOP ATTACKS DECLINING MORAL STANDARDS, we expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, and so on, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations, or our reckless indifference to the natural environment of our planet.

So the first thing to say about ethics is that it is not a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex. Even in the era of AIDS, sex raises no unique moral issues at all. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, and so on, but there is nothing special about sex in this respect, for the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by sex.) Accordingly, this book contains no discussion of sexual morality. There are more important ethical issues to be considered.

Second, ethics is not an ideal system that is noble in theory but no good in practice. The reverse of this is closer to the truth: an ethical judgment that is no good in practice must suffer from a theoretical defect as well, for the whole point of ethical judgments is to guide practice.

Some people think that ethics is inapplicable to the real world because they regard it as a system of short and simple rules like "Do not lie," "Do not steal," and "Do not kill." It is not surprising that those who hold this view of ethics should also believe that ethics is not suited to life's complexities. In unusual situations, simple rules conflict; and even when they do not, following a rule can lead to disaster. It may normally be wrong to lie, but if you were living in Nazi Germany and the Gestapo came to your door looking for Jews, it would surely be right to deny the existence of the Jewish family hiding in your attic.

Like the failure of a restrictive sexual morality, the failure of an ethic of simple rules must not be taken as a failure of ethics as a whole. It is only a failure of one view of ethics, and not even an irremediable failure of that view. The deontologists—those who think that ethics is a system of rules—can rescue their position by finding more complicated and more specific rules that do not conflict with each other, or by ranking the rules in some hierarchical structure to resolve conflicts between them. Moreover, there is a long-standing approach to ethics that is quite untouched by the complexities that make simple rules difficult to apply. This is the consequentialist view. Consequentialists start not with moral rules but with goals. They assess actions by the extent to which they further these goals. The best-known, though not the only, consequentialist theory is utilitarianism. The classical utilitarian regards an action as right if it produces as much or more of an increase in the happiness of all affected by it than any alternative action, and wrong if it does not.

The consequences of an action vary according to the circumstances in which it is performed. Hence a utilitarian can never properly be accused of a lack of realism, or of a rigid adherence to ideals in defiance of practical experience. The utilitarian will judge lying bad in some circumstances and good in others, depending on its consequences.

Third, ethics is not something intelligible only in the context of religion. I shall treat ethics as entirely independent of religion.

Some theists say that ethics cannot do without religion because the very meaning of "good" is nothing other than "what God approves." Plato refuted a similar claim more than two thousand years ago by arguing that if the gods approve of some actions it must be because those actions are good, in which case it cannot be the gods' approval that makes them good. The alternative view makes divine approval entirely arbitrary: if the gods had happened to approve of torture and disapprove of helping our neighbors, torture would have been good and helping our neighbors bad. Some modern theists have attempted to extricate themselves from this type of dilemma by maintaining that God is good and so could not possibly approve of torture; but these theists are caught in a trap of their own making, for what can they possibly mean by the assertion that God is good? That God is approved of by God?

Traditionally, the more important link between religion and ethics was that religion was thought to provide a reason for doing what is right, the reason being that those who are virtuous will be rewarded by an eternity of bliss while the rest roast in hell. Not all religious thinkers have accepted this argument: Immanuel Kant, a most pious Christian, scorned anything that smacked of a self-interested motive for obeying the moral law. We must obey it, he said, for its own sake. Nor do we have to be Kantians to dispense with the motivation offered by traditional religion. There is a long line of thought that finds the source of ethics in the attitudes of benevolence and sympathy for others that most people have. This is, however, a complex topic, and since it is from [Practical Ethics] I shall not pursue it here. It is enough to say that our everyday observation of our fellow human beings clearly shows that ethical behavior does not require belief in heaven and hell.

The fourth, and last, claim about ethics that I shall deny in this chapter is that ethics is relative or subjective. At least, I shall deny these claims in some of the senses in which they are often made. This point requires a more extended discussion than the other three.

Let us take first the oft-asserted idea that ethics is relative to the society one happens to live in. This is true in one sense and false in another. It is true that, as we have already seen in discussing consequentialism, actions that are right in one situation because of their good consequences may be wrong in another situation because of their bad consequences. Thus casual sexual intercourse may be wrong when it leads to the existence of children who cannot be adequately cared for, and not wrong when, because of the existence of effective contraception, it does not lead to reproduction at all. But this is only a superficial form of relativism. While it suggests that the applicability of a specific principle like "Casual sex is wrong" may be relative to time and place, it says nothing against such a principle being objectively valid in specific circumstances, or against the universal applicability of a more general principle like "Do what increases happiness and reduces suffering."

The more fundamental form of relativism became popular in the nineteenth century when data on the moral beliefs and practices of far-flung societies began pouring in. To the strict reign of Victorian prudery the knowledge that there were places where sexual relations between unmarried people were regarded as perfectly wholesome brought the seeds of a revolution in sexual attitudes. It is not surprising that to some the new knowledge suggested, not merely that the moral code of nineteenth-century Europe was not objectively valid, but that no moral judgment can do more than reflect the customs of the society in which it is made.

Marxists adapted this form of relativism to their own theories. The ruling ideas of each period, they said, are the ideas of its ruling class, and so the morality of a society is relative to its dominant economic class, and thus indirectly relative to its economic basis. So they triumphantly refuted the claims of feudal and bourgeois morality to objective, universal validity. But this raises a problem: if all morality is relative, what is so special about communism? Why side with the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie?

Engels dealt with this problem in the only way possible, by abandoning relativism in favor of the more limited claim that the morality of a society divided into classes will always be relative to the ruling class, although the morality of a society without class antagonisms could be a "really human" morality. This is no longer relativism at all. Nevertheless, Marxism, in a confused sort of way, still provides the impetus for a lot of woolly relativist ideas.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Writings on an Ethical Life by Peter Singer. Copyright © 2000 Peter Singer. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Introduction,
The Nature Of Ethics,
Moral Experts FROM Analysis,
About Ethics FROM Practical Ethics,
Across The Species Barrier,
Preface to the 1975 Edition FROM Animal Liberation,
All Animals Are Equal ... FROM Animal Liberation,
Tools for Research FROM Animal Liberation,
Down on the Factory Farm ... FROM Animal Liberation,
A Vegetarian Philosophy FROM Consuming Passions,
Bridging the Gap Environmental Values FROM The Environmental Challenge,
Saving and Taking Human Life,
Famine, Affluence, and Morality FROM Philosophy and Public Affairs,
The Singer Solution to World Poverty FROM The New York Times Magazine,
What's Wrong with Killing? FROM Practical Ethics,
Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus FROM Practical Ethics,
Prologue FROM Rethinking Life and Death,
Is the Sanctity of Life Ethic Terminally Ill? FROM Bioethics,
Justifying Infanticide FROM Practical Ethics,
Justifying Voluntary Euthanasia FROM Practical Ethics,
Euthanasia: Emerging from Hitler's Shadow In Place of the Old Ethic FROM Rethinking Life and Death,
Ethics, Self-Interest, and Politics,
The Ultimate Choice FROM How Are We to Live?,
Living Ethically FROM How Are We to Live?,
The Good Life FROM How Are We to Live?,
Darwin for the Left FROM Prospect,
A Meaningful Life FROM Ethics into Action: Henry Spira and the Animal Rights Movement,
Autobiographical Notes,
Animal Liberation: A Personal View FROM Between the Species,
On Being Silenced in Germany FROM The New York Review of Books,
An Interview,
Notes,
Permissions,
Index,
Acknowledgments,
A Biography of Peter Singer,

Writings on an Ethical Life

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