A Companion to Ethics

by Peter Singer (Editor)

Book by

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Anthologies, Textbooks

565 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Peter Singer is sometimes called "the world’s most influential living philosopher" although he thinks that if that is true, it doesn't say much for all the other living philosophers around today. He has also been called the father (or grandfather?) of the modern animal rights movement, even though he doesn't base his philosophical views on rights, either for humans or for animals.


In 2005 Time magazine named Singer one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute ranked him 3rd among Global Thought Leaders for 2013. (He has since slipped to 36th.) He is known especially for his work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, for his controversial critique of the sanctity of life doctrine in bioethics, and for his writings on the obligations of the affluent to aid those living in extreme poverty. 


Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation in 1975. In 2011 Time included Animal Liberation on its “All-TIME” list of the 100 best nonfiction books published in English since the magazine began, in 1923. Singer has written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), The Most Good You Can Do, Ethics in the Real World and Utilitarianism: A Very Short Introduction. His works have appeared in more than 30 languages.

Singer’s book The Life You Can Save, first published in 2009, led him to found a non-profit organization of the same name. In 2019, Singer got back the rights to the book and granted them to the organization, enabling it to make the eBook and audiobook versions available free from its website, www.thelifeyoucansave.org.



Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States and Australia, he has, since 1999, been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is married, with three daughters and four grandchildren. His recreations include hiking and surfing. In 2012 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest civic honour.

Reviews

[Riku Sayuj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Singer takes a different approach with this book and instead of culling from existing literature, he calls for essays. The result is an eclectic mix of essays that exhibit a wide range of contemporary’s takes on some of the classic and current problems that philosophers wrestle with or theorize about. It consists of some fifty original essays. These essays deal with the origins of ethics, with the great ethical traditions, with theories about how we ought to live, with arguments about specific ethical issues, and with the nature of ethics itself.

As Singer puts it, a quick summary might go like this: in the first part, we see how little we know about the origins of ethics, how ethics in small-scale societies takes forms very different from those it takes in our own, and how the most ancient ethical writings already reflect a variety of views about how life is to be lived. Then the great ethical traditions are put on display; and we find divergence of opinion not only between the different traditions, but within each tradition itself. The history of Western philosophical ethics shows how, from the earliest Greek thinkers to the present day, old philosophical positions have resurfaced at intervals, and old battles have had to be fought out all over again in more modern terms. When, in Part IV, the volume moves from the past to the present, we are presented with many theories of how we ought to live, and about the nature of ethics, all plausible, sometimes disagreeing with other approaches.

The many voices makes this a valuable collection in that the method provides a level of over-all detachment that a single author tackling multiple philosophies might find hard to achieve. Here each of the authors are (presumably) scholars who wanted to make a distinct point and Singer is okay with accepting that the book might not have any coherence beyond being a companion to the many schools; but the reader also develops a sense of convergence of ideas as the book moves from the past to the present and from questions to possible solutions. What is striking at this point is the unexpected extent to which writers who had started from quite different places all seemed to be heading in the same direction.

That is the strength of the book. It lays out the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle but leaves it to the reader to divine if there is an overarching outline connecting them. And a book on philosophy should always endeavor to let that thrill be the reader’s.

[Edward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Singer is a great editor. The selections on kantian, rights, virtue, and consequentialism are some that I recall off-hand being good. The point made (in "consequentialism") that this is a theory of moral justification (finding out what acts are right or wrong) and NOT a theory of moral deliberation (not a guide to make everyday decisions, necessarily) was great. The section (or is it just the tradition) of deontology was terrible.

[John Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent all-round intro to ethics - one could write an MA thesis just on the contents. Great section on Marxism.

[Socrate · Rating 3 out of 5]

În primele decenii ale secolului XX, mai precis în anul 1916, John Dewey, unul dintre cei mai importanti exponenti ai filosofiei pragmatice în America, ne atragea atentia, în lucrarea Democracy and Education, că, „de fapt, morala este la fel de cuprinzătoare ca şi actiunile legate de raporturile noastre cu ceilalti". "Morala- afirma el -se referă la întregul caracter, iar caracterul în ansamblu este identic cu omul în toate manifestările şi atitudinile sale concrete", după care conchidea că "aspectul moral şi cel social al conduitei sunt, în ultimă instantă, identice". În ultimele decenii ale veacului trecut, un alt american, nu mai putin celebru, Dwight Waldo, constata că secolul XX poate fi cu greu remarcat, atât din punctul de vedere al respectării codurilor morale acceptate, căt şi al concentrării sale asupra investigatiei etice. Din contra, el a fost remarcat tocmai printr-o decădere a respectării codurilor morale traditionale, un sentiment larg răspândit potrivit căruia moralitatea este "relativă", dacă nu cumva fără rost, şi o dispozitie în a privi cercetarea etică drept frivolă, irelevantă. Aceste curente de gândire şi simtire au fost asociate cu o "prăbuşire" a credintei religioase şi o creştere concomitentă a "credintei" în ştiintă şi în aura sa filosofică sau antifilosofică.

[Rory Armstrong · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lots to unpack and some clear references to read (specially Rawls who seems to appear in about half the essays).
However it was a very heavy read with sometimes an overwhelming amount of technical terms and university level jargon which lost me at times.
The essays felt like the technical understanding of ethics in university in 1990 which inevitably misses a lot of contemporary issues too.
So I couldn't really recommend it for the interested reader.

[Pat Vargas · Rating 5 out of 5]

👍

[Tom Farrow]

I want to come back to this book later to read Chapter 31.

[Christopher Schaffalitzky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is edited by Peter Singer and contains the writings of many different contemporary philosophers. It's a decent book. But you can find better books on the subject.

[Richard Newton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a useful book with a wide ranging set of essays on a very broad set of ethical topics. In fact the broadness of the book's contents is both a strength and weakness. The strength is that you will find angles on aspects of ethics you will struggle to find in many ethical anthologies. The weakness is that by being quite so broad, it does lack something in terms of depth. The essays are generally of a high standard - although I found a couple less well written (and the standard is not as high as Singer's other really excellent anthology - Applied Ethics). So in the end it depends what you want - if you really want an anthology that covers all aspects of ethics then this is probably as close as you will get to such a thing in a single volume. If you are looking for an anthology with really deep and thorough essays on certain aspects then this is probably less strong. I am pleased I bought it and it has certainly introduced me to some streams of ethical thinking I was less familar with. However, in a couple of core areas the essays are a less profound than I hoped for.

[Internet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Littered with typos, but a very respectable overview. I'd hoped that this collection would be a good introduction to the field, and for the most part it was. The sections on ethics, the history of ethics, and specific ethical issues were great, but the articles on meta-ethics were a bit too dense for my tastes, probably because they pack so much into ten pages. They seemed to be written at a much higher level than the rest of the book and were quite a bit more demanding. On the other hand, I wasn't even aware of ethics and meta-ethics as distinct fields until I read this book.

[Gene Bales · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not read many anthologies whose contents are as wonderfully clear and comprehensive as this one. Peter Singer is an outstanding ethicist, and he has done a wonderful job of recruiting some of the very best experts in the field of ethics. This is a big book, but the essays are one and all terrific.

[Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this in bits & pieces before. Currently making a good effort at plowing straight through. On Social Contract theory now. I like it so far, there are some typographical errors, and some of the essays have oddly structured paragraphs, but, overall, a nice book.

[Jules Findlay · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a great overview of Ethics, unlike other readers it is very accessible; the essays are very introductory. Singer's 'Applied Ethics' is much more focused and substantive so I would probably buy that and save some $$$.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wonderful collections of introductory essays.

[Omaid ibn Naimet]

At some places the language and structure of sentences is complex. And that's a major turn off from this book.

[Julián Guzmán · Rating 5 out of 5]

Esta extensa obra está dividida en 7 grandes partes que abarcan desde el origen de la ética, pasando por las grandes tradiciones religiosas hasta llegar a los problemas contemporáneos y a los desafíos y críticas al estudio y aplicación misma de un sistema ético. Asimismo, cuenta con epilogo elaborado por su editor, el filósofo Peter Singer.

Singer, que después de Rawls debe ser la figura más influyente en la ética contemporánea, hace un trabajo monumental al reunir y ordenar los temas que estructuran todo el universo de la discusión ética. La virtud fundamental del texto radica en dar una visión que, sin caer en lo superficial o en ser extremadamente académica, da cuenta de cada una de las teorías, conceptos y problemas de la ética a lo largo de la historia.

Dentro de los autores que participan de la publicación se destacan Jonathan Dancy y Will Kymlicka. Especialmente, se recomiendan los siguientes artículos: "La ética budista", "La tradición del contrato social" y "El egoísmo".