Practical Ethics

by Peter Singer

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 more happiness for all affected by it than any alternative action and wrong if it does not.

The universal aspect of ethics, I suggest, does provide a ground for at least starting with a broadly utilitarian position. If we are going to move beyond utilitarianism, we need to be given good reasons why we should do so.

There is no logically compelling reason for assuming that a difference in ability between two people justifies any difference in the amount of consideration we give to their interests. Equality is a basic ethical principle, not an assertion of fact.

when we make ethical judgments, we must go beyond a personal or sectional point of view and take into account the interests of all those affected, unless we have sound ethical grounds for doing otherwise. This means that we weigh interests, considered simply as interests and not as my interests, or the interests of people of European descent, or of people with IQs higher than 100. This provides us with a basic principle of equality: the principle of equal consideration of interests.

Some years ago an American sociologist, Steven Goldberg, built a provocatively entitled book, The Inevitability of Patriarchy, around the thesis that the biological basis of greater male aggression will always make it impossible to bring about a society in which women have as much political power as men.

Is there something about the life of a rational and self-conscious being, as distinct from a being that is merely sentient, that makes it much more serious to take the life of the former than the latter? One line of argument for giving an affirmative answer to this question runs as follows. A self-conscious being is aware of itself as a distinct entity, with a past and a future. (This, remember, was Locke's criterion for being a person.) A being aware of itself in this way will be capable of having desires about its own future.

Other philosophers think that ‘Why should I act morally?’ must be rejected for the same reason that we must reject ‘Why should I be rational?’ Like the question ‘Why should I act morally?’, the question ‘Why should I be rational?’ questions something that we normally presuppose. But to question rationality – not the use of reason in any specific context, but in general – really is logically improper because in answering it we can only give reasons for being rational. Thus, the person asking the question must be seeking reasons and, hence, is herself presupposing rationality. The resulting justification of rationality would have to be circular – which shows, not that rationality lacks a necessary justification, but that it needs no justification, because it cannot intelligibly be questioned unless it is already presupposed.

Is ‘Why should I act morally?’ like ‘Why should I be rational?’ in that it presupposes the very point of view it questions? It would be, if we interpreted the ‘should’ as a moral ‘should’. Then the question would ask for moral reasons for being moral. This would be absurd. Once we have decided that an action is morally obligatory, there is no further moral question to ask. It is redundant to ask why I should, morally, do the action that I morally should do.

Reason and ethics There is an ancient line of philosophical thought that attempts to demonstrate that to act rationally is to act ethically. The argument is today associated with Kant and is mainly found in the writings of modern Kantians, though it goes back at least as far as the Stoics. The form in which the argument is presented varies, but the variations tend to have a common structure, as follows: 1. Some requirement of universalizability or impartiality is essential to ethics. 2. Reason, whether theoretical or practical, is universally or objectively valid. If, for example, it follows from the premises ‘All humans are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is human’ that Socrates is mortal, then this inference must follow universally. It cannot be valid for me and invalid for you. Therefore: 3. Only a judgment that satisfies the requirement described in (1) as a necessary condition of an ethical judgment will be an objectively rational judgment in accordance with (2). For I cannot expect any other rational agents to accept as valid for them a judgment that I would not accept if I were in their place; and if two rational agents could not accept one another's judgments, they could not be rational judgments, for the reason given in (2). To say that I would accept the judgment I make, even if I were in someone else's position and they in mine is, however, simply to say that my judgment is one I can prescribe from a universal point of view. Ethics and reason both require us to rise above...