Practical Ethics

by Peter Singer

Ethics goes beyond ‘I’ and ‘you’ to the universal law, the universalizable judgment, the standpoint of the impartial spectator or ideal observer, or whatever we choose to call it.

the view we have reached is known as ‘preference utilitarianism’ because it holds that we should do what, on balance, furthers the preferences of those affected.

The essence of the principle of equal consideration of interests is that we give equal weight in our moral deliberations to the like interests of all those affected by our actions.

we cannot know where equal consideration of interests will lead us until we know what interests people have, and this may vary according to their abilities or other characteristics.

The basic element, the taking into account of the person's interests, whatever they may be, must apply to everyone, irrespective of race, sex or scores on an intelligence test.

Intelligence has nothing to do with many important interests that humans have, like the interest in avoiding pain, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, to love and care for any children one may have, to enjoy friendly and loving relations with others and to be free to pursue one's projects without unnecessary interference from others.

In the example involving earthquake victims, although equal consideration of interests leads to unequal treatment, this unequal treatment produces a more egalitarian result.

In our society, large differences in income and social status are commonly thought to be all right, as long as they were brought into being under conditions of equal opportunity.

social differences accentuate genetic differences; but the genetic differences would remain, and on most estimates they are a significant component of the existing differences in IQ.

equality of opportunity is not an attractive ideal. It rewards the lucky, who inherit those abilities that allow them to pursue interesting and lucrative careers. It penalizes the unlucky, whose genes make it very hard for them to achieve similar success.

removing social disadvantages will not suffice to bring about an equal or a just distribution of income –

distribution according to the abilities one inherits has nothing to do with what people deserve or need.

‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’

It might therefore be worth trying to reward effort, which would mean paying people more if they worked near the upper limits of their abilities, whatever those abilities might be.

Although the principle of equal consideration of interests provides the best possible basis for human equality, its scope is not limited to humans.

The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Bentham points to the capacity for suffering as the vital characteristic that entitles a being to equal consideration.

If a being suffers, there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration.

Racists violate the principle of equality by giving greater weight to the interests of members of their own race when there is a clash between their interests and the interests of those of another race.

There are many areas in which the superior mental powers of normal adult humans make a difference: anticipation, more detailed memory, greater knowledge of what is happening and so on.

Pain and suffering are bad and should be prevented or minimized, irrespective of the race, sex or species of the being that suffers.

How bad a pain is depends on how intense it is and how long it lasts, but pains of the same intensity and duration are equally bad, whether felt by humans or animals.

According to preference utilitarianism, an action contrary to the preference of any being is wrong, unless this preference is outweighed by contrary preferences.

To have a right to life, one must have, or at least at one time have had, the concept of having a continuing existence.

Some members of other species are persons; some members of our own species are not.

So it seems that killing a chimpanzee is, other things being equal, worse than the killing of a human being who, because of a profound intellectual disability, is not and never can be a person.

Human children less than one year old typically fail the mirror test, but by the time they are eighteen months old, most can pass it.

If dogs and cats qualify as persons, the mammals we use for food cannot be far behind.

To be a person, in his view, one must have a biographical sense of self. Humans, he points out, typically tell stories about their lives, weaving narratives that bring together where they have come from, where they are now and what they hope for in the future.

It is as if sentient beings are receptacles of something valuable, and it does not matter if a receptacle gets broken so long as there is another receptacle to which the contents can be transferred without any getting spilt.

We can, and should, compare the lives of those who will exist with the lives of those who might have existed, if we had acted differently.

with merely conscious beings, birth and death cancel each other out; whereas with self-aware beings, the fact that one may desire to continue living means that death inflicts a loss for which the birth of another is insufficient compensation.

Because the only satisfaction we can achieve is transient relief from a negative state, life is not worth living, and the best we can hope for is to escape from the cycle of birth and death.

to have an unfulfilled desire is, he holds, to be in a state of dissatisfaction, and that is a bad thing. Moreover, we spend most of our lives with unfulfilled desires, and the occasional satisfactions that are all most of us can achieve are insufficient to outweigh these prolonged negative states.

For if to bring someone into existence will inevitably leave a negative balance in the moral ledger, why should we do it? We should do it only, presumably, if otherwise there will be a bigger negative balance in the moral ledgers of those who already exist – that is, if they want to have children or want there to be generations that come after them.

to hold that merely conscious beings are replaceable is not to say that their interests do not count.

As long as sentient beings are conscious, they have an interest in satisfying their desires, or in experiencing as much pleasure and as little pain as possible.

Sentience suffices to place a being within the sphere of equal consideration of interests, but it does not mean that the being has a pe...

The term ‘animal’ – even in the restricted sense of ‘nonhuman animal’ – covers too diverse a range of lives for one principle to apply to all of them.

it is possible to regard merely conscious animals as interchangeable with one another in a way that beings with a sense of their own future are not.

when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a biographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation towards the future.

The absence of any obvious sharp line that divides the fertilized egg from the adult creates the problem.

the calf, the pig and the much derided chicken come out well ahead of the fetus at any stage of pregnancy –

take instead the point at which the brain is physically capable of receiving signals necessary for awareness. This suggests eighteen weeks of gestation as the earliest time at which the fetus can feel pain.

in the United States, over 85 percent of abortions are done in the first trimester, that is, when the fetus is less than thirteen weeks old. Therefore, most abortions are unlikely to involve any experience of pain for the fetus.

The fetus as potential life

the fact that something is unique is not in itself a reason for preserving it –

The Stoic philosopher Seneca wrote that a wise person ‘lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can’.

life only gains its full moral significance when there is awareness of one's existence over time.

or the recovery of it, can definitely be excluded. Once it is clear that a patient in a persistent vegetative state has no awareness, and never again can have any awareness, her life has no intrinsic value.