Review: Practical Ethics by Peter Singer

Peter Singer deals with the controversial subjects of abortion, euthanasia and infanticide, amongst others, in a revised and updated edition of his classic 1980 text Practical Ethics. Review by Joseph Mahon.

Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. In 1993, together with Paula Cavalieri, an Italian philosopher and animal advocate, he founded the Great Ape Project. Its aim was to “grant some basic rights to non-human great apes: life, liberty and the prohibition of torture.”1 Singer is also the author of more than forty books, including Animal Liberation (1975), Rethinking Life and Death (1996) and, more recently, The Life You Can Save (2009). In 2005, he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Practical Ethics, first published in 1980, has been widely read, used in many courses in universities, and translated into fifteen languages. But this third edition, advises Singer, “is significantly different from the first and second editions.  Every chapter has been reworked, factual material has been updated, and where my position has been misunderstood by my critics, I have tried to make it clearer.”2

There is also a completely new chapter on climate change, while a chapter from the second edition, on the obligation to accept refugees, has been dropped. Singer concludes his Preface to this 2011 edition with the telling remark that “The astute reader who compares this edition with the previous one may notice that I am now more ready to entertain - although not yet embrace - the idea that there are objective ethical truths that are independent of what anyone desires.”3

The first chapter of his book ends with the assertion that “This book can be read as an attempt to indicate how a consistent preference utilitarian would deal with a number of controversial problems.”4 The issues that proved to be more controversial than any others, when Singer first published his thoughts on them, were abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia. So, how does a consistent preference utilitarian deal with these? What does someone who holds that we should do what, on balance, furthers the preferences [i.e. the “wants, needs and desires”] of those affected, have to say about abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia?

Singer addresses the issue of abortion in chapter 6. First, he identifies weaknesses in the liberal stance on the issue. The standard liberal argument for a permissive abortion law is undermined, he says, by the fact that abortion is not a victimless practice; as such, it cannot be construed as that kind of private behaviour which, in the words of the Wolfendon Report, is “none of the law’s business.” Against the deontological feminist stance of Judith Jarvis Thomson, Singer argues that, even in the case of rape, abortion is morally wrong if, all things considered, the consequences of a termination are worse than the consequences of allowing the pregnancy to go full term.

Singer himself is not opposed to abortion, only to weak arguments used to support it. His main argument against what he calls the conservative position is that it is not wrong to kill a fetus, because a fetus is not a person. A person is an entity who exhibits intelligence and awareness (including some level of self-awareness), as well as having emotions and social needs. A fetus does not have any of these capacities.  So, “Because no fetus is a person, no fetus has the same claim to life as a person.  Until a fetus has some capacity for conscious experience, an abortion terminates an existence that is - considered as it is and not in terms of its potential - more like that of a plant than of a sentient animal like a dog or a cow.”5

It cuts no ice with Singer to insist that a human fetus is a human being, since being a human being, as he sees it, amounts to no more than being a member of the species Homo Sapiens, and that merely amounts to having “a characteristic lacking moral signficance.”

Neither will it do to argue that a fetus is a potential person, since potential persons don’t and can’t have the same rights as actual persons. Finally, against Don Marquis, Singer argues that it is not wrong to deprive a fetus of its future, since a fetus is not capable of envisaging a future, its own or anyone else’s.

It is interesting to note that very few of these arguments are, technically speaking, utilitarian, not even preference utilitarian. Anyway, the core of Singer’s stance on abortion is the normative claim that that there is no moral significance attached to being a human being. To employ Singer’s own reasoning on this matter, there is no more moral significance attached to the fact that X is a human being than there is to the fact that X is Afro-Caribbean.

But racial characteristics don’t matter morally because they are morally overriden by another, non-racial characteristic, that of being human. This arises from the fact that, historically, racial characteristics had a moral significance that often imperilled the bearer. Specifically, to be white was to be worthy of respect, and to be empowered to enslave non-whites. To rescue non-whites from the inferno of slavery and its concomitants, it was necessary to insist on their human status. Much of the narrative of moral resistance to depravity would be unintelligible if Singer’s normative claim was true.

Singer doesn’t shirk the logical consequences of his argument. One of these is that “the case for killing other human beings, in certain circumstances, is strong.”6In particular, there can be no moral objection, in principle, to infanticide, since neonates, no more than fetuses, are not persons either.  If the consequences of not killing a neonate are worse than those of killing it, then it is not wrong to kill it.

In the case of euthanasia and the law, Singer maintains that there has been no slippery slope in those jurisdictions which have legalised euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. Nor is any such unwanted development likely to eventuate. This is due to the fact that “If acts of euthanasia can only be carried out by a member of the medical profession, with the concurrence of a second doctor, it is not likely that the propensity to kill would spread unchecked throughout the community.”7

But this is not the wild claim made by those who are opposed to legalising euthanasia. They hold, rather, that if you legalise such a practice, it will become widespread; and, in a further version of the slippery slope argument, they assert that if you legalise voluntary euthanasia, nonvoluntary euthanasia will follow: it will be carried out, and the law will turn a blind eye to it.

Research published in 2009, by Rietjens, van der Mass et al., show that these fears are well-founded (though these Dutch academics themselves don’t think so). A survey of physicians by the study's authors found much more euthanasia reported in Holland than in adjacent jurisdictions with a comparable epidemiology of diseases and quality of health care.

1 The Guardian, 27.5.2006.

2 Practical Ehics, pp.ix, x.

3 Ibid., p.xiii.

4 Ibid., p.14.

5 Ibid., p.136.

6 Ibid., p.155.

7 Ibid., pp.188, 189.