Interviewing Peter Singer

How to rethink life and death if, as John Lennon put it, “life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans” and at least since modern times we have tried to hide death from our horizon?

The last twenty years has seen a reversal of that tendency you mention, to hide death.  At least in the countries with which I am familiar – Europe, Australia, the United States – there is a new openness in talking about death, and especially in talking about our choices in dying.. 

How is it possible to create a Darwinian left when social scientists are very reluctant to study biology and think that all that leads to potentially racist views and biologicism?

Again, this is changing, and many social scientists are finding the evolutionary paradigm useful in understanding human social behavior.  Few people, even among social scientists, would now defen the old idea that we are born as blank slates on which everything that is written is the result of the culture in which we are brought up.

A new book has been published in Argentina that talks of Ecofascism and even yourself have been criticized in the same manner. How should ecological movements prevent this?

I don’t understand how someone who always seeks change by democratic and nonviolent methods – as I do – can be described as an ecofascist.  Of course, both ecological concerns, and a desire to reduce the suffering of animals, will lead to some restrictions on what we do.  But that is no justification for ignoring the interests of animals, or of  future generations of humans, or even of those humans who are already alive, and who will, in few decades, face starvation if continuing climate change causes the rains on which they depend to fail.  But I don’t see how trying to prevent such harms to others can be described as a form of fascism.

What are your views on moral and literature? Are there things that we should not read or write, as Coetzee asks himself through his character Elizabeth Costello?

It is odd that you should mention this example, since I am currently editing, with Professor Anton Leist of Zurich, a collection of essays on Coetzee and Philosophy, in which this question is raised, along with many others.   I am reluctant to prohibit the raising of any topic at all, but I do sympathize with Elizabeth Costello that sometimes it is neither necessary nor desirable to probe into the darkest recesses of our nature and what that can lead to.

Do you know how Argentinians eat?  We are a very culturally strong carnivourous country. How not to eat meat here?  Most people wouldn’t even consider listening to an ethical argument regarding this. Eating meat makes Argentinians happy…

Yes, I have been to Argentina and I didn’t find it easy to be a vegetarian!  (Although in Buenos Aires you have some good vegetarian restaurants.)  But so what?  This is like the argument that having slaves made the slaveowners happy.  It doesn’t justify it.   

Moral experts are sometimes and in certain places not very welcomed: people do not like to be told how immorally they behave by someone who thinks of himself as ethically superior, “nobody is free of sins in order to throw the first stone”, and sometimes moral discourse is seen as the discourse of power and therefore morality as a discourse of the opressors and politically rightwing. How do you manage with that? Even applied ethics in a hostile environment is seen as an oxymoron and can lead to moral harrasment… “Genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite end of the moral spectrum”? You once agreed with this quote from Princess Diana’s brother. But isn’t she who is dead? Who is more threatened?

I don’t think Princess Diana’s death has anything to do with her goodness, if indeed she was so good, so let’s put that suggestion aside.  As for the rest, I’m not claiming to be free of sins.  It isn’t a matter of being morally superior or inferior, but of having been made aware of some moral issues that many people are not aware of.  If moral discourse is sometimes seen as the discourse of power, that is probably because in countries with a dominant religiou, the morality comes from the religion, which is usually also closely allied with power.  But applied ethics is not like that, or at least not necesasrily like that.  Applied ethics is just thinking through the moral issues that lie behind our practical decisions and it is not, in itself, either leftwing or rightwing..

Utilitarianism is also not usually welcomed in Argentinian universities, not to say sociobiology…Would you like to comment on that?

There’s not a lot I can say, except that I hope that in time the interest in utilitarianism will grow.  Sociobology, which is now usually referred to as evolutionary psychology, is a different question, for it offers explanation for human behavior, but does not tell us what we ought to do.

Very catholic countries like ours are very reluctant to consider euthanasia, even abortion that is still illegal in Argentina. Imagine if I write that you advocate euthanasia for severely disabled babies, if you confirm me that this is your case as I read in different places. How were your views received beyond the anglo-saxon protestant world? Is it different? What about in Asian countries?

I advocate that parents should have the possibility of choosing euthanasia for their severely disabled babies, if after consulting with their doctors and others they believe that this is in the best interests of their baby and their family. 

These views have been discussed and taken seriously in many countries, including Catholic countries like Italy and Spain.  There is less resistance to them in Asian countries like South Korea and Japan than in most countries with Christian origins, because only 150 years ago, in many Aisan countries, infanticide was widely practiced not only when the child was severely disabled, but also if children were born too closely together, so as to place great demands on the mother.

Can we talk of a universal moral sense?

Yes, all humans are social mammals, and we have evolved a moral sense that motivates us to care for our children, and to practice reciprocity, returning favors when others do favors to us, and paying back those who harm us.  The incest taboo also seems universal, again evidently a product of evolution.  But I should stress that the fact that we all share these judgments does not show that they are right, only that they are part of our common evolutonary heritage.

Can we think of an ethics beyond species when we even struggle to make one within species work?

Of course we can.  Just as we can think of an ethic beyond our own community, even as we struggle to develop a harmonious community.

You say you judge actions by their consequences. What about the old saying “what counts is the intention you have” (or its natural translation in English that I do not know)?

There are good consequentialist reasons for taking notice of the intentions people have, and blaming or praising them for the intentions with which they act, rather than the outcomes of their actions, which may be affected by luck.  The point of doing this is to encourage people to act with good intentions, because in general this will lead to good consequences.

You mention that some people use cynicism about morality as an excuse for not trying to be a better person. In that sense, what do you think of the influence of Nietzsche’s philosophy in the humanities and the social sciences, and the results of decades of dominating poststructuralists readings?

First, I have never lived in a culture in which Nietzsche’s philosophy played a major influence, nor one dominated by postscruturalism.  At least in anglophone cultures, the influence of these ways of thinking is quite minor, limited largely to some departments of literature or cultural studies.  And I am glad about that, because most poststructuralists are quite naïve philosophically, and their rejection of objective truth reminds me of the kind of arguments that some undergraduate students, in their first or second years, come up with.  These arguments have a long history, and people should really know the philosophical literature – and the arguments against such crude forms of relativism – before they put them forward.

You affirmed that we should be free to ridicule religion and deny the holocaust. How is that possible in a politically correct environment? How to talk about and do research on race and intelligence? How to combine (if that were necessary) both views?

It’s simply a matter of allowing the widest possible freedom of thought and expression.  As John Stuart Mill argued, we can only demonstrate that ideas are sound and important if we allow them to challenged.  Even if a claim is absurd – like denying the holocaust – we should provide the evidence that refutes it, not imprison the people who make it.

What about your solution to world poverty? Couldn’t the very thought of it be considered somewhat naïve?

I will present my solution more fully in my next book, The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, which will be published next March.  In a word, the solution is more and better aid.  There is nothing naïve about that.  The amounts of aid given today are shockingly modest, when considered in proportion to the income of wealthy nations – the United States, for example, gives only 18 cents in every $100 it earns, and much of that is for political purposes, not to end world poverty.  We need more research into what kinds of aid really help the poor, and we need more resources going into those kinds of aid.  There will always be some poor people in the world, but large-scale, mass poverty can be ended over the next few decades, if we really try.

Being a utilitarian, should it not be hard to argue in terms of rights of the animals?

At the fundamental philosophical level, I don’t argue for rights, not for animals and not for humans either.  I argue for equal consideration of interests.  Rights are merely a convenient shorthand for saying that because of this equal consideration of interests, we should have laws and conventions that prohibit, in normal circumstances, doing certain things to certain beings.

Borges wrote in “Our poor individualism” that Argentinians, differently from Americans and almost all Europeans, do not identify with the State; and that we are individuals, not citizens. We even seem to admire those who fool the State and “only conceive a personal relationship” with it. Therefore, stealing public money or goods, for instance, might not be socially considered a crime… There are also sociological studies that define Argentina as an anomic society. How can this be changed?

I’d prefer not to answer that question, I simply don’t know enough about Argentina to comment.

How much influence has Animal Liberation had beyond the English speaking world?

It’s been translated into about 20 languages - all the major European languages, and some minor ones, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.  Organizations promoting the ideas of the book exist in dozens of non-English-speaking societies.

Is a brand new ethics possible? Is a global ethics possible?

Throughout history, ethics has changed, though usually at a slow pace.  But as with so many other aspects of life, the pace is quickening.  As for a global ethics, we need one so urgently – to cope with global problems like climate change, for example – that if it seems difficult, we will just have to try harder.  Without a global ethics, we may not survive at all, or if we do, it will be at a much lower standard of living that we face now.