Orstalian Kulture number 38==issue 410 Gotye -- FEC

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Date Posted: 19:32:16 07/06/12 Fri
Author: Peter Albert David Singer AC Born (1946-07-06) 6 July 1946
Subject:

Orstalian Kulture number 38==issue 410 Gotye

Peter Singer
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For other people named Peter Singer, see Peter Singer (disambiguation).
Peter Albert David Singer AC
Born (1946-07-06) 6 July 1946 (age 66)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic philosophy · Utilitarianism
Main interests Ethics
Influenced by[show]
John Stuart Mill · Henry Sidgwick
R.M. Hare · Jeremy Bentham

Influenced[show]
Peter Unger · Colin McGinn
Roger Crisp · Dale Jamieson · Gregory Pence

Peter Albert David Singer AC (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian moral philosopher. He is currently the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book, Animal Liberation (1975), a canonical text in animal rights/liberation theory.

Singer has served on two occasions as chair of the philosophy department at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996 he stood unsuccessfully as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004 he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies, and in June 2012 was named a Companion of the Order of Australia for his services to philosophy and bioethics.[1] He serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal. He was voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals in 2006.[2]

Contents [hide]
1 Life and career
2 Animal Liberation
3 Applied ethics
3.1 Abortion, euthanasia and infanticide
3.2 World poverty
3.3 Other views
3.3.1 Zoophilia
3.3.2 Evolutionary biology and leftist politics
3.3.3 Vegetarianism and ethics of food consumption
3.3.4 Personism
3.3.5 Surrogacy
3.4 Criticism of Singer
3.4.1 Protests
4 Meta-ethics and foundational issues
5 Honours
6 Publications
7 See also
8 References
9 External links

[edit] Life and careerSinger's parents were Viennese Jews who emigrated to Australia from Vienna in 1938, after Austria's annexation by Nazi Germany.[3] They settled in Melbourne, where Singer was born. His grandparents were less fortunate: his paternal grandparents were taken by the Nazis to Ùódê, and were never heard from again; his maternal grandfather died in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.[4] He has a sister, Joan (now Joan Dwyer). Singer's father imported tea and coffee, while his mother practiced medicine. He attended Preshil[5] and later Scotch College. After leaving school, Singer studied law, history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne, gaining his BA degree (hons) in 1967.[6] He received an MA for a thesis entitled Why should I be moral? in 1969. He was awarded a scholarship to study at the University of Oxford, and obtained from there a B.Phil in 1971, with a thesis on civil disobedience supervised by R. M. Hare and subsequently published as a book in 1973.[7] Singer names Hare and Australian philosopher H. D. McCloskey as his two most important mentors.[8]

After spending two years as a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford, he was a visiting professor at New York University for 16 months. He returned to Melbourne in 1977, where he spent most of his career, aside from appointments as visiting faculty abroad, until his move to Princeton in 1999.[9] In June 2011 it was announced he would join the professoriate of New College of the Humanities, a private college in London, in addition to his work at Princeton.[10]

According to philosopher Helga Kuhse, Singer is "almost certainly the best-known and most widely read of all contemporary philosophers".[11] Michael Specter wrote that Singer is among the most influential of contemporary philosophers.[12]

[edit] Animal LiberationMain article: Animal Liberation (book)
Published in 1975, Animal Liberation[13] has been cited as a formative influence on leaders of the modern animal liberation movement.[14] The central argument of the book is an expansion of the utilitarian idea that "the greatest good of the greatest number" is the only measure of good or ethical behaviour. Singer argues that there is no reason not to apply this to other animals. He popularized the term "speciesism", which was originally coined by Richard D. Ryder, to describe the practice of privileging humans over other animals.[15]

[edit] Applied ethicsPart of a series on
Utilitarianism
Predecessors[show]
Epicurus
David Hume
Claude Adrien Helvétius
William Godwin
Francis Hutcheson
Key people[show]
Jeremy Bentham
John Stuart Mill
Henry Sidgwick
Richard Mervyn Hare
Peter Singer
Types of utilitarianism[show]
Preference · Rule · Act
Two-level · Total · Average
Negative · Hedonism
Enlightened self-interest
Key concepts[show]
Pain · Suffering · Pleasure
Utility · Happiness · Eudaimonia
Consequentialism · Felicific calculus
Problems[show]
Mere addition paradox
Paradox of hedonism
Utility monster
Related topics[show]
Rational choice theory
Game theory
Social choice
Neoclassical economics

Politics portal
v · t · e
Singer's most comprehensive work, Practical Ethics (1979),[16] analyzes in detail why and how living beings' interests should be weighed. His principle of equal consideration of interests does not dictate equal treatment of all those with interests, since different interests warrant different treatment. All have an interest in avoiding pain, for instance, but relatively few have an interest in cultivating their abilities. Not only does his principle justify different treatment for different interests, but it allows different treatment for the same interest when diminishing marginal utility is a factor. For example, this approach would privilege a starving person's interest in food over the same interest of someone who is only slightly hungry.

Among the more important human interests are those in avoiding pain, in developing one's abilities, in satisfying basic needs for food and shelter, in enjoying warm personal relationships, in being free to pursue one's projects without interference, "and many others". The fundamental interest that entitles a being to equal consideration is the capacity for "suffering and/or enjoyment or happiness". Singer holds that a being's interests should always be weighed according to that being's concrete properties. He favors a 'journey' model of life, which measures the wrongness of taking a life by the degree to which doing so frustrates a life journey's goals. The journey model is tolerant of some frustrated desire and explains why persons who have embarked on their journeys are not replaceable. Only a personal interest in continuing to live brings the journey model into play. This model also explains the priority that Singer attaches to interests over trivial desires and pleasures.

Singer's ideas require the concept of an impartial standpoint from which to compare interests. He has wavered about whether the precise aim is the total amount of satisfied interests or the most satisfied interests among those beings who already exist prior to the decision-making. The second edition of Practical Ethics disavows the first edition's suggestion that the total and prior-existence views should be combined. The second edition asserts that preference-satisfaction utilitarianism, incorporating the 'journey' model, applies without invoking the first edition's suggestion about the total view. The details are fuzzy, however, and Singer admits that he is "not entirely satisfied" with his treatment.[17]

Ethical conduct is justifiable by reasons that go beyond prudence to "something bigger than the individual," addressing a larger audience. Singer thinks this going-beyond identifies moral reasons as "somehow universal", specifically in the injunction to 'love thy neighbor as thyself', interpreted by him as demanding that one give the same weight to the interests of others as one gives to one's own interests. This universalising step, which Singer traces from Kant to Hare,[18] is crucial and sets him apart from those moral theorists, from Hobbes to David Gauthier, who tie morality to prudence. Universalisation leads directly to utilitarianism, Singer argues, on the strength of the thought that one's own interests cannot count for more than the interests of others. Taking these into account, one must weigh them up and adopt the course of action that is most likely to maximise the interests of those affected; utilitarianism has been arrived at. Singer's universalising step applies to interests without reference to who has them, whereas a Kantian's applies to the judgments of rational agents (in Kant's kingdom of ends, or Rawls's Original Position, etc.). Singer regards Kantian universalisation as unjust to animals.[19] As for the Hobbesians, Singer attempts a response in the final chapter of Practical Ethics, arguing that self-interested reasons support adoption of the moral point of view, such as 'the paradox of hedonism', which counsels that happiness is best found by not looking for it, and the need most people feel to relate to something larger than their own concerns.

Practical Ethics includes a chapter arguing for the redistribution of wealth to ameliorate absolute poverty (Chapter 8, "Rich and Poor"), and another making a case for resettlement of refugees on a large scale in industrialised countries (Chapter 9, "Insiders and Outsiders").

Although the natural, non-sentient environment has no intrinsic value for a utilitarian like Singer, environmental degradation is a profound threat to sentient life, and for this reason he states that environmentalists are right to speak of wilderness as a 'world heritage'.[20]

[edit] Abortion, euthanasia and infanticideConsistent with his general ethical theory, Singer holds that the right to life is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to hold preferences, which in turn is intrinsically tied to a being's capacity to feel pain and pleasure. In his view, the central argument against abortion may be stated as the following syllogism:

It is wrong to kill an innocent human being.
A human fetus is an innocent human being.
Therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.[21]

In his book Rethinking Life and Death, as well as in Practical Ethics, Singer asserts that, if we take the premises at face value, the argument is deductively valid. Singer comments that defenders of abortion attack the second premise, suggesting that the fetus becomes a "human" or "alive" at some point after conception; however, Singer finds this argument flawed in that that human development is a gradual process, and it is nearly impossible to mark a particular moment in time as the moment at which human life begins.

Singer at MIT.Singer's argument for abortion differs from many other proponents of abortion, then; rather than attacking the second premise of the anti-abortion argument, Singer attacks the first premise, denying that it is necessarily wrong to take innocent human life:

[The argument that a fetus is not alive] is a resort to a convenient fiction that turns an evidently living being into one that legally is not alive. Instead of accepting such fictions, we should recognise that the fact that a being is human, and alive, does not in itself tell us whether it is wrong to take that being's life.[22]

Singer states that arguments for or against abortion should be based on utilitarian calculation which compares the preferences of a woman against the preferences of the fetus. In his view a preference is anything sought to be obtained or avoided; all forms of benefit or harm caused to a being correspond directly with the satisfaction or frustration of one or more of its preferences. Since a capacity to experience the sensations of suffering or satisfaction is a prerequisite to having any preferences at all, and a fetus, up to around eighteen weeks, says Singer, has no capacity to suffer or feel satisfaction, it is not possible for such a fetus to hold any preferences at all. In a utilitarian calculation, there is nothing to weigh against a woman's preferences to have an abortion; therefore, abortion is morally permissible.

Similar to his argument for abortion, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[23]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living."[24]

Singer classifies euthanasia as voluntary, involuntary, or non-voluntary. Voluntary euthanasia is that to which the subject consents.

Singer's book Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics offers further examination of the ethical dilemmas concerning the advances of medicine. He covers the value of human life and quality of life ethics in addition to abortion and other controversial ethical questions.

Religious critics have argued that Singer's ethic ignores and undermines the traditional notion of the sanctity of life. Singer agrees and believes the notion of the sanctity of life ought to be discarded as outdated, unscientific and irrelevant to understanding problems in contemporary bioethics.[25]

Singer has experienced the complexities of some of these questions in his own life. His mother had Alzheimer's disease. He said, "I think this has made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult".[26] In an interview with Ronald Bailey, published in December 2000, he explained that his sister shares the responsibility of making decisions about his mother. He did say that, if he were solely responsible, his mother might not continue to live.[27]

[edit] World povertyIn "Famine, Affluence, and Morality",[28] one of Singer's best-known philosophical essays, he argues that some people living in abundance while others starve is morally indefensible. Singer proposes that anyone able to help the poor should donate part of their income to aid poverty relief and similar efforts. Singer reasons that, when one is already living comfortably, a further purchase to increase comfort will lack the same moral importance as saving another person's life.[29] Singer himself reports that he donates 25 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF.[30] In "Rich and Poor", the version of the aforementioned article that appears in the second edition of Practical Ethics,[31] his main argument is presented as follows:

If we can prevent something bad without sacrificing anything of comparable significance, we ought to do it; absolute poverty is bad; there is some poverty we can prevent without sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance; therefore we ought to prevent some absolute poverty.

Singer's most recent book, The Life You Can Save, makes the argument that it is a clear-cut moral imperative for citizens of developed countries to give more to charitable causes that help the poor. While Singer acknowledges that there are problems with ensuring that money goes where it is most needed and that it is used effectively, he does not think that these practical difficulties undermine his original conclusion (that people should make a much greater effort to reduce poverty).[32]

[edit] Other views[edit] ZoophiliaIn a 2001 review of Midas Dekkers' Dearest Pet: On Bestiality, Singer argues that sexual activities between humans and animals that result in harm to the animal should remain illegal, but that "sex with animals does not always involve cruelty" and that "mutually satisfying activities" of a sexual nature may sometimes occur between humans and animals, and that writer Otto Soyka would condone such activities.[33] This position is countered by fellow philosopher Tom Regan, who writes that the same argument could be used to justify having sex with children. Regan writes that Singer's position is a consequence of his adapting a utilitarian, or consequentialist, approach to animal rights, rather than a strictly rights-based one, and argues that the rights-based position distances itself from non-consensual sex.[34] The Humane Society of the United States takes the position that all sexual molestation of animals by humans is abusive, whether it involves physical injury or not.[35]

Commenting on Singer's article "Heavy Petting,"[36] in which he argues that zoosexual activity need not be abusive, and that relationships could form which were mutually enjoyed, Ingrid Newkirk, president of the animal rights group PETA, argued that, "If a girl gets sexual pleasure from riding a horse, does the horse suffer? If not, who cares? If you French kiss your dog and he or she thinks it's great, is it wrong? We believe all exploitation and abuse is wrong. If it isn't exploitation and abuse, [then] it may not be wrong." A few years later, Newkirk clarified in a letter to the Canada Free Press that she was strongly opposed to any exploitation of, and all sexual activity with, animals.[37]

Singer believes that although sex between species is not normal or natural,[38] it does not constitute a transgression of our status as human beings, because human beings are animals or, more specifically, "we are great apes".

Singer lecturing at Oxford University[edit] Evolutionary biology and leftist politicsIn A Darwinian Left,[39] Singer outlines a plan for the political left to adapt to the lessons of evolutionary biology. He says that evolutionary psychology suggests that humans naturally tend to be self-interested. He further argues that the evidence that selfish tendencies are natural must not be taken as evidence that selfishness is right. He concludes that game theory (the mathematical study of strategy) and experiments in psychology offer hope that self-interested people will make short-term sacrifices for the good of others, if society provides the right conditions. Essentially Singer claims that although humans possess selfish, competitive tendencies naturally, they have a substantial capacity for cooperation that has also been selected for during human evolution. Singer's writing in Greater Good magazine, published by the Greater Good Science Center of the University of California, Berkeley, includes the interpretation of scientific research into the roots of compassion, altruism, and peaceful human relationships.

Nonetheless, he claims not to be anti-capitalist. In an interview with New Left Project[40] in 2010, he said the following:

Capitalism is very far from a perfect system, but so far we have yet to find anything that clearly does a better job of meeting human needs than a regulated capitalist economy coupled with a welfare and health care system that meets the basic needs of those who do not thrive in the capitalist economy.

He then adds that "If we ever do find a better system, I'll be happy to call myself an anti-capitalist."

[edit] Vegetarianism and ethics of food consumptionIn an article for the online publication Chinadialogue, Singer called Western-style meat production cruel, unhealthy and damaging to the ecosystem.[41] He rejected the idea that the method was necessary to meet the population's increasing demand, explaining that animals in factory farms have to eat food grown explicitly for them, and they burn up most of the food's energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm.

Singer calls himself a vegetarian and a "flexible vegan". In his May 2006 interview in Mother Jones, he states:

I don't eat meat. I've been a vegetarian since 1971. I've gradually become increasingly vegan. I am largely vegan but I'm a flexible vegan. I don't go to the supermarket and buy non-vegan stuff for myself. But when I'm traveling or going to other people's places I will be quite happy to eat vegetarian rather than vegan.[42]

In addition to his addressing issues concerning the consumption of animal products, Singer's "Can You Do Good by Eating Well?" in Greater Good examines the ethics of eating locally grown food.

[edit] PersonismAlthough he has expressed admiration for many of the values promoted by secular humanism, Singer believes it to be incomplete and promotes a preference utilitarian view he calls "personism" instead.[43]

[edit] SurrogacyIn 1985, Singer wrote a book with the physician Deanne Wells arguing that surrogate motherhood should be allowed and regulated by the state by establishing non-profit 'State Surrogacy Boards', which would ensure fairness between surrogate mothers and surrogacy-seeking parents. Singer and Wells endorsed both the payment of medical expenses endured by surrogate mothers and an extra "fair fee" to compensate the surrogate mother.[44][45]

[edit] Criticism of SingerSinger's positions have been criticised by groups, such as advocates for disabled people and right-to-life supporters, concerned with what they see as his attacks upon human dignity. Singer has replied that many people judge him based on secondhand summaries and short quotations taken out of context, not his books or articles.[46]

Some claim that Singer's utilitarian ideas lead to eugenics.[47] American publisher Steve Forbes ceased his donations to Princeton University in 1999 because of Singer's appointment to a prestigious professorship.[48] Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote to organisers of a Swedish book fair to which Singer was invited that "A professor of morals ... who justifies the right to kill handicapped newborns ... is in my opinion unacceptable for representation at your level."[49] Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, criticised Singer's appointment to the Princeton Faculty in a banquet speech at the organisation's national convention in July 2001, claiming that Singer's support for euthanizing disabled babies could lead to disabled older children and adults being valued less as well.[50] Theodore Dalrymple wrote in 2010 that Singerian moral universalism is "preposterous—psychologically, theoretically, and practically".[51]

Singer's work has attracted criticism from other philosophers. Bernard Williams, who was a critic of utilitarianism, said of Singer that he "is always so keen to mortify himself and tell everyone how to live". Williams criticised Singer's ethic by saying that he's "always so damn logical" and thus "leaves out an entire dimension of value". Williams claimed that Singer's utilitarianism is impractical as it's impossible to "make these calculations and comparisons in real life".[12]

[edit] ProtestsIn 1989 and 1990, Peter Singer's work was the subject of a number of protests in Germany. A course in ethics led by Dr Hartmut Kliemt at the University of Duisburg where the main text used was Singer's Practical Ethics was, according to Singer, "subjected to organized and repeated disruption by protesters objecting to the use of the book on the grounds that in one of its ten chapters it advocates active euthanasia for severely disabled newborn infants". The protests led to the course being shut down.[52]

When Singer attempted to speak during a lecture at Saarbrücken, he was interrupted by a group of protesters including advocates for the disabled. He offered the protesters the opportunity to explain why he should not be allowed to speak. The protesters indicated that they believed he was opposed to all rights for the disabled. They were unaware that, although Singer believes that some lives are so blighted from the beginning that their parents may decide their lives are not worth living, in other cases, once the decision is made to keep them alive, everything that can be done to improve the quality of their life should, to Singer's mind, be done. The ensuing discussion revealed that there were many misconceptions about his positions, but the revelation did not end the controversy. One of the protesters expressed that entering serious discussions was a tactical error.[53]

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"Bioengineering, Ethics and Mental Disability." -- issue 410 Gotye effective Tuesday3/7/2012 toMonday 16/7/2012, 19:35:41 07/06/12 Fri