Practical Ethics

"Practical Ethics came out in 1979, just before I began studying philosophy. I loved its rigour, and I found Peter Singer almost impossible to argue with. I agreed with almost every position he took on every issue. There were chapters on abortion, on animal rights, on how much money we can give to the poor. It’s really the blueprint for everything he’s written subsequently. He is prolific, but if you want to know what Singer believes on a given topic, you may as well go back to Practical Ethics . There’s a whole chapter on the fact that if we know that people are going to die in the Third World and we fail to do something about it, we’re as responsible for their murder as if we put a bullet through their heads. It’s a very practical book which addresses these controversial issues. I became a vegetarian at university after reading it, so it had a big effect on my life. I’ve since moved away from his very rigid utilitarianism on other topics, but I still find his arguments about how we should treat animals very persuasive. He says that to claim that humans are more important than animals merely because they’re human would be what he calls “speciesist”, and no different from saying that white people are more important than black people merely because they’re white. If you say that humans are more important than animals, you have to give a reason. You have to say it’s because they’re smarter, or have the ability to plan for the future. Now if you accept that premise – and I don’t see how you can’t – then there is a real problem of humankind’s overlap with some animals. If you say that what matters is our ability to plan for the future, then what about babies, or people with severe Alzheimer’s or who are mentally retarded, who don’t have that ability any more than chimpanzees do? Why do you think they are more morally important than animals? So once you accept the premise, you have to take animal suffering a bit more seriously. Singer says that suffering matters wherever it is produced, and we should care about the suffering of any sentient creature. If we think that the benefit we get from eating meat doesn’t outweigh the incredible suffering of factory farming, then we should give up eating meat. And that’s why I’m a vegetarian . But Singer is completely logical about it. He accepts that if you were to eat only free range animals who lived a happy life at the end of which they were killed, there is almost nothing wrong with that. So there’s no reason why you can’t be an ethical meat eater, but you have to choose what meat you eat."

"I think of Peter as the ‘grandfather’ of effective altruism. He laid out the foundations, and he’s the reason many people got into the community. He didn’t start the movement itself, but he’s clearly its inspiration and has been a big proponent of ideas. In terms of why I chose this book, I can think of three reasons. “I think of Peter as the ‘grandfather’ of effective altruism.” One is that some core philosophical ideas in it are key motivations for effective altruism itself. A second reason is that it was one of the books that really got me enthusiastic about philosophy. I had already decided to study philosophy as an undergraduate, but when I read it, I was really compelled by the thought that philosophical reasoning is of huge importance and can really change the world. I was so inspired by that. The third reason is that Peter Singer represents the career and life that I would also like to lead: someone whose ultimate purpose is the pursuit of truth, with the willingness to follow arguments wherever they lead, and actually willing to make changes to their life on the basis of those ideas. The thought experiment is this: imagine you’re walking past a child drowning in a shallow pond, screaming for help. You can get in and save the child, but you’re wearing a really nice suit or dress, perhaps because you’re on your way to a wedding. It cost several thousands of dollars, and will get completely ruined in order to save the child. Imagine yourself thinking that you don’t want to waste that money, and you just walk on by and let the child die. In moral philosophy, we have a technical term for someone who does that: they’re called an asshole. It’s very clear morally that if there’s a child drowning in front of you, you’re required to save them, even if it costs you a few thousand dollars. That sum of money to you is simply nothing in comparison with saving a life. But then, the killer twist is that we’re in that situation all the time. For a $3,500 donation to the Against Malaria Foundation , you can, on average, save one child’s life. What’s the moral difference? Arguing that there is none, Peter Singer concludes that we’re actually obliged to give away a lot of our income to those living in poor countries. I find that argument very compelling, and it was one of the reasons for me to become an effective altruist. But it’s not an argument I use very much in public, partly because I think it’s not the most persuasive one, and it’s not always necessary to use it. There is already a very large number of people who want to do good, and the reason that’s stopping them from doing good is that it’s confusing and scary, and they’re afraid of not having an impact. I certainly was in that category as an undergraduate. What we do is skip to the chase and tell those people: ‘look, these are the options available to you, and you can truly have a transformative impact on the world. It’s up to you to pursue that life or not.’ I doubt that those who decide not to pursue it, even in the face of such opportunities, would get convinced by additional moral arguments. It’s extremely neglected, and probably the most neglected cause among the ones we look at. 60 billion animals are killed every year for food, and the very vast majority of them are kept in factories, in horrific conditions. Almost everyone in society, if they really understood what those conditions are, would vote against them. Yet, there are only a few tens of millions of dollars spent every year on improving the conditions of animals in factory farms. You can compare that to global health and development, which I also think is neglected, but receives 250 billion dollars every year. This is ten thousand times as much money, and that’s not counting individual philanthropy as well, which also amounts to many billions of dollars. So it’s a huge issue, and an incredibly neglected one in relation to the size of the problem. I think that’s true in public discourse as well. Society is starting to do a little better—a few percent of people are vegetarians, but it’s not major news. For an issue that future generations might look back on and see as a moral atrocity, it barely gets mentioned. In a way that’s not astounding, since animals can’t unionize, they don’t get a vote, they’re completely disenfranchised in society. “Animal welfare is probably the most neglected cause among the ones we look at.” I think it’s possible that people in the future will come to regard animals as being of equal status to humans. That doesn’t mean I would save 2 chickens over 1 human. The ratio would probably still be a thousand to one, or something like that. But one unit of pain is the same whether you’re a chicken or a human being. I think it’s possible to achieve this, but I would expect that getting there requires removing a huge self-interested bias that people have to not care about animals. If we get very low-cost, tasty and healthy lab-grown meat, that might be a solution. It would provide people with a self-interested incentive to stop farming animals in order to eat meat, and they’ll gradually realize that the conditions in which factory farming was done were horrible."