Hi, I'm Peter Singer, I'm
professor of Bioethics at Princeton
University, and I'm going to be
teaching the course "Practical Ethics." My
background is in
philosophy, and in particular I've been
working in practical ethics for many
years.
I've worked in a number of different areas.
One of my better known books is "Animal
Liberation,"
which deals with the ethics of how we
ought to be treating animals.
I've also written on life-and-death
questions
in a book called "Rethinking Life and
Death." I've written
a general book called "Practical Ethics,"
which is
part of the content of this course,
and more recently, I've written a book
called
"The Life You Can Save," which is about the
ethics of contributing to
reduce global poverty for people who are
able to do so, people living in affluent
countries,
asking what are the obligations of those
who have more money than they really
need in the face of a world in which
there are people living in extreme
poverty. So
those are some of the issues that we're
going to be talking about in
"Practical Ethics" over the coming weeks.
We'll going into these questions in
more detail, looking at all of these issues,
starting off with an introduction to
ethics to ask
what is ethics, and looking at some other
major ethical theories,
like utilitarianism, deontological
theories,
theories of rights, and so on. Then we'll move
to
those questions about life-and-death
decisions,
including questions about abortion,
questions about euthanasia, whether
there's a difference between
omitting treatment that leads to the
death of a patient
or actively ending that patient's life.
We'll then go on to
questions about the obligations of
the wealthy to the global poor, and
also ethical questions about the
choice of career:
how do you decide what you're going to
do with your life if you're at that
stage of your life?
What are the ethical implications of
making
different career choices? And we're going to 
meet some people who are living
different lives and doing a great deal
for
charities and organizations
that are helping the global poor. After
that, we will talk about the ethics
of our treatment of animals, we'll talk
about that
both in terms of basic ethical
principles,
and then we'll talk about the ethics
of using animals
in research, and we will talk about
living ethically in terms of our choices
about what we eat, what are the ethics
of the food
that we choose to buy and put on our plate. We'll
then ask whether ethics extends not
only beyond humans to animals, but also
beyond animals to things that are not
even sentient. For example,
to plants, perhaps to endangered plants.
What is the value of protecting
endangered species? And, should we be
protecting
forests and ecological systems for their
own sake,
even apart from the benefits that they
bring to humans
and to animals? As we get near the end of
the course, we'll be looking at
affirmative action.
Should institutions like this, Princeton
University,
be preferring to take
people of a racial or ethnic minority
group,
rather than somebody who perhaps did
just slightly better on the admission
tests, on--
scored better on that, but does not
bring the diversity to campus
that people from a minority might do?
And in the very last of the classes,
we're going to ask:
Why should we act ethically anyway? If
we've learned a little bit about what
ethics is,
and what it is to act ethically, then
what do we do with that? Does it-- is it
automatic that we then act that way?
Do we need reasons for acting that way?
And, if so, what would those reasons be?
The nature of the course
is that each week there will be two large
lectures
taking place in this room that is behind
me, and
as well, for the Princeton students
who are here,
each one of them takes part in a
once-weekly discussion group, that at
Princeton is traditionally called a
precept.
In some other universities it may be
called a discussion section
or a tutorial. But the idea is that you
have a small group of people -- not more
than a dozen --
who can discuss the issues that are talked
about in the large lectures
more intensively, with
either myself or a teaching assistant,
usually a
graduate student in a related subject.
Although, of course, you won't be able to
participate in the actual precepts that
we have at Princeton,
you will have the opportunity to
participate in
discussions in various ways. There will
be discussion forums for you,
to discuss with each other, you will
also be able to
submit a question on video and,
although we're not going to be able to
answer all of your questions,
we will answer what we think of as
representative questions, which
a lot of you are interested in getting
answered.
There are also going to be some quizzes.
We're breaking up the lectures, which
here at Princeton run for 50 minutes, but
we're going to break them up into
sections and give you some little
quiz questions to make sure that your
following along
well with what I've been saying. And if
you're not, then you can go back over
what you've just listen to. In addition,
you
will be able to submit written work.
As the Princeton students have written
essays or papers
to submit, you will be able to submit
written work
and we will have a system of peer
assessment, so that you will be graded by
your
fellow students and you will also grade
your fellow students, and
that will give you an indication of
how you going in your written work. So,
there are quite a few ways in which you
can participate in this course
and we're looking forward to your
involvement
in it, as well as, of course,
hoping that you will get a lot out of the
questions,
the discussions that we're having, and it
will help you to
clarify your own values and also to
perhaps challenge you on some of the
ethical views that you have,
to think about whether you're right,
whether, maybe, you
might want to live a little bit
differently after taking this course.
That's certainly a possibility and I do
hope that you'll
enjoy it and find it intellectually
stimulating. Thank you.
