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(upbeat music)
- Welcome to a Conversation with History.
I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute
of International Studies.
Our guest today is Peter Singer,
who is the Ira W. Decamp
Professor of Bioethics
at Princeton University's
Center for Human Values.
Professor Singer, welcome to Berkeley.
- Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here.
- Where were you born and raised?
- I was born and raised
in Melbourne, Australia.
- And looking back, how
do you think your parents
shaped your thinking about the world?
- Oh, I think, you know,
my parents were immigrants
to Australia, they were
refugees from the Nazis,
so they had arrived in Australia in '38,
that's eight years before I was born.
Certainly their immigrant experience,
the fate of their more extended family,
who were left in Europe and
many of whom became victims
of the Holocaust, that
certainly shaped my views.
And so did Australian
society, which I think
is a reasonably open, friendly,
egalitarian, tolerant society, so I'm sure
that growing up in Australia
left a big impact on me.
- What was conversation
around the dinner table like,
was anyone in your family
interested in philosophy,
or was it a discussion of current
events, or sports? (laughs)
- Well, no, there was
no particular interest
in philosophy as such,
but not in sports either.
There was certainly some
about current events,
about what was happening in the world.
There was perhaps a bit
more interest in psychology.
My grandfather had been
a colleague of Freud's
in Vienna, had worked with him, and then
later would work with Alfred Adler,
and my mother was a medical practitioner,
but she was interested in psychology.
So that kind of topic came up,
I was aware of that background,
but I couldn't say that we
had intensive discussions
about either Freudian or Adlerian
psychology around the dinner table.
It may have come up occasionally,
but it wasn't a regular
staple of conversation.
- And you actually, later
in your academic career,
wrote a book about your grandfather.
Tell us a little about--
- I did, yes.
I wrote, not that long ago, really,
maybe, what, 10 years ago
or something like that,
a book called Pushing Time Away:
My Grandfather and the
Tragedy of Jewish Vienna.
As I said, I'd known about my grandfather
and his work with Freud all my life,
I knew that he'd written
a book and a number
of other articles that
were published in journals.
My mother and my aunt had those works.
They also had some letters from him.
But I hadn't really read them;
they were in German, I do read German
but I read it more slowly
than I read English,
and I had, guess, not felt it was really
a priority for me to read them,
until as I started to get older I thought,
well, if I don't do this soon
I'll never get to know what my grandfather
was like, what his ideas were like.
And so I started to read some of this,
and as I read, I thought, there is a lot
of interesting material here, a lot
of different kinds of
material, private letters
as well as the more academic articles;
the history of the
Freudians in the early days
and the breakup that led to
the split off from the Adlerians.
So I decided to write about that,
and then I also wrote about the tragedy
of what happened, why
my grandparents did not
come with my parents to
Australia, and their sad fate.
- And the title is interesting, and where
did that come from, Pushing Time Away?
- That title comes from a
letter that my grandfather
wrote to my grandmother
before they were married,
one of, (laughs) it seems silly today,
but my grandfather's parents objected
to his proposal of
marriage to my grandmother
because she was three
years older than him,
and in those days it was expected that men
would marry women younger
than them rather than older.
So he wrote to her that "what
unites us pushes time away."
Basically I suppose he
was saying that we have
an intellectual companionship,
an intellectual union,
not merely one based
on physical attraction.
And I thought that that
struck me as a good phrase
for what I was trying to do in writing
about my grandfather,
and my grandmother too,
I was trying to push time away
so that I could get to
know them despite the fact
that they, or certainly my grandfather,
had died before I was born.
- What did you learn from this experience,
and how did that affect you personally?
That is, of writing the book?
- Well, I mean, I learned
some personal things
about the various sort of unfortunate
semi-accidental
circumstances that prevented
my grandparents from leaving Austria,
and that was very sad, it
was one of these things
where you kept thinking, if only,
if only this had happened
slightly differently,
if only they had had
a better understanding
of the urgency of leaving and so on,
they could have been saved.
So there was certainly that.
I also got a sense of the
intellectual background
out of which I came, and a better sense
of what my grandparents were like
and what the city in
which they lived was like,
so I had a better understanding of Vienna
in that really, I think
great period of Vienna
from around the turn of the
century until the Nazi takeover.
Obviously Vienna was a very lively
and exciting city to be
in, with quite a large
Jewish population, and
certainly some anti-Semitism
but still a fair amount of
tolerance and acceptance
with the Jewish population of Vienna
really playing a major
role in its cultural life.
- One of the themes in your work
is kind of the universal
application of values,
if I can state it that way.
Was that, going through
the history of the Jewish
community there, did
that sort of impact you
and confirm your feelings about
what happens when a group like the Nazis
impose their will on populations
and identify certain
people as being outsiders?
- Certainly there's, I mean, I think
I didn't have to actually write the book,
I think I already had
that from my childhood,
the idea of the importance of preventing
authoritarian rule of this sort,
the importance of establishing basic
guarantees, if you like, that minorities
are not to be excluded in that
way, discriminated against.
Yes, I think that was
something I could already had;
you could say it was
confirmed by the book,
but I already had it solidly enough.
So I don't think the universal
values come from that.
I mean, if anything,
what I got from the book
was my grandfather's
immersion in the values
of ancient Greece and Rome,
because he was a classics scholar.
And so he was really interested in values
and he was interested in
how to live ethically,
he may not have used exactly that term,
but he was interested in
the ideas of the ancients.
And so that sense that these ideas
still speak to us and that we still have
things to learn and things to share
with all sorts of different
kinds of civilizations
and periods, that's something that I
perhaps did get from reading his writings.
- Back to your education now.
Where did you do your undergraduate work,
and then at what point in your education
did you decide that philosophy
was what you wanted to do?
- I did my undergraduate degree
at the University of Melbourne,
and I was originally planning to do law,
but I got interested in the humanities.
For a long time I didn't
decide between doing
history and philosophy,
and I think I ended up
doing philosophy because I felt
there were bigger issues that
I could look at and work at,
this is at the time when I was thinking
of going on to do some graduate work
in one or the other, in
history or philosophy.
And I chose philosophy because I could
talk about really important issues, about
what's right and wrong and
why we should act ethically,
whereas the history
department wanted me to do
some original research based on documents
that had not been really studied
or written about that much, so essentially
they were pushing me to do something
on an area of less interest both to me
and, I think, of less significance
to the world as a whole.
- And then you went on to
Oxford and did a DPhil there.
- I actually did a degree
called a BPhil, yeah,
I guess I'm unusual among academics
in not having a doctorate,
because at the time,
certainly as far as
getting an academic job
in Australia was concerned, it was
not necessary to have a doctorate.
The Oxford degree was a graduate degree,
it's a two-year graduate degree
involving a thesis as well as coursework,
and from the point of view of Australian
philosophy departments, that was an ideal
preparation for an academic career.
- And so in this, laying
the foundation of your
intellectual journey, what
led you to Utilitarianism?
- I was already led towards Utilitarianism
as an undergraduate by
one of my teachers there,
a professor called H.J. McCloskey,
who wrote about ethics and actually was
himself quite hostile to Utilitarianism.
But he did give it a fair presentation,
and even as an undergraduate, I felt
that the objections he brought against it
were not knockdown
objections, that there were
possible replies to those objections.
And I remember already
in undergraduate essays
pushing those replies and saying, well,
this is not really a reason
for not being a Utilitarian,
and then, you know, some other argument
is not a good reason either.
And in the end I decided
that none of the objections
to Utilitarianism that
some other philosophers
had thought were sufficient
reason for rejecting it,
that none of them were
really strong enough
to persuade me to reject it.
- Along the way here, you're
actually doing your education,
especially your work
at Oxford, in the '60s,
so I'm curious as to how
all the events of the '60s
were shaping you, and
your actual involvement
in student organizations and
other movements at that time?
- Right, that was
actually at the University
of Melbourne more than Oxford.
I only went to Oxford in
'69, towards the end of '69.
And certainly the student movement
was already quite strong at
the University of Melbourne,
particularly because Australia
was involved in the Vietnam War.
We were sending troops to
fight alongside the Americans
and we reintroduced conscription;
there had been conscription previously,
then there'd been a period without it.
It was reintroduced for the Vietnam War.
So there was a strong student movement
of opposition to the war,
and I was part of that,
I was actually president
of an organization
called Melbourne University
Campaign against Conscription.
So I was pretty much involved
in anti-war activities
at that time and in the student movement.
And I think that definitely
had an impact on me
in thinking about the importance of really
living according to some principles,
of not just going along with what society
or the government was
doing, but of forming
your own views and standing up for them.
So when I got to Oxford, although as
an Australian in Britain I was not
as politically involved directly,
but when new issues came to my attention
like the issue of the
treatment of animals,
for example, I think I was ready to say,
this is an important moral issue too
and we ought to take a stance about this,
we ought not to go along with what society
as a whole or the
mainstream thinks is right,
because it's not really right.
- So there is, when one
does a cursory examination
of your work, a kind of a link between
the philosophical foundations of your work
and the activism on certain issues
that you've gotten involved in.
So it's really practical ethics
(laughs) in a way, yeah.
- Oh, very definitely,
there's a very direct link.
I mean, I took up the
issue of animal liberation
not because I was an animal lover;
I was never really an animal lover,
I never particularly wanted to have pets
or dogs or cats living around me.
I took this up as an ethical issue.
It seemed to me that, once I learned
about the way we were treating animals,
not just the dogs and cats
that you see around homes
but in particular animals in farms,
in factory farms and
used in research as well,
this just seemed to me
to be completely wrong,
this seemed to me to have no
ethical foundation at all.
And so I took it up as an ethical issue,
it was very directly an offshoot
of my philosophical interest in ethics.
- I know that, as you
indicated in your lecture
yesterday, that some of your
thinking about Utilitarianism
is changing as you do
do more and more work.
But help us understand,
what are the foundations
of your thinking as a student and
a practitioner, I guess,
of Utilitarianism?
- Yes, and just to be clear,
I'm not changing my thinking in the sense
of abandoning Utilitarianism.
- No, right, yeah.
- There are some aspects as to what it is
that we ought to maximize
that I'm rethinking.
But Utilitarianism is the view
that we ought to do what,
all things considered,
will have the best consequences,
and that still seems to
me to be absolutely right,
that ultimately we must
judge right and wrong
in terms of the
consequences of our action.
The question is, what
sort of consequences?
Well, most of my life I've
been a preference Utilitarian;
that means I think the
consequences we ought to look at
are the extent to which our actions
satisfy the preferences of
all those conscious beings
that have preferences about what we do,
as against thwarting or
frustrating those preferences.
I'm now perhaps leaning towards the view
that the consequences we
ought to be concerned about
are reducing pain and maximizing
pleasure or happiness.
So it's, since obviously
most sentient beings
have preferences not to be in pain
and to have pleasurable sensations,
it's not a huge difference,
but philosophically
it is a significant difference.
- And there are important
features, as I understand it,
of Utilitarianism in the sense
that there is embedded here the idea
that you're egalitarian, in other words
these conclusions that you
reach really apply to everybody
and it's hard to draw lines, even between
species, basically, is what you're saying.
- Yes, certainly in one
sense I'm an egalitarian,
and that is that I think
that we ought to give
equal consideration to similar interests,
whether the interests
are those of, let's say
a man or a woman, or a
person of European descent
or of Asian or African
descent, and of course
most people now would agree that
we should not draw those distinctions.
But I would say also, if
there are non-human animals
that have interests that
we can roughly compare
with our own, their interests
are just as important as ours.
So that's egalitarianism
at a very basic level,
equal consideration of similar interests.
It doesn't mean that I think that
we ought to treat animals
the same as humans
or even that we ought to treat all humans
in exactly the same way; that will depend
on what their interests are and how
we can best meet or
satisfy those interests.
- And so it was this thinking that
furthered your embrace of what was
an emerging animal
liberation movement, namely
that we can't just focus
on our species, basically.
- Yes, but it may sound
immodest, but there was
actually no emerging
animal liberation movement.
I think my book came before the
emerging animal liberation movement.
The term animal liberation
was not used or known at all;
there was really only
a much more traditional
animal welfare movement,
what would be represented
in the United States by
the Humane Societies,
focusing largely on dogs and cats
and perhaps some attractive wild animals
or horses or something like that.
There was really no
movement that was concerned
about farm animals and factory farming,
and there was an older
anti-vivisection movement,
that's true, but it was
very much a minority;
most people would have
written it off as just cranky.
So I think the animal,
what you could really call
an animal liberation movement only emerged
in the years following the publication
of my book Animal Liberation.
- And let's explore that, and
I guess what I had in mind
was, you had friends and
were in discussion about...
Well, let me ask you this.
How did you come to see
the importance of this
in a context where there was no movement
but it was an idea, a set
of ideas were emerging
among your friends and your circle
of acquaintances--
- Well, that's certainly true.
I mean, I'm not going to claim any sort
of total philosophical originality here.
I was fortunate enough to meet a few other
graduate students at Oxford who were
already thinking about
animals in a radical way,
and there was a book
published called Animals,
Men and Morals, edited by
Stanley and Rosalind Godlovitch
and John Harris, who were
philosophers at Oxford
but graduate students, not academic staff,
who had started to think about this
and they'd collected a number of essays.
So yes, I was part of that group
and I got a lot of thoughts
and ideas from them
as well as sources of factual information
about what was happening to
animals on factory farms.
Richard Ryder, who later
wrote an important book
called Victims of Science about the use
of animals in science, was also at Oxford.
So there were a number of people,
but they hadn't actually
formed any kind of movement.
There were ideas that
I came in contact with
and that really opened my eyes to the idea
that there was this vast
universe of sentient beings
who were just regarded as being
outside the sphere of morality,
and really at that time virtually nobody
was seriously concerned
with their interests,
nobody spoke of animal rights
as if they had any rights.
The focus was just on
humans and the assumption
was that whatever happens to animals
doesn't really matter that much.
- So, and this is fascinating because,
on the one hand, you had embraced certain
philosophical assumptions, and they must
have helped activate you
to see the moral issue
in these kind of discussions
that you were around.
But then you took, talk to us a little
about your approach to the New York Review
to write a review of the book
that you discussed, which
then led to your own work.
- Yes.
Okay, so as I mentioned, my friends
had edited this book,
Animals, Men and Morals,
and they had some hopes
that it would trigger
a public discussion of
the treatment of animals,
but was published first in England
and it just sunk like a stone,
really, without a trace.
It was not reviewed by any
of the major newspapers
or Sunday papers or
magazines, it was ignored,
and this was just part of the
phenomenon that I mentioned,
that nothing about animals
could really matter that much
so why bother reviewing a book
that talks about how we
ought to treat animals?
So that was very
disappointing for my friends
and very disappointing for me too.
And then they got the news that there
was gonna be an American
edition of their book,
it was picked up by a relatively
small publisher, Taplinger.
And I thought, well, is there
anything that could be done
to prevent the book having the same fate
in the United States
that it had in Britain?
And I got the idea, I was a regular reader
of the New York Review of Books,
I got the idea that this was a place
that was open to radical
ideas, because they published
a lot of radical articles
about the Vietnam War,
about black liberation, about
gay liberation and so on;
that it was widely read, it was the place
that anybody who was on the left
or politically radical and had some
intellectual standards would go to.
And so I just, you know, wrote
more or less out of the blue
to the editor, Bob
Silvers; I'd had no contact
with him before, he'd
certainly not heard of me.
But I should mention that by this time
I actually had an academic appointment
at Oxford, which may have been useful.
After I graduated in '71, I
became a college lecturer,
a very junior kind of
academic appointment,
but at least I could write on
Oxford University notepaper to him.
And maybe that helped,
I don't really know.
I described the book, I described how
I would write about it, and that really
this was calling for an
animal liberation movement
parallel to the other
liberation movements,
women's liberation, black liberation,
gay liberation, that
we were familiar with.
And that was not,
incidentally, in the book,
the book didn't really talk
about animal liberation
as a movement, but that was
implicitly what it was doing.
So Bob Silvers was open-minded enough
to write back and say, "Well,
this sounds intriguing.
"I'm not gonna make any
commitment until I see
"your piece, but certainly send it to us,
"we'd like to have a look at it."
So I wrote a review essay, as was typical
of the New York Review;
it doesn't just publish
reviews that stick to the
book, it publishes essays
around the book, that
develop the ideas of a book.
I wrote that piece, I
called in Animal Liberation.
I said that the book
is a call for an animal
liberation movement, a manifesto
for an animal liberation
movement, and I was absolutely delighted
when Silvers wrote back
and said he liked the piece
and they were gonna publish it.
- And the essay was then
turned into a larger book.
- That's right, then I
got a number of letters
after that was published, including one
from an editor at a New York publisher
saying, this is really intriguing,
would you consider writing a book on this?
So that was what led to
the book Animal Liberation.
In an autobiographical
essay you talk about a man
who in the course of this you later met
in a course you were
teaching on animal lib
named Henry Spira, and he
actually took the activism
to a new level in the sense of, he was
I gather a labor organizer
in his past and so on
but actually began focusing
on getting corporations
to change their policies using animals
and testing cosmetics
and such other things.
- Yeah, that's right.
So just to follow my career, I'd had
this two-year junior college
lectureship at Oxford
and although my wife and I, since she
came from Melbourne as well,
were planning to go back
to Australia eventually, we wanted
to raise our children in Australia,
I had an invitation
from New York University
based partly on that piece I wrote
for the New York Review
and another article I wrote
called Famine, Affluence, and
Morality about global poverty
that was published in a
more academic journal,
so I had an invitation to come there
for a temporary assistant professorship.
So I went to New York University
and I was working on writing
the book Animal Liberation.
And I was invited to teach a
continuing education course
so I decided to use the
draft material that I had
for the book and advertise this course,
and I can't remember, maybe 15,
20 people enrolled in the course.
And there was one man who really stood out
because whereas those people enrolled
were predominantly female,
women were more interested
in animals at that time, I guess more open
to that kind of what might have been seen
as a sentimental view, and
also they were generally
pretty polished, I guess sophisticated,
you might say upper-class people.
There was a man who just from his accent
had much more of a
working-class background,
spoke in a rougher way,
but was really interested
in the idea that animals
were an exploited underclass,
because that was where he had come from,
he'd come from, as you
mentioned, the labor movement
and the idea that the
working class is exploited,
and he actually had got the point
that just as the wealthy upper class
tend to exploit the working class,
so the human species exploits animals.
And at the end of the
course, he stood up and said,
"Well, you know, this
has all been very good,
"all this theoretical
discussion, all very interesting,
"but how about we actually try
and do something about this,
"and if anybody from this group would like
"to talk with me about
what we can really do,
"you can meet at my apartment"
at such and such a time.
So a little group did go
to meet at his apartment
and they started these campaigns, which,
actually, the first was
not against a corporation,
it was against the American
Museum of Natural History,
which is a big New York institution,
right there on Central Park, very public,
but what the public who went in to look
at the dinosaur skeletons did not know
is that in the upper floors, experiments
were being conducted on cats that involved
mutilating them and blinding them.
And when Spira got FOI
information about this
and publicized it, he started a campaign
that was the first campaign, I think,
in the history of the United States
to actually stop a series
of animal experiments.
Although the anti-vivisection movement
had been going for a century or more,
never before had it actually succeeded
in stopping a set of animal experiments.
So that was the first
success, and then they went on
to campaign against
cosmetics testing on animals,
and they persuaded Revlon
and Avon and other companies
to put money into developing alternatives
to the use of animals in a
lot of cosmetics testing.
- So there's a very interesting chain here
in the sense of, you have
a philosophical foundation
that goes back to
Utilitarianism, the nurturing
of the application of these ideas
really in the formulation of a problem
because of this group you
were interacting with,
then the publication,
but then the hard work
of organizing in a way to have an impact.
So it's an interesting chain, because
the notion, you have
written on world poverty,
you've written on many
things, but in the case
of animal rights and world policy,
there has been a subsequent effort
to actually practice practical ethics,
(laughs) namely,
- Right.
- To apply them and to make it happen.
- Yes, that's certainly true,
and I think you're right
that there was a very clear connection
between my Utilitarianism, my view
about both animals and global poverty,
that there was a lot of
suffering going on here
that was unnecessary and could be stopped,
and eventually that it was
necessary to take steps,
not just to write a book
and publicize these things
but to really try to find
mechanisms of bringing about change.
And obviously I'm delighted
that that has happened
in the case of the animal movement,
and to some extent is happening
in the case of global poverty as well.
- And there, how do you account for
what has happened with regard
to the poverty movement,
because here in a way you're depending
on existing organizations,
and identifying them
and making them known to
people who are motivated
by the idea that you have, which has
a foundation, again, in Utilitarianism?
- Yes, that's right.
They are slightly different,
because as I said,
there was really no
animal liberation movement
and it was necessary to
found new organizations,
which is what Henry Spira did, and also,
for example, Ingrid
Newkirk and Alex Pacheco
founding People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals,
and various other
organizations that started,
because the older organizations,
the Humane Societies
and the RSPCAs in Britain, were generally
seen as too conservative to change.
I mean, fortunately they have changed
over the years to some extent, but there
there were new organizations founded.
In the case of global poverty,
most of the organizations
were okay, you know,
they were doing the job,
organizations like Oxfam
and Save the Children
and UNICEF and so on.
They were generally doing the job,
but they didn't have the kind
of resources going to them,
and what I was trying to
do was to get the idea
that it is the responsibility of any of us
who have money to spare,
any of us who are living
at a kind of level where
we can think nothing
of spending, you know, 30 or 50 dollars
on a meal at a restaurant
or going to the theater
or something like that, when these amounts
might be all that a family has to live on
for a month in the developing countries,
and it's the lack of that kind of amount
that might be a life or
death difference in terms
of getting medical care for a sick child.
So what I think was lacking
there was the awareness
in the general public
that if we want to live
an ethical life, we need not only
to think about, you know,
not cheating and stealing
and harming those near
us, but we need to think
about what our responsibilities are
to help those who, through no fault
of their own, are living in dire poverty
where their living conditions are just not
what we would regard as a decent minimum
and their children may die
from things like diarrhea
or measles, diseases which we can prevent
or easily cure in the developed world
but which they don't have the resources
to prevent or cure in
the developing world.
- And in this particular
case, the added dimension
of the Web creates a place where people
can find out about your idea and actually
link to organizations
that would allow them
to implement their change in thinking
as a result of the
philosophical principle,
shall we say, that you're working with.
- Yes, exactly, that's right.
So I wrote a book called
The Life You Can Save
and I set up a website,
thelifeyoucansave.com,
and people can go there
and they can find out
about my ideas, they can see
suggested levels of giving
that are proportionate to
people's income levels,
and they can find links to organizations
that I regard as highly effective
in reducing global poverty
that they can make those donations to,
so it is a kind of a one-shop stop
for people who are interested
in what they can do
to help to reduce global poverty.
- This interesting combination
of philosophical principles
with activism leads to a question of,
what are the skills and temperament
that it takes, on the one
hand to be a philosopher
and on the other hand to be an activist?
- Yeah, that is an interesting question,
'cause they're not exactly the same.
I mean, I think the problem
is, as a philosopher
you're very aware of all the
nuances of your positions,
of all the possible objections and how
you might counter those objections,
and essentially you're
aware of the complications
of defending any ethical view.
Whereas as an activist, it's often better
to have a somewhat simpler approach
and just to focus on the main things
and not get too complicated
or nuanced in your approach.
From a campaigning point of view
in reaching a wide audience,
it's perhaps better
to see things in somewhat
more black and white terms.
So I've often had that kind of conflict.
I mean, I am professionally a philosopher,
but I have been involved
in many organizations
that are campaigning
organizations, particularly
in the animal movement but
also regarding global poverty.
And I do sometimes have
to sort of (laughs)
say to myself in a way, yeah, you know,
if you were writing this philosophy book
you would write it slightly differently,
but since what you're writing is a leaflet
or a statement to issue to the media,
you have to be a little
more straightforward
and simpler in terms of doing that.
So that's one difference.
The other thing is I think it takes
a fair amount of
persistence as a campaigner
to get through to people and
to make those breakthroughs.
So you have to be prepared to be there
for the long haul, and
that's quite important.
I mean, I said fairly quickly
that Henry Spira's group
managed to stop those
experiments at the Museum
of Natural History, but they
were outside that museum
every weekend for, I
don't remember exactly
but I think it was more than a year
before they did stop those experiments.
So it did take a fair
amount of persistence
to actually make that breakthrough,
and that's really
important as a campaigner
and it's something different
from what philosophers
might do, who might say,
well, as long as this
interests me I'll keep working on this,
but once it no longer interests me
I'll go and work on something else.
- In the case of these
books for public discourse,
it really requires, on
the one hand a clarity
of writing and on the other, sound, basic
philosophical principles, 'cause
they both seem to be at work here.
- Yes, they are, and that
conflict is definitely there
depending on what audience
you're writing for.
So for instance, my book Practical Ethics
was really written to be
used in philosophy courses
and it tries to look at the objections
as much as you reasonably
can and discuss them
in a fairly philosophical way.
If you look at either Animal Liberation
or the book about global
poverty, The Life You Can Save,
they were both explicitly
written for a broader
audience, so the philosophy in them
is not so detailed, not so complex.
It's still there, and I certainly still
stand by everything that I say,
but if you were writing an academic book
it would be more complicated, I suppose,
whereas what I wanted to do was to really
state the basic essentials and then
go into some of the practical aspects
of the facts of the
situation that are relevant
and what we can do about these situations.
- Now, another element of Utilitarianism
is this notion of being
responsible for acts
and omissions, basically,
and it's in the area
of medical ethics, where you've
also done path-breaking work,
that those aspects come into play.
Let's talk a little about
that, because in that area
you were also kind of early into the game,
so to speak, of looking at the choices
in medicine that were being created
by the development of technology.
So technology seems to
be an important driver
in that area, where we're
suddenly confronting
kind of important philosophical issues
which nobody wants to address.
- Yes, absolutely.
I did get into bioethics
in its fairly early days,
it existed, but fairly early on,
and I was the founding
director of the first
Australian bioethics center,
at Monash University.
And technology certainly
played a role in that
because Australia, and even specifically
the scientists at Monash University,
were among the pioneers
of in-vitro fertilization.
The very first in-vitro
fertilization child
was conceived in England
as a result of work
by Edwards and Steptoe, but the second
and third, I think it was,
IVF births were in Australia,
and the Australian team
was also the first to show
that you could freeze
embryos and thaw them
and still have sound,
healthy children from them.
So there were a lot of
pioneering steps that were taken,
and for that reason, there was a lot
of ethical interest in
what was happening here.
And so the university supported me
in setting up a center that
would study these questions,
and to some extent, I suppose, provide
a level of discussion that
was lacking at the time
in the community, that there wasn't really
a lot of really serious
reflection on these issues.
There were heated statements from,
one the one hand the scientists
and on the other hand,
particularly I suppose
religious groups that
were opposed to this,
but there wasn't anything very much
that was looking at it at
a higher, more thoughtful,
more philosophical level
of ethical discussion.
So that's what I was trying
to contribute to that field.
- And here the,
especially in the birth of children
who were incapacitated
through no fault of their own,
there was a failure or a debate
within the medical community to make
a decision about continuing life
versus discontinuing life, and this was
a whole moral area that
had to be explored.
- Yes, that was certainly another issue
where again, technology played a role.
Having set up the center
at Monash University,
were approached by
doctors who were dealing
with newborn intensive care,
and one of the conditions
that they were concerned
about was spina bifida,
which at that stage was much more common
than it is now because the connection
with taking folic acid during
pregnancy was not known,
and also there was less
prenatal diagnosis.
So we had these babies born with
some very severe case of spina bifida.
And if they'd been born in
the '50s they would have died,
because there wasn't the
technology to keep them alive.
But in the '60s, doctors
developed the means
to keep them alive, and
then having done that,
in particular a doctor
called John Lobur in England,
who was in an area with a
very high rate of spina bifida
and he had through his technology
saved the lives of maybe
hundreds of these children.
But then they kept coming
back to his clinic,
they kept needing more medical attention,
they need repeated
operations; some of them
had 40 operations by the time
they were 10 or 12 years old.
They were often still
very severely disabled,
in some cases with
significant intellectual
disability as well, and
he started to revaluate
what he'd been doing, and saying,
well, was it really
right to save the lives
of these children, should we let them die?
And so Australian doctors
were also troubled
by those issues, and
they came to talk to us
at the Monash center to get
some ethical discussion going.
And we looked at what they were doing
and we had to agree that
there were some cases
where it was not actually desirable
to prolong the lives of these children.
But the only thing that they could do
was simply not treat them and hope
that they would die fairly soon,
and that's where this
distinction between acts
and omissions that you mentioned comes in,
because as a Utilitarian, it seemed to me
that once you make the decision
that it's better that
this infant should die,
then there's no real moral difference
between allowing the infant to die
through basically benign neglect
and giving the child a lethal injection.
And in fact, there's a lot to be said
in favor of the lethal injection,
because then the child will die swiftly
and without further
suffering, whereas otherwise
the child may linger for weeks or months
in a fairly distressed
state; very distressing
for the parents and
hospital staff as well.
So we were saying, look, if
this is what you're going to do,
and we think it sometimes is justified
in deciding that it's better
the child should not live,
then why not allow doctors to actively
end the lives of the children.
- And in some of what
you wrote at this time
you point out that there was
a definitional issue here,
that the definitions that the doctors
would come up with wouldn't
hold as circumstances changed.
So there was a whole effort to say,
well, we can do things
if there's brain death,
but then that whole definition
seemed less and less, had to be redefined.
- Well, I mean, around this period
death was being redefined
in terms of brain death,
because hospitals didn't know what to do
with patients who could be supported
in the sense that their
hearts could be kept beating,
blood could be kept circulating,
but there was no brain activity at all
and there was absolutely no prospect
that they would every recover in any way.
So starting out with a Harvard committee
that examined this and then moving on
to a President's Commission
that looked at it,
essentially the definition
of death got changed
to declare these people dead.
To my point of view,
while that undoubtedly
had a desirable result,
because it's true that
there was no point in keeping
these people on respirators
when there was no prospect of them ever
recovering consciousness, I thought it was
in a way a slightly
underhand way of achieving
that objective, that it
would have been more honest
to say, not that they're dead,
because their bodies definitely
seemed to be still alive,
but to say that there was no benefit
to keeping them alive,
that although they were
living human beings, it was
permissible to end their lives
because without any prospect
of consciousness returning
there was no value or benefit to anyone,
neither to them nor to anyone
else, in keeping them alive.
- In this bioethics area, it would seem
that the whole problems we're
having with medical costs
are gonna open up a whole new domain
where we have to weigh this other value
of how much it costs and
should we be doing things
that just prolong life for a short time.
Talk a little about that, I mean,
is this gonna be the next area of,
well, it probably already is an area
which bioethics are gonna
have to define the questions
and come up with some, at least
philosophically, with the answers.
- It already is an area,
although in the United States
there's a reluctance to
talk about it openly.
But in other countries,
in Britain or Australia
or in Europe, I think
it's already understood
that healthcare resources are
limited, they're not infinite,
and we ought to do the
most good that we can
with the resources we have,
and doing the most good
that we can is probably not using
all the medical technology at our disposal
to prolong the life of somebody
who is clearly dying
and is going to be dying
within a week or a month,
has poor quality of life,
in some cases may have
dementia or other conditions
like that, that this is not
getting good value for our money
and it's not even good for the patient.
So the idea that we are going to have
to ration our resources
is something that is
generally accepted in most countries,
and it's only in the United
States that there's been
a very slow and reluctant
acceptance of that idea
that healthcare resources, even
in a wealthy society, are not infinite.
- I think this was in your
autobiographical essay,
you talk about the problem
of "imperfect information,
"powerful interests, and a desire
"not to know disturbing
facts," I think you
identified those as problems,
once philosophically
you've grappled with a
problem, to why you don't see
the kind of improvement you might want to
when you link the philosophical
conclusions to a kind of activism.
- Yeah, I think that's write, and I guess
that quote that you just read applies
particularly to the animal area,
because you have powerful
corporate interests,
you have agribusiness, huge corporations
that have vested interests
in continuing this system,
and also you have consumers who are just
in the habit of eating animal products
and would really rather not
know about how they're produced
because they kind of have a vague sense
that if they do know,
they'll get uncomfortable
with what they're eating,
so better just to turn away,
why do I have to watch that video
of intensive pig farms
or cruelty to chickens
or laying hens on the farms.
So people don't like to
watch this sort of thing,
and that what makes it
difficult to actually reach
the public, to get them just to know
basic things like, how
is your food produced?
I mean, that seems to me clearly
an ethical responsibility.
If you're going down to the supermarket
to vote with your dollars in favor
of producing pork or chicken for instance,
oughtn't you to know what
happened to the pigs and chickens
before they were turned into those
plastic-wrapped packages on the shelf?
- So it seems that you really
are committed in your life's work
to the application of reason to in a way
change the world by sorting through
the problems and the
confusion that deny us
clarity so we can think about it.
- Yeah, I think that puts it very well.
I certainly am committed to
the application of reason,
not just to our thought
but to the way we live.
- Now, let me read you,
one last thing, I wanna
read you a quote, actually,
which came from an interview on 60 Minutes
which I thought after exploring
your work was a nice summary.
You said to Dan Rather, "My ethics come
"from considering the
consequences of my actions
"for all those that get affected by them.
"I am prepared to say that in a sense,
"my ethics is a kind of Golden Rule.
"The idea of saying, how would you like it
"if this were done to you, is fundamental
"to my sense of ethics because I think
"that's what ethics is about, it's about
"getting beyond yourself and looking
"at the effect that
you're having on others."
- Absolutely, yes, I certainly
still hold exactly that view.
I think that the Golden
Rule is a wonderful tool
for thinking about what
you're doing ethically
rather than just from a
self-interested point of view.
And it ought to be putting
ourselves in the position
of all those affected by our action,
whether they are like
us, let's say, you know,
in my case, white males
in developed countries,
or whether they're
African women, let's say,
living in poverty, or even, to the extent
that we can understand what it's like,
if they are a sow living in
a narrow stall on concrete,
unable to walk around
for most of their life,
or a hen unable to stretch
their wings in a cage.
We have to do our best to
put ourselves in the position
of these beings as well, because they are
sentient beings and they
are affected by our actions.
- And then one final question,
how would you advise students
to prepare for the future
if they wanna combine
philosophy with activism?
- Well, I would say live
your lives to some purpose
and think about career choice.
There's actually quite a new organization
that has been set up to encourage people
to think about career
choices in an ethical way.
It's called 80,000 Hours
because that's roughly
the amount of time that
students from graduating
might spend on their career
throughout their lives.
So if you look up 80,000,
just written as numerals,
80000hours.com, I think it is,
you'll get some interesting discussion
about ethical career choices.
And in contrast, many people think, well,
somebody like me would
advocate going into NGOs,
working for Oxfam or working
for People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals or
an organization like that.
Well, yes, they may be good choices,
but if you're really committed, say,
to reducing global poverty,
there's some arguments
that say that if you have the ability
to earn large amounts of money
by going into investment banking,
as long as you maintain
your values and commitment
and give away what you don't need,
which will be a very large
sum if you're successful,
to organizations fighting global poverty
or protecting the environment
or working for animals,
you could maybe be even more effective
in those sorts of careers.
So it's not as obvious as you might think,
what young people ought to do
or ought to focus on
doing when they graduate.
- Professor Singer, on that positive note,
thank you very much
for coming on our program.
- Thank you, it's been
great talking to you.
- And thank you very much for joining us
for this Conversation with History.
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