The Hypocrisy of Peter Singer
It sounds good to read Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. I had already started it ages ago. But I reread the second chapter last night, simply so that I could refresh my memory of it. I also read a blurb about it on Amazon.com, however, and I'm not sanguine about the book's ability to help me. Williams's argument is based on the assumptions that ethics is not objective and is culturally relative. I do not agree with either of these claims. It seems that the only way that he thinks that he can protect the First World from untold self-sacrifice is by destroying morality entirely. Certainly one must destroy a Singerian approach to morality. But other moral codes, which are objective and culturally non-relative, should be enough to do this. We should not be encouraging the view that anything you think is right because your culture says so. After all, it is plausible that an entire society may in some ways be unjust. Williams recognises this, and so it is a major preoccupation with the later chapters of his book. I do not think that I need a similar preoccupation. An entire society may in some ways simply be unjust, and that is all there is to it. One does not need to be a cultural relativist to believe that Singerian morality is evil and inhuman. It should be quite enough to point out the ways in which his view is oversimplified and reductive.
I guess my basic difficulty is with providing much content to my own ethics. I do not consider myself to be a moral revolutionary at all, and I don't want to be. I don't regard my moral views as at all controversial. Nor do I feel inclined necessarily to shut up someone who is saying something that is stupid and evil. But I do feel inclined to speak out against a claim that is stupid, evil and dangerous! And I regard this Singer person as inherently dangerous. I question any ethic that removes a person's basic right to her own life. He seems keen to destroy anything that you want for your own happiness just because not everybody else is happy. The money you spend on a stereo could mean the difference between life and death for a small child. That car could have helped build a classroom for an Ethiopian. That movie could have contributed to somebody's medicine1.
The superficiality of these arguments should be evident. For one thing, they only regard the immediate material needs that a person has for survival. But what of the importance in helping oneself and not being a burden to others? In other contexts, Singer seems to have no problem with this conception. Hence his claim that infanticide of disabled infants is acceptable to reduce the burden to society and to family.2
Yet this seems to contradict his previous claim. Why should we give all our surplus income to the Third World and not to deformed infants? If some people can be put to death because they require too much care, then what about others? Why not simply euthanise everyone below the poverty line to remove their unsightly suffering? Or why not keep ourselves on the poverty line to support all the children born disabled? Singer cannot have it both ways!
Singer advocates that we should give ten percent of our salary to the poor3. This actually falls far short of what his moral theory itself requires. Anything a person owns that is not a basic necessity should be given to the poor. My purchasing of my various books is immoral because I should have given that money to charity. I should take a bus everywhere despite the much longer travel times and sell my car for charity. Forget about owning that TV set. I should find out about the nightly news from the local pub instead. So why is it that Singer advocates that people give "only" ten percent away, rather than something much higher? It is because he knows perfectly well that he will not be taken seriously if he advocates exactly what his theory recommends. So instead, he attempts to have his own cake and eat it too yet again. On the one hand, he advocates self-sacrifice on a more moderate scale. On the other hand, he tries to make readers feel an indeterminate sense of guilt through numerous hypotheticals4. In the meantime, he himself gives only twenty percent of his salary to charity. This is surely much less than he could really afford. He claims that he is simply waiting for everyone else to catch up with him, and then it will be easier to give more5. In other words, he is behaving half as immorally as what he recommends that others do. This is what he uses as an excuse not to do what his own theory recommends!
This is not the only way in which Singer is a hypocrite. His own mother had Alzheimer's disease, and he did not euthanise her. Instead, he spent much of his own money on her care, despite the fact that it could have saved more people if given to Oxfam. His utilitarian ethics does not recognise that you have a greater obligation to your mother. You should simply save the greatest number of people possible. So this is another case of his practice contradicting his own theory.
[I explore these issues in more depth in the following entries:
]1See, for example, "Rich and Poor" in Practical Ethics, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
2See "Taking Life: Humans" from Practical Ethics above.
3"Rich and Poor" above.
4For example, one of his hypotheticals in "Rich and Poor" is comparing the consequences of buying a stereo with shooting a child.
5Attributed to the edition of "Sixty Minutes II" on 20 February, 2002, cited in "Disingenuous Ethics" by Dan Roentsch. (search: "'Peter Singer' hypocrisy")
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