The Moral Psychology of Peter Singer
I am currently reading Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman. I was very impressed by Berman’s article “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror”. It made me very eager to see what he had to offer by way of a philosophy of liberalism. I have so far been very impressed by the second chapter, about Armageddon and its modern forms. He puts the case very well that the War on Terror is very much a war about tolerance versus intolerance, monism versus pluralism.
I finished the second chapter of Terror and Liberalism early this morning. Consequently, I had time to read the fifth chapter of The President of Good and Evil as well. So far this weekend I have had time to read two chapters each from both books.
I notice that you are moving more in a political direction these days. Your last two books have both been about politics. One is American and the other international—though it primarily concerns America.
The first book was research into the way that Peter Singer accuses George W. Bush of hypocrisy. I wanted to use it as a guide to how I could accuse Singer of hypocrisy himself. God knows, since Singer took up his university appointment at Princeton, he has been shown to be very hypocritical.
I agree, and it is the American media that has shown this. The Australian media never touched upon this subject. They would have had you believe that Singer would have bumped off his mother the second she started to go dotty, and was keeping his family barely above the subsistence level.
Yes. And from the looks of things, Singer really considers this to have been an invasion of his privacy. I think that in Australia he has been used to being able to say just anything he pleases without having to practise it at all consistently.
This is not to discredit the degree to which Singer does practise his own ethics consistently. Michael Specter notes that he practises his ethics about as consistently as anybody would be likely to do. But this is not why I am so angry at his hypocrisy. It is because he is still so harshly judgmental about everybody else for not taking his ethics as seriously as he does.
At the same time, however, I think that this provides a valuable lesson in moral psychology. Singer’s writing is high-handed because he believes that he is morally superior to everybody else. This is in virtue of the fact that he comes closer than anybody else to obeying his ethics fully. He doesn’t seem to have any problem with being a hypocrite if he is still more moral than others. He is not judging himself solely by the standard of his own ethics, in other words. He is judging himself by how he compares with everyone else around him on a scale determined by his own ethics. In other words, he is not judging himself based on absolute morality, but on relative morality. It is much easier to judge oneself in terms of relative morality than absolute morality. This is true especially when one’s belief system is as difficult to practise as Singer’s.
These sound like different senses of absolute and relative morality from what you discussed before. You said that absolute morality was merely concerned with being moral and not being immoral. As such, it did not admit of degrees—every action was either moral, immoral or amoral. Relative morality, however, did admit of degrees. Specifically, it preserved as much morality as it could, given the intention to perform an immoral action. Those are not the same senses as what you have just used above. Here, absolute morality concerns the way in which you judge yourself as absolutely moral or immoral in terms of whether you do or do not obey a certain code of ethics. As such, it does not admit of degrees here either. Relative morality, however, admits of degrees here too. It judges a person as moral or immoral in terms of the degree to which she obeys a specific code of ethics relative to other people.
A source of confusion here is, what does it mean exactly to be a ‘moral’ person? I do not think that most people are concerned so much with being ‘moral’ people. I think that people find it more psychologically important to be morally decent people. In this respect, the criteria for being a morally decent person are much less stringent than they are for being a moral person. For example, a moral person by Singer’s ethics would probably need to practise that ethics completely. The requirements for a morally decent person, however, would not be so stringent. She might only need to practise that ethic to the same degree as did everyone else who believed in it.
But even that does not explain Singer’s mentality. Presumably most of the people to whom he preaches do not actually believe in his ethics to begin with. By your above definition of moral decency, therefore, Singer could not logically compare himself with them.
Part of the problem with Singer’s ethics is that it has no adequate account of moral psychology. How would Singer characterise a moral person, as opposed to a morally decent person? Singer obviously falls far short of obeying his own ethics. It therefore seems to me that he cannot consider himself to be a moral person, because being a moral person is probably true or false absolutely. But to be morally decent really means to be morally ‘good enough’. Being good enough must definitely be understood as a state occurring along a continuum of degrees. Above that state a person would be morally good, or lovely, or excellent, or special, and so on. Below that state a person would be weak, or degenerate, or depraved, or wicked, and so on. The question therefore becomes, where on the continuum of degrees does moral decency lie? A question to be answered another time...
I finished the second chapter of Terror and Liberalism early this morning. Consequently, I had time to read the fifth chapter of The President of Good and Evil as well. So far this weekend I have had time to read two chapters each from both books.
I notice that you are moving more in a political direction these days. Your last two books have both been about politics. One is American and the other international—though it primarily concerns America.
The first book was research into the way that Peter Singer accuses George W. Bush of hypocrisy. I wanted to use it as a guide to how I could accuse Singer of hypocrisy himself. God knows, since Singer took up his university appointment at Princeton, he has been shown to be very hypocritical.
I agree, and it is the American media that has shown this. The Australian media never touched upon this subject. They would have had you believe that Singer would have bumped off his mother the second she started to go dotty, and was keeping his family barely above the subsistence level.
Yes. And from the looks of things, Singer really considers this to have been an invasion of his privacy. I think that in Australia he has been used to being able to say just anything he pleases without having to practise it at all consistently.
This is not to discredit the degree to which Singer does practise his own ethics consistently. Michael Specter notes that he practises his ethics about as consistently as anybody would be likely to do. But this is not why I am so angry at his hypocrisy. It is because he is still so harshly judgmental about everybody else for not taking his ethics as seriously as he does.
At the same time, however, I think that this provides a valuable lesson in moral psychology. Singer’s writing is high-handed because he believes that he is morally superior to everybody else. This is in virtue of the fact that he comes closer than anybody else to obeying his ethics fully. He doesn’t seem to have any problem with being a hypocrite if he is still more moral than others. He is not judging himself solely by the standard of his own ethics, in other words. He is judging himself by how he compares with everyone else around him on a scale determined by his own ethics. In other words, he is not judging himself based on absolute morality, but on relative morality. It is much easier to judge oneself in terms of relative morality than absolute morality. This is true especially when one’s belief system is as difficult to practise as Singer’s.
These sound like different senses of absolute and relative morality from what you discussed before. You said that absolute morality was merely concerned with being moral and not being immoral. As such, it did not admit of degrees—every action was either moral, immoral or amoral. Relative morality, however, did admit of degrees. Specifically, it preserved as much morality as it could, given the intention to perform an immoral action. Those are not the same senses as what you have just used above. Here, absolute morality concerns the way in which you judge yourself as absolutely moral or immoral in terms of whether you do or do not obey a certain code of ethics. As such, it does not admit of degrees here either. Relative morality, however, admits of degrees here too. It judges a person as moral or immoral in terms of the degree to which she obeys a specific code of ethics relative to other people.
A source of confusion here is, what does it mean exactly to be a ‘moral’ person? I do not think that most people are concerned so much with being ‘moral’ people. I think that people find it more psychologically important to be morally decent people. In this respect, the criteria for being a morally decent person are much less stringent than they are for being a moral person. For example, a moral person by Singer’s ethics would probably need to practise that ethics completely. The requirements for a morally decent person, however, would not be so stringent. She might only need to practise that ethic to the same degree as did everyone else who believed in it.
But even that does not explain Singer’s mentality. Presumably most of the people to whom he preaches do not actually believe in his ethics to begin with. By your above definition of moral decency, therefore, Singer could not logically compare himself with them.
Part of the problem with Singer’s ethics is that it has no adequate account of moral psychology. How would Singer characterise a moral person, as opposed to a morally decent person? Singer obviously falls far short of obeying his own ethics. It therefore seems to me that he cannot consider himself to be a moral person, because being a moral person is probably true or false absolutely. But to be morally decent really means to be morally ‘good enough’. Being good enough must definitely be understood as a state occurring along a continuum of degrees. Above that state a person would be morally good, or lovely, or excellent, or special, and so on. Below that state a person would be weak, or degenerate, or depraved, or wicked, and so on. The question therefore becomes, where on the continuum of degrees does moral decency lie? A question to be answered another time...
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