Practical Ethics

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Possibly the world's most important book - Rated
I first read Practical Ethics twenty-five years ago, and have re-read it, including the later expanded edition, several times. It is an amazing book, because it quietly, calmly and rationally tears apart most of our conventional views about what is right and wrong, particularly in the areas of abortion, euthanasia, our treatment of animals, how we should respond to global poverty and what responsibility we have towards future generations. Singer is currently a professor at Harvard, and is probably the world's most influential writer on ethics. Certainly, Practical Ethics is the most important book that I have ever read, and I urge you to read it, too.

Singer does not pre-judge anything: he challenges us to throw away assumptions such as 'all human life is sacred' and he exposes the unjustifiability of many of the conclusions that we imagine follow from the differences between people and other animals. He uses logical argument to make us realise that if we want to be moral, we need to fundamentally change many of our attitudes.

Singer uses detailed scientific facts as well as moral argument to explore how we should behave, and comes to many controversial conclusions. He has been accused, wrongly, of being hostile to the rights of people with disabilities, but in fact he is a persuasive advocate for ending all unfair discrimination, and for valuing the comparable interests of all sentient beings equally, even when those sentient beings are not people.

I do not agree with everything in Practical Ethics (though I suspect that when we disagree, it is Singer who is right!), but reading it has still managed to change my life in many ways. Be prepared for a challenging and wonderfully stimulating read.

Ethics - of a sort - Rated
In this book, Peter Singer examines core questions of ethics and expounds his own framework for ethical thought, which he describes as "preference utilitarianism". He develops his theory by considering, in turn, some of the most important questions in ethics, concentrating particularly on those dilemmas which involve questions about the moral status of human beings and other creatures. Within his wider "preference utilitarianism", Singer adopts a personhood-based approach to issues of moral status - while he acknowledges that attributes like sentience confer a certain degree of moral considerableness, Singer ultimately regards "persons" (rational, autonomous, self-conscious agents)as the exclusive bearers of "full" moral status. "Persons", for Singer, is a group which includes most adult human beings, great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans), and possibly also other "higher mammals" like dolphins. It excludes "lower" vertebrates, invertebrates, and, controversially, some human beings, including very young children (those who have not yet attained self-consciousness or rationality)and severely mentally-impaired adults (either through mental disability or through degenerative neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease). Unsurprisingly, Singer has caused great offence to many people who argue that, by proposing a category of 'human nonpersons' he disregards the moral value of many human beings whose lives should be valued and respected despite severe disabilities. Singer, for his part, argues that to value a life for no other reason that it is a human life would simply be "speciesism" - discrimination in favour of our own species and against others. He claims that when we consider the moral status of humans, apes, etc, the fact of whether a being belongs to our species is no more relevant than whether or not he or she belongs to our race. Personhood theory is, of course, open to wide-ranging attack from advocates of a more "relational" morality and critics of overly-rationalitic, abstract moral theories. Singer, in particular, has been attacked for resurrecting the spectre of Nazi-era policies like non-voluntary euthanasia for those human beings deemed subnormal, or "nonpersons". This criticism obviously hits a nerve - Singer devotes a lengthy appendix of his book to an unconvincing refutation, in which he portrays himself as a much-maligned martyr for free speech.