philosophy
Max Charlesworth
Dale Jamieson (ed)
Singer and His Critics
Blackwell $45.00pb, 368pp
1 55786 909 X
PETER SINGER, AUSTRALIA'S most famous philosophical son, is in many ways a throwback to late 19th century thinkers such as Henry Sidgwick and, above all, John Stuart Mill. Like them Singer has always been concerned with large practical moral issues in political philosophy and public ethics. The curious thing, however, is that the style of British analytical philosophy in which Singer was formed was hostile to the idea that the philosopher should be concerned with these larger issues. I remember in the 1950s and 1960s when I went to the University of Melbourne being told that political philosophy was dead and many of the bright young things devoted themselves to logico-linguistic 'puzzles' about meaning and language instead of being concerned with the great 19th century ethical issues.
The present collection is composed of a number of essays by Singer's admirers, friends, sympathisers and critics and it is, like most of these festschrifts, a mixed bag of tricks. Some of the essays are rather hagiographical in tone and extravagant claims by admirers are made about the importance of Singer's thought. Thus Roger Crisp claims that Singer's book How are we to live is 'one of the most powerful books of the 20th century', though where that leaves the likes of Russell, Wittgenstein, Frege and Husserl and Sartre, is not at all clear.
Of the directly critical essays some are concerned with extremely fine-grained issues which will be accessible to very few readers. (I have never understood why philosophers write these professionally opaque papers, many of which probably have, at most, a readership of two.) There is, however, an excellent essay by Holmes Ralston III who argues that Singer has a very limited view of the phenomena of life. Singer, he says,
has himself proved blind to the still larger effort in environmental ethics to value life in all its ranges and levels, indeed to care for biosphere Earth...His victory is mainly for vertebrates, who form only 4 per cent of living things by species and only a tiny fraction of a per cent by numbers of individuals.
Singer of course condemns 'speciesism', the prejudice that the human species has some kind of unique value, but it looks as though he may himself be guilty of 'vertebratism'!
One must also mention the engagingly quirky contribution by R.M. Hare, 'Why I am only a demi-vegetarian', written in almost autobiographical style. Hare shows very acutely that full vegetarianism, as a principled position, is difficult to maintain, at least on utilitarian grounds. Carnivores will be pleased to know that the best we can hope for is a much weaker position.
The editor, Dale Jamieson, provides an interesting overview of the growth of the practical ethics movements -- bioethics, environmental ethics, business ethics, professional ethics -- and of Singer's place in the movement. But Jamieson's essay is rather parochial and a-historical. Nothing is said, for example, about earlier Continental philosophers of 'praxis', particularly those of a neo-Marxist persuasion -- Sartre, Lukacs, Marcuse et al. -- and the contribution (mainly Catholic) of French and Dutch and German moral theologians -- Josef Fuchs, Bernard Haring, and others. As Toulmin and Jonson have shown, the older tradition of casuistry on medico-legal problems has been immensely important in the genesis of medical ethics and bioethics. 'Practical ethics' was then a going concern long before the modern movement came on stream.