A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Carter on Singer

Joe Carter is, I think, too hard on Peter Singer in this post. Singer is wrong about a lot of stuff–his views on disability and on bioethics in particular. But as much as anyone he deserves credit for bringing the abuses of animals in factory farms to public attention, not to mention his work on our moral obligations to very poor people in other countries.

Too many people get the impression that morality is a zero-sum game and that, in particular, raising the status of animals means lowering the status of humans. Singer has contributed to that impression with his jeremiads against the “sacredness” of human life. But they’re logically distinct issues. Tom Regan’s version of animal rights, for instance, doesn’t have any of the unsavory implications for “marginal” humans that Singer draws from his version of utilitarianism.

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2 responses to “Carter on Singer”

  1. Joe Carter

    But as much as anyone he deserves credit for bringing the abuses of animals in factory farms to public attention, not to mention his work on our moral obligations to very poor people in other countries.

    I think Singer actually does more harm than good on both issues.

    For starters, he is the one that popularized the concept of “animal rights” which does nothing for animals and only degrades humans. Animals have no “rights” — either negative or positive — nor do they have moral obligations. That is one of the things that separates us from them — we do have moral obligations, and an obligation to treat animals with the inherent dignity they deserve as God’s creatures. Singer merely lowers us to the level of animals, which means, if we followed his logic to the end, that we have no obligations to treat them any differently than they treat other each other. We too would be “red in tooth and claw.”

    And his claim that we have moral obligations to the poor is undercut by his dismissal of human dignity. If all species are equal, then feeding a stray cat would be just as moral as feeding a starving child in Africa.

    If anything, I think I was way too soft on Singer. ; )

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  2. Lee

    Joe, I’m not sure I see why you think the concept of animal rights leads to those conclusions. I think that we have direct duties to animals or, to put it another way, that they have legitimate moral claims on us. What more is entailed by saying that they have rights? (e.g. the right not to be wantonly tortured?)

    Also, Singer is not a thoroughgoing egalitarian in the sense that he thinks a human child has the same value as a cat. As a utilitarian, he is committed to the view that beings capable of richer mental lives (e.g. us) contribute more utility to the overall total. Thus, we have more value than creatures with poorer capacities for experience. In my view this is too precarious a foundation for human dignity, but it doesn’t entail the wholesale leveling that some people attribute to Singer.

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