1A: Peter Singer (1946--)

Peter Singer and pig.  Singer is best known for his book,  Animal Liberation (1975), that was a turning point
 for  animal rights activists upon its publication. He talks about animal  rights with Stephen Colbert at this site.

All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot
shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

--Peter Singer

You can find general information about philosopher Peter Singer (don't confuse him with Peter W. Singer, an expert on national security issues) at the following websites: Princeton University, The European Graduate School, and bio.com. It should not be a surprise that The Animal Liberation Front also argues in favor of his positions. At bigthink.com you can find numerous video interviews with him discussing his philosophy. Essays by him appear at Project Syndicate. An interview he did with The New York Times, May 27, 2015, appears here.

Singer is also the founder of The Life You Can Save. It is an organization that promotes charitable giving to the poorest people in the world, and it offers guidance to potential donors about who to give to and how much, based on an individual's annual income. 

What is utilitarianism, the philosophy that Singer is linked with, sometimes simplistically? You can find two descriptions of utilitarianism on the Encyclopedia Britannica and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy websites.

To be a utilitarian means that you judge actions as right or wrong in
 accordance with whether they have good consequences. So you try to do
 what will have the best consequences for all of those affected.

--Peter Singer

Peter Singer: Some People are More Equal than Others

Peter Singer is hailed as the world's most influential philosopher. But when he declared it was acceptable to kill disabled babies, he unleashed a firestorm.

(London) Independent, July 1, 2004

by Johann Hari

Peter Singer's story begins in the Nazi death-camps, and he has been circling them all his life. One of his grandparents died in Treblinka; two others died on the way. They had all been minor stars in the 1930s Golden Age of the Viennese intellect, mixing with Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alfred Adler. Today, their grandson is routinely compared to the Nazis who herded them into the gas chambers.

The Wall Street Journal recently compared Singer with Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann. A US Congressman has described him as "taking the Josef Mengele chair in bio-ethics" at Princeton University. Diane Coleman, the leader of the disability rights group Not Dead Yet, describes Singer as "a public advocate of genocide and the most dangerous man on earth". Sitting neatly in a London hotel, Peter Singer is munching a scone and gassing nobody. He is skeletal, but smiles faintly at me. "Shall we begin?" he asks.

"Do you remember the first time you were compared to a member of the Third Reich?" I ask, all the while wondering if it is possible to ask this question without seeming rude. He does not pause. "Yes. It was in Germany in 1989," he says. His voice is so soft that half of what he says is not audible when I play the tape later. "I was invited to speak at a conference organized by the parents of disabled children. There were so many protesters - saying that I was trying to revive eugenics and so on - that the invitation was cancelled." At another German lecture later that year, his glasses were smashed before a mob chanting, "Singer raus [Singer out], Singer raus!" . . . . . 

Singer's moral system is called preference utilitarianism, and evolved from the 19th-century philosophy of John Stuart Mill. It sounds convoluted, but many people in the post-religious societies of Europe take its central premise for granted. It has one basic idea: to be moral, you must do whatever will most satisfy the preferences of most living things. Morality doesn't come from heaven or the stars; it comes from giving as many of us as possible what we want and need.

This isn't some dry academic theory. It affects the most important decisions in every person's life. Say you are old and sick and want to die. Under the old Judaeo-Christian ethic, you have an immortal soul given to you by God, and He will reclaim it from you when He's good and ready. Under preference utilitarianism, your preference - which harms nobody else - should be met, with a lethal injection from a friendly doctor if necessary. The scale of Singer's intellectual ambition is staggering. He is trying to lead an ethical revolution unparalleled since paganism was beaten and banished by the Judaeo-Christian ethic. "You can't expect such a radical shift," he says dryly, "without a few fights."

To read all of this interview click on this.

OPINION

Good Charity, Bad Charity

By PETER SINGER

International Herald Tribune (the global edition of The New York Times)

Published: August 10, 2013

You are thinking of donating to a worthy cause. Good. But to which cause should you give?

If you seek help from professional philanthropy advisers, the chances are that they won’t have much to say about this vital question. They will guide you, to be sure, through an array of charitable options. But the prevailing assumption in their field is that we shouldn’t, or perhaps can’t, make objective judgments about which options are better than others.

Take Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, one of the world’s largest philanthropic service organizations. Its Web site offers a downloadable pamphlet with a chart showing areas to which a philanthropist might give: health and safety; education; arts, culture and heritage; human and civil rights; economic security; and environment. The Web site then asks, “What is the most urgent issue?” and answers by saying, “There’s obviously no objective answer to that question.”

Is this true? I don’t think so. Compare, for instance, two of the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors’ categories: “health and safety” and “arts, culture and heritage.” To me it seems clear that there are objective reasons for thinking we may be able to do more good in one of these areas than in another.

To read all of this opinion piece click on this.

Stephen Colbert talks with Singer about his book The Life You Save.

Singer mentions the film Central Station in his essay,
"The Singer Solution to World Poverty."
You can watch the complete film, above.

The Ice Bucket Way of Giving

A Better Ice Bucket Challenge

THE NEW YORKER, SEPT. 5, 2014

BY MICHAEL SPECTER

This has been a summer of sustained outrage: tenth-century zealots committing unspeakable atrocities in Syria and Iraq; a season of violence and hate in Israel and Gaza; and, in Ukraine, the invasion of a sovereign nation by a power-mad autocrat. There has, however, been at least one bright spot on the human frontier: the “ice-bucket challenge,’’ which so far has raised more than a hundred million dollars for the A.L.S. Association, which supports research and care for those living with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. Last year, the organization raised less than a quarter of that sum.

Unless you spent the summer in Antarctica, the mechanics of the challenge are no doubt familiar: dump a bucket of ice water on your head or make a donation—most people do both—and then challenge others to do it, too, and post it all on Facebook or some other social-media site. It has been a brilliant campaign, an ever-changing video chain letter, quick, easy to understand, a way to feel good about yourself while dripping, briefly, in ice water during the summer’s hottest days.

George W. Bush did it, and challenged Bill Clinton to do it, too. So did Gisele Bündchen. Matt Damon, who has long been committed to easing sanitation problems in the developing world, used toilet water. Bill Gates’s challenge was very Bill Gates: to drench himself, he designed a new contraption. According to the BBC, more than two million ice-bucket-related videos have been posted on Facebook, and twenty-eight million people have uploaded, commented on, or liked ice-bucket-related posts. Justin Bieber’s video, on Instagram, has more than a million “like”s.

It would seem churlish, then, to argue that all of this cheerful decency has been misplaced. A.L.S. is a horrible disease, causing intense suffering to its victims and to all those who love them. In a world with unlimited resources and bottomless generosity, A.L.S. research would deserve ten, even twenty times the money that it has just received. But we don’t live in such a world. And, while most people are repulsed by the idea, when we spend money on saving and prolonging some lives, we are making judgments about how much those lives (and others that we don’t try as hard to save) are worth.

The complete essay can be found at The New Yorker's website. Click on this link to read it.

The Ice Bucket Racket

THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 14, 2014

by IAN MCGUGAN

The essay can be found at The New York Times website. Click on this link to read it.

Extreme Poverty and the World Bank

Above, Ali Velshi of Al Jazeera interviewed Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank Group, on April 9, 2014, about the World Bank's plan to end extreme poverty by 2030. Learn more about the World Bank Group here. Learn more about Jim Yong Kim here. On the same topic, you can read "Fixing the World, Bang-for-the-Buck Edition."

What are young philanthropists doing today? For one example, read "Cari Tuna and Dustin Moskovitz: Young Silicon Valley Billionaires Pioneer New Approach to Philanthropy." The story appeared in The Washington Post, December 26, 2014. In The Atlantic, June 15, 2015, Derek Thompson addresses the notion of "The Most Efficient Way to Save a Life."

Extreme poverty is not only a condition of unsatisfied material needs. 

It is often accompanied by a degrading state of powerlessness.

-- Peter Singer