Malcolm Gladwell spells that out in The Tipping Point, a book all activists should read. The Effective Altruism movement urges funders to donate to charities that can prove how many animals they help. One of the top recommendations is a group that urges food companies to stop using eggs from hens in battery cages. That effort will surely help end that one hideous farming practice and ease some of the suffering of billions of animals. But those approaching the companies would have no success if other activists weren’t changing public opinion, pushing the envelope, and putting societal pressure on those companies to at least make some improvements. It’s worth noting that any choice of litmus test for inclusion in the circle is, to some degree, culturally determined.
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Since infants and people with severe mental disabilities are human, anthropocentrism can explain why they deserve moral consideration. But anthropocentrism also has a weakness; it seems to be speciesist. Another response to the worry described above is to adopt anthropocentrism, the view that adult humans deserve moral consideration simply because they are biologically human. While effective altruism – the philanthropic social movement you helped originate – has its critics, it has gained a following in recent years, including in Silicon Valley tech circles (disgraced cryptocurrency founder Sam Bankman-Fried was prominent in the movement).
At the same time, it has the implausible implication that neither infants nor people with severe mental disabilities deserve moral consideration (since they aren’t rational, i.e., they don’t act on reasons). Below, we survey five theories of moral considerability.3 They all accept that adult humans deserve moral consideration, but they disagree about why that is. As a result, they disagree about what else deserves moral consideration. Secular arguments for equal and exclusively human worth generally tend to follow one of two strategies. One, which has recently gained renewed attention because of a novel argument by S. I conclude that, if all humans are to be included in the community of equals, we must lay to rest the idea that we can do so without also including a wide range of non-human animals.
- That ruling reflected the effect of my having no legal counsel in confronting Singer’s law firm.
- He believes rational thought has played a major role in expanding the moral circle over the centuries.
- Where I disagree with some effective altruists is how dominant longtermism should become in the movement.
- The original claim was for $4 million, with the amended complaint increasing punitive damages after I learned, in 2022, that his behavior had not changed.
- After fifteen years of peace, in December 2018 I asked Singer to stop in Los Angeles for a small fundraising dinner for DawnWatch, as he changed planes heading back to Australia from Princeton.
- No matter how one views those circumstances, one must see the bitter irony in Peter Singer delivering the 2022 keynote address at that conference.
Should animals, plants, and robots have the same rights as you?
Another factor, of course, is the presence of activists who are willing to work damn hard to push the boundaries of the circle. “Reason enables us to take the point of view of the universe,” he told me. The same is true for the belief that black people should have the same rights as white people.
Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.
Instead of working to empirically determine which entities are and aren’t sentient, you might sidestep that whole question and believe instead that anything that’s alive or that supports life is worthy of moral consideration. All other animals – human and non-human – deserve moral consideration. Animal lovers would say that all animals deserve moral consideration. The idea that non-human animals have significant moral status is comparatively modern. It owes much to the work of philosopher Peter Singer and his 1975 book ‘Animal Liberation’. Finally, according to ecocentrism, what deserves moral consideration isn’t individual beings but collectives or groups, specifically those that promote the flourishing of ecosystems (e.g., wolf packs and aspen groves).
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It prioritises the distant future over the concerns of today and advocates reducing the risk of our extinction, for example, by thwarting the possibility of hostile artificial intelligence (AI) and colonising space. We should think about the long-term future and we ought to try to reduce risks of extinction. Where I disagree with some effective altruists is how dominant longtermism should become in the movement. We need some balance between reducing the extinction risks and making the world a better place now. We shouldn’t negate our present problems or our relatively short-term future, not least because we can have much higher confidence that we can help people in these timeframes. Though the lives of people in the future aren’t of any less value, how we can best help people millennia from now is uncertain.
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I understand that the organizers did not know that for the last few decades Peter Singer has been treating our movement like his personal harem and was, at the time of the conference, fighting that claim in court. It’s entirely possible that we’ll have expanded it in some respects and narrowed it in others. I can imagine us having laws against eating sentient animals, even as we continue to repress certain classes of people.
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A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life which he is able to succor, and when he goes out of his way to avoid injuring anything living. He does not ask how far this or that life deserves sympathy as valuable in itself, nor how far it is capable of feeling. How we’re going to discover whether a robot is sentient is still open for debate, but to Singer it’s obvious that whenever the answer turns out to be yes, inclusion in the moral circle must follow. Now it’s cropping up more often in activist circles as new social movements use it to make the case for granting rights to more and more entities. For example, you have the right not to be unjustly imprisoned (liberty) and the right not to be experimented on (bodily integrity). Biocentrism can explain some intuitions that other theories cannot.
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Similarly, other inventions have arguably catalyzed the expansion of the moral circle. Steven Pinker, in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, says the printing press was crucial to humanity’s ethical development because it helped spread humanitarian ideas. And then there are some who argue that even machines can be granted rights. What about a robot we may invent in the future that seems just as sentient as chimpanzees and elephants, despite being made of silicon?
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There’s a concept from philosophy that describes this evolution — it’s called humanity’s expanding moral circle. The circle is the imaginary boundary we draw around those we consider worthy of moral consideration. Over the centuries, it’s expanded to include many people who were previously left out of it.
- These are questions that activists for the rights of animals, nature, and robots all grapple with as they use the idea of the moral circle to mount their arguments.
- Everyone reading this sentence likely (hopefully!) agrees that women deserve the same rights as men.
- If Peter Singer and I are forced back into court under a different claim, we will face a different California judge.
- The approach below is what philosophers call consequentialist.
- In order to answer these practical ethical questions, then, we would have to figure out not only who or what deserves moral consideration but also how to treat the things that deserve moral consideration.
- Though I am grateful for the support I have been offered, I want, badly, to get on with my life and I hope Peter Singer feels the same way.
- It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016.
He believes rational thought has played a major role in expanding the moral circle over the centuries. Some go even further and argue that all living organisms deserve moral consideration.11 This view is biocentrism. I hear from people who tell me about his latest anti-animal liberation statement, thinking I might want to use it as ammunition to take him down, but I don’t. For 20 years I felt like I was covering for him, betraying myself, and betraying the women in our movement and the movement itself. Finally, when the horrible truth of our relationship was thrown in my face, I felt forced to stand for myself and the female activism experience.