How Are We To Live?
By Peter Singer
Text Publishing. $24.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
It's been one helluva century! No sooner are we free of the placenta than we are sentenced to our role in history. But what does it all mean?
Did God make us — in the words of my childhood catechism — "to know him, love him and serve him and to be happy with him forever in heaven?". Is life totally meaningless and we must make the best of a bad job? If there is meaning, what is it?
What we want around here are some answers. Let's start with Peter Singer: professional philosopher, specialising in ethics. Unlike the output of other academic philosophers, past and present, his books are undoubtedly popular, both here and overseas. His book on animal liberation is a standard text of the animal rights movement and is often cited in the letters page of Green Left Weekly.
Singer's major achievement is his ability to modernise ethics — the study of morals — and wrest it from the clutches of theology. Singer asks the question: why live a moral life if living has no meaning and we don't fear eternal damnation? Instead of living as we please, we should live as we choose by choosing to live ethically. "No amount of reflection will show a commitment to an ethical life to be trivial and pointless", he writes.
Living ethically is more than getting out on the right side of the bed each morning: "Ethics is everywhere in our daily lives. It lies behind many of our choices, whether personal or political, or bridging the difference between the two ... But ethics intrudes into our conscious lives only occasionally, and often in a confused way. If we are to make properly considered ultimate choices, we must first become more aware of the ethical ramifications of the way we live. Only then is it possible to make ethics a more conscious and coherent part of everyday life."
The way Singer calls it, everyday ethical life is a consciously chosen lifestyle which is "an alternative way of living, at odds with the narrow, accumulative and competitive pursuit of self interest".
So in answer to his own question — How are we to live? — Singer answers: ethically.
Social constraints
While an ethical lifestyle cannot be reduced to a set of rules, opportunities for ethical commitment can be embraced by working for a cause so long as it is a "'transcendent cause', that is, a cause that extends beyond the boundaries of the self". Examples of transcendent causes are animal liberation and "taking the point of view of the universe".
Broadly, that's OK — it is better that we think more of the ramifications of what we do and do our bit to make things better. However, what Singer does not confront is the rationale of the social system of which we are a part and by which we are dominated. Instead, he turns the problem around to suit his agenda. While he describes the societies we inhabit as mere aggregations of mutually hostile individuals, he assumes that "we" created them.
I have a problem with that, because I signed on only a few years ago, and the mess was here before I could walk. History had already done its business before I came on the scene. I, personally, created very little. In being born I oppressed and exploited no-one and did my best with the life that was allocated to me. So well, in fact, that I now read the books of Peter Singer.
My problem is not with my desire to live a better life but that this society won't let me. Like the early Christians, how can I be ethically consistent in my daily life when the society in which I live rests on the exploitation of other human beings (and other species, of course!) as well as of myself? That's a fundamental ethical question which Singer doesn't answer because he has done something else in this book: he has rejected Marx.
It's not me who is hung up on Marx; Singer is. He goes to great lengths to purge Marx of ongoing relevance to his ethical program: Marx's ethical commitment led to the nightmare of Stalin; Marx's thought was utopian; only the brave cling to the socialist ideal, etc.
Indeed, precisely because socialism failed and "capitalism triumphed", Singer insists we need to seek out a third way which rests on the commitment generated in a consciously ethical outlook. "The division", he writes, "between an ethical and a selfish approach to life is far more fundamental than the difference between the politics of the political right and the political left".
Note that! Singer places ethics outside politics: neither left nor right, but ethical.
But Singer realises that history does exist, even if it isn't very meaningful — at least not as meaningful as Marx would have it. He concedes that there was a right side to the question of slavery, it was just to fight for workers' rights, Hitler was bad, and civil rights for minorities should be supported — even if, within Singer's ethics, the question of abortion is a grey area.
If that's the case and there is a right and a wrong even on these questions, then ethics cannot be separated from politics. If an ethical approach to life requires you to adopt positions on a whole series of social questions, then you are not only being ethical but political as well. Despite yourself, you have embraced a political program.
Individuality
If your ethical position is your own work — rather than a copy from some political radical, such as Marx — then you qualify as part of the alternative Singer calls for. If, however, you arrived at those positions through the aid of political theory, then you are part of the problem, and instead of being ethical, you are being merely political.
What Singer hints at is that the only true ethics is one that you generate individually — albeit with his encouragement. So the solution to the social and ecological crisis that confronts us is not to work for a "distant utopian future" but to act according to a conscious ethical outlook on life.
The fact that one person's conscious ethical outlook may be another's poison seems not to faze Singer. Given the multitude of relations — between the first and third worlds, between classes and between genders, for instance — both consciousness and, consequently, ethics will vary.
The Judaeo-Christian tradition resolved this problem by employing God — or the pope or the Bible — as umpire to arrive at a formally consistent moral outlook. But the doctrine of Zionism or the prescriptions in Rerum Novarum (expounding Catholic social creed) hardly serve to awaken the fullness of life's meaning in everyone they affect.
Instead of addressing social reality as an entity, Singer projects ethics as a method applicable to a whole series of exercises taken one at a time. It is ethical to put your litter in the appropriate bin, for instance, and to work for creatures other than humans because your life has more meaning if you do so. Like the scouts — all you need do is at least one good deed per day to learn how to live.
Basically Singer tries to separate his ethics from that which has gone before. His is designer ethics which embraces values thwarted by a meaningless life, personalised for each individual. While he tries to generate an encompassing sense of community by exploring the Japanese concept of "wa" (the ideal of unity and team spirit), he doesn't suggest how such kinship can be obtained except from among those who sign on to act ethically.
Unfortunately, history does not play by such rules. Ethically motivated individuals can support the most ruinous of causes, such as wars, along with the rest of the population buoyed along by orchestrated jingoism. Even the vegetarian Hitler loved and respected animals more than he did Jews, Roms and Communists.
If we are to live ethically, then we need more than custom-made ethics. If ethics is to be applied to the world, then it must be fostered there. To do that consistently requires a agenda. Unfortunately, Singer tries to be ethical without being revolutionary.