Table Of ContentETHICS IN THE REAL WORLD
ETHICS IN
THE REAL WORLD
82 Brief Essays
on Things That Matter
• • •
PETER SINGER
• • •
With a new afterword
by the author
Pri n c eton U n i v e r si t y Pre s s
Pri n c eton a n d Ox f ord
Copyright © 2016 by Peter Singer
Afterword to the paperback edition copyright © 2017 by Peter Singer
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work
should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
Ninth printing, and first paperback printing, 2017
Paperback ISBN 978-0-691-17847-9
The Library of Congress has cataloged the
cloth edition of this book as follows:
ISBN 978- 0- 691- 17247- 7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016935598
British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Minion Pro
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Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
9 10
CONTENTS
• • • • • •
Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xv
Big Questions
The Value of a Pale Blue Dot 3
Does Anything Matter? 6
Is There Moral Progress? 9
God and Suffering, Again 12
Godless Morality (with Marc Hauser) 15
Are We Ready for a “Morality Pill”? (with Agata Sagan) 19
The Quality of Mercy 23
Thinking about the Dead 27
Should This Be the Last Generation? 31
Philosophy on Top 35
Animals
Europe’s Ethical Eggs 41
If Fish Could Scream 44
Cultural Bias against Whaling? 47
A Case for Veganism 50
Consider the Turkey: Thoughts for Thanksgiving 55
In Vitro Meat 60
Chimpanzees Are People, Too 63
The Cow Who . . . 66
Beyond the Ethic of the Sanctity of Life
The Real Abortion Tragedy 73
Treating (or Not) the Tiniest Babies 77
vi • Contents
Pulling Back the Curtain on the Mercy Killing
of Newborns 81
No Diseases for Old Men 85
When Doctors Kill 89
Choosing Death 93
Dying in Court 97
Bioethics and Public Health
The Human Genome and the Genetic Supermarket 103
The Year of the Clone? 106
Kidneys for Sale? 110
The Many Crises of Health Care 114
Public Health versus Private Freedom? 118
Weigh More, Pay More 122
Should We Live to 1,000? 125
Population and the Pope 129
Sex and Gender
Should Adult Sibling Incest Be a Crime? 135
Homosexuality Is Not Immoral 139
Virtual Vices 142
A Private Affair? 146
How Much Should Sex Matter? (with Agata Sagan) 150
God and Woman in Iran 154
Doing Good
The One- Percent Solution 159
Holding Charities Accountable 163
Blatant Benevolence 167
Good Charity, Bad Charity 171
Heartwarming Causes Are Nice, But Let’s Give
to Charity with Our Heads 175
Contents • vii
The Ethical Cost of High- Price Art 179
Preventing Human Extinction (with Nick Beckstead
and Matt Wage) 182
Happiness
Happiness, Money, and Giving It Away 191
Can We Increase Gross National Happiness? 195
The High Cost of Feeling Low 199
No Smile Limit 202
Happy, Nevertheless 205
Politics
Bentham’s Fallacies, Then and Now 211
The Founding Fathers’ Fiscal Crisis 215
Why Vote? 219
Free Speech, Muhammad, and the Holocaust 222
The Use and Abuse of Religious Freedom 225
An Honest Man? 229
Is Citizenship a Right? 232
The Spying Game 236
A Statue for Stalin? 239
Should We Honor Racists? 243
Global Governance
Escaping the Refugee Crisis 249
Is Open Diplomacy Possible? 253
The Ethics of Big Food 257
Fairness and Climate Change (with Teng Fei) 260
Will the Polluters Pay for Climate Change? 264
Why Are They Serving Meat at a Climate Change Conference?
(with Frances Kissling) 268
viii • Contents
Dethroning King Coal 273
Paris and the Fate of the Earth 277
Science and Technology
A Clear Case for Golden Rice 283
Life Made to Order 287
Rights for Robots? (with Agata Sagan) 291
A Dream for the Digital Age 295
A Universal Library 298
The Tragic Cost of Being Unscientific 302
Living, Playing, Working
How to Keep a New Year’s Resolution 307
Why Pay More? 310
Tiger Mothers or Elephant Mothers? 313
Volkswagen and the Future of Honesty 317
Is Doping Wrong? 321
Is It OK to Cheat at Football? 324
A Surfing Reflection 328
Afterword to the Paperback Edition 331
Index 335
INTRODUCTION
• • • • • •
We all make ethical choices, often without being con-
scious of doing so. Too often we assume that ethics is about
obeying the rules that begin with “You must not. . . .” If that
were all there is to living ethically, then as long as we were
not violating one of those rules, whatever we were doing
would be ethical. That view of ethics, however, is incom-
plete. It fails to consider the good we can do to others less
fortunate than ourselves, not only in our own community,
but anywhere within the reach of our help. We ought also to
extend our concern to future generations, and beyond our
own species to nonhuman animals.
Another important ethical responsibility applies to citi-
zens of democratic society: to be an educated citizen and a
participant in the decisions our society makes. Many of
these decisions involve ethical choices. In public discussions
of these ethical issues, people with training in ethics, or
moral philosophy, can play a valuable role. Today that is not
an especially controversial claim, but when I was a student,
philosophers themselves proclaimed that it was a mistake to
think that they have any special expertise that would qualify
them to addresses substantive ethical issues. The accepted
understanding of the discipline, at least in the English-
speaking world, was that philosophy is concerned with the
analysis of words and concepts, and so is neutral on sub-
stantive ethical questions.
