From these beginnings the Princeton scholar--I stay away from the word "philosopher" here--Peter Singer believes you can build a moral edifice of towering grandeur. Or at least a very big club with which in his book The Life You Can Save he bludgeons his readers into conceding that they should donate a "fair" amount of their income to international relief organizations. For this, like all writers of books of moral uplift (most especially those whose prescriptions are safely ignored), he is greeted as a moral thinker of probing clarity.
In fact, The Life You Can Live like most--well, all--books of prescriptive morality, is proudly ignorant. Singer announces this ignorance and the related contempt for his readers in the third chapter, where he considers the objections to his thesis. For this he takes as his interlocuters "students taking an elective called Literature and Justice at Glenview High (that's not its real name) a school in a wealthy Boston suburb." The students of "Glenview" (why he doesn't give its real name is a mystery) voice what are supposed to be the conventional objections to moral behavior of the self satisfied bourgeoisie. Unsurprisingly, since he's telling the story, Singer manages to pulverize these easily. In doing this, he happily steamrolls over the entire history of philosophy and literature to establish the primacy of the teachers of virtue:
"If we see a person holding a cat's paws on an electric grill that is gradually heating up, and when we vigorously object he says, 'But it's fun, see how the cat squeals,' we don't just say, 'Oh, well, you are entitled to follow your own beliefs,' and leave him alone. We can and do try to stop people who are cruel to animals, just as we stop rapists, racists, and terrorists. I'm not saying that failing to give is like committing these acts of violence, but if we reject moral relativism in some situations, then we should reject it everywhere."
How much easier can it be? From the premise that torturing cats is wrong we move in a mere three sentences to the irrefutability of the everlasting moral order.
If this is philosophy, then philosophy is an excellent courtier, delivering the truisms of Sunday school lessons and dorm room bull sessions--"moral relativism is wrong"--while dressing them up as difficult truths. Everything falls neatly into two categories, "wrong" and "right." And of course the ultimate beneficiary of this model is the Princeton professor whose expertise is the sifting of experience into these two slots, into which all acts fall like nickels and dimes in the coin counting machine.
But maybe, after all, it's not so simple. The objection to the teachers of virtue has never been to the doing of good acts. And certainly, the acts that Singer advocates--helping the suffering around the world--are inarguably good. If people want to spend their money for humanitarian purposes, there is no one in the world who will stop them, or do anything but commend them. Whether it is a child who is drowning in front of you, or a child dying of malaria, saving him is a good thing.
How good acts turn into obligations, however, isn't something that Singer has much patience for. If someone tortures a cat we believe he is bad. Fine, that is Singer's intuition, and mine, and yours. But from these tiny and solid intuitions, Singer pretends he can move to a host of policies that do not jibe with our intuitions. On the subject of, say, donating all your money to international relief NGOs I have no intuitions at all. No, that's not true: if it leaves your children in poverty, my intuitions say it is wrong. In fact, if it leaves your children meaningfully worse off, my intuition says it's wrong.
To this Singer has no real answer. Starting with the poor material of a few inarguable intuitions, he gives us no basis for moving further. If you start with intuition, you end up only as far as intuition goes. It does not bring you to Singer's weirdly precise conclusion of donating 10 percent of your income about $100,000. A good thing, no question. But why 10 percent? Who knows? If Singer actually believed the arguments in his book, then surely Singer, who argues that the death of every child in a far away place should be as utmost a concern to us as the death of a child close to us and directly in front of us, he wouldn't stop there.
The practical moralist is a simplifier. He writes for an audience that he treats as children, who will not be bothered to ask what standpoint he is arguing from--why, that is, he does what he does. If he is Kant writing the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, maybe he believes that he stands on firm enough footing that he does not need to explain it in every work. But no one now stands on this kind of footing. To try to pass off policy prescriptions, no matter how reasonable or good hearted, as the logical necessities of moral philosophy is to take a position that that is the opposite of moral: it is to subordinate the search for anything resembling truth to political aims.
Singer comes up with prescriptions that are guaranteed to leave his readers with a nice feeling of having read something virtuous. But there is an intellectual cost to this. The record of the professional teachers of virtue is not enviable. From the adding up of duties and obligations, the extension of the sphere of what we are told we should feel compelled to do, very little good has come. Listen to any dictator: you can bet that there is not one for whom "obligation" is not a favorite word.
The practical moralist is a simplifier. He writes for an audience that he treats as children, who will not be bothered to ask what standpoint he is arguing from--why, that is, he does what he does. If he is Kant writing the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, maybe he believes that he stands on firm enough footing that he does not need to explain it in every work. But no one now stands on this kind of footing. To try to pass off policy prescriptions, no matter how reasonable or good hearted, as the logical necessities of moral philosophy is to take a position that that is the opposite of moral: it is to subordinate the search for anything resembling truth to political aims.
Singer comes up with prescriptions that are guaranteed to leave his readers with a nice feeling of having read something virtuous. But there is an intellectual cost to this. The record of the professional teachers of virtue is not enviable. From the adding up of duties and obligations, the extension of the sphere of what we are told we should feel compelled to do, very little good has come. Listen to any dictator: you can bet that there is not one for whom "obligation" is not a favorite word.
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