Peter Singer Interview

Author(s): Peter Singer and Scott Douglas Jacobsen

Publication (Outlet/Website): Noesis: The Journal of the Mega Society

Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2023/11

Abstract

Prof. Singer’s biographic statement on his website says the following: “Journalists have bestowed on me the tag of “world’s most influential living philosopher.” They are probably thinking of my work on the ethics of our treatment of animals, often credited with starting the modern animal rights movement, and of the influence that my writing has had on development of effective altruism. I am also known for my controversial critique of the sanctity of life ethics in bioethics. In 2021 I was delighted to receive the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture. The citation referred to my “widely influential and intellectually rigorous work in reinvigorating utilitarianism as part of academic philosophy and as a force for change in the world.” The prize comes with $1 million which, in accordance with views I have been defending for many years, I am donating to the most effective organizations working to assist people in extreme poverty and to reduce the suffering of animals in factory farms. Several key figures in the animal movement have said that my book Animal Liberation, first published in 1975, led them to get involved in the struggle to reduce the vast amount of suffering we inflict on animals. To that end, I co-founded the Australian Federation of Animal Societies, now Animals Australia, the country’s largest and most effective animal organization. My wife, Renata, and I stopped eating meat in 1971. I am the founder of The Life You Can Save, an organization based on my book of the same name. It aims to spread my ideas about why we should be doing much more to improve the lives of people living in extreme poverty, and how we can best do this. You can view my TED talk on this topic here. My writings in this area include: the 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” in which I argue for donating to help the global poor; and two books that make the case for effective giving, The Life You Can Save (2009) and The Most Good You Can Do (2015). I have written, co-authored, edited or co-edited more than 50 books, including Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, Rethinking Life and Death, One World, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Point of View of the Universe (with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek. My writings have appeared in more than 25 languages. I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. After teaching in England, the United States, and Australia, in 1999 I became Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. I am now only teaching at Princeton for the Fall semester. I spend part of each year doing research and writing in Melbourne, so that Renata and I can spend time with our three daughters and four grandchildren. We also enjoy hiking, and I surf.” Singer discusses: Animal Liberation Now; and the awakening to the treatment of animals. 

Keywords: Animal Liberation, Animal Liberation Now, Apuleis, Australia, Buddhism, Canadian student, Japan, Oxford, Peter Singer, Plutarch, Princeton University, Pythagoras, Romans, The Golden Ass.

Conversation with Professor Peter Singer: Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University (1)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: So, today, we are back with Peter Singer. Different publication, second interview, you are coming out with a book again, Animal Liberation Now, as an update on Animal LiberationI, which is an update on the original text. This interview is being done in December, but it will come out in May, 2023. So, to begin, what was the first indication in your intellectual history and personal history when ethical consideration for non-human animals was considered important and legitimate?

Prof. Peter Singer: To me, this can be traced to a very definite single event. There was a chance lunch that I had with a fellow graduate student. I was a graduate student at Oxford studying philosophy and came from Australia. I was talking after class to a Canadian graduate student about a topic completely unrelated to animals, but something going on in the class. He said, “Let’s continue the discussion over lunch, over at my college.” I said, “Sure”. We went there to get served. At the table where you get served, there was either a salad plate or some spaghetti with some red-brown sauce on top of it. I took the spaghetti. The Canadian asked if there was meat in the spaghetti sauce. When he was told there was, he took the salad. We sat down and continued to talk, and the conversation that we were having. When that came to a natural conclusion, when I asked him what his problem was with meat, you have to realize this is 1970.

There aren’t a lot of vegetarians around.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Singer: I don’t think I had a serious conversation with a vegetarian about eating animals. There weren’t really any. You knew that some Indians didn’t eat meat. There might be some people who thought it was bad for their health to eat meat, but they were pretty rare too. Richard said something much more straightforward than that. He said, “I don’t think it is right to treat animals the way they are treated to turn them into food for us”. It took me aback. I knew, of course, animals were turned into food. I thought they were outdoors in the fields, basically, having a good time before the grim day.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Singer: When they go to get dropped off for slaughter. Richard said, “No, they are inside, confined in sheds. The real test of how much you crowd them is if your profits go up. You will cram them until so many may drop dead that they can’t cope, then profits decrease. Then you will stop. That is not the point at which their welfare is good. It is well past that.” This pretty well disturbed me. I found myself reasonably kind to animals. I never thought of myself as an animal lover. I never had companion animals. Who wants to be cruel to animals? That is a bad thing. I didn’t know much about it. Richard said there is a book out about this by Ruth Harrison called Animal Machines. It wasn’t a well-known book and obscure book about animal faming. I don’t think it was on any bookshelves. It was pretty revealing because it was building on what farm magazines were saying about how to treat your animals. “You make more money if you do this”. It backed up what Richard was saying.

“This is not good. Is it really okay to treat animals like this? Why would it be okay?” That is what got me thinking that there is a serious moral issue that I should think more about.

Jacobsen: If we go back to the 1970s story and the moral awakening on the treatment of animals, are there prior individuals in centuries past who gave serious consideration to the ethics of animals? I think we’re all somewhat aware of the dismissal of moral concern for animals in intellectual history.

Singer: Yes. There, certainly, have been a few individuals in different civilizations. Interstingly, Buddha talks a lot about compassion. Buddha talks about compassion for sentient beings, not just for humans. If you go to visit a Buddhist temple, certainly, I visited some in Japan. You get a little admission ticket. You pay a small fee for admission. On the ticket, it says, “The first precept of Buddhism is compassionate consideration for all sentient beings”. That doesn’t mean all people following Buddhism and Buddhist priests are vegetarians. In the West, Pythagoras was a vegetarian. Although, we don’t know why, because we have no direct writings. It may have been his thoughts on being reincarnated as animals. There was some connection with India or the East. That may have led Pythagoras to think that.

But there are a couple of ancient writings. There is an essay by Plutarch, in the Roman period, called on abstinence from flesh. We don’t have it all. But it is clear that what we have does talk about the suffering inflicted on animals, particularly by wealthy Romans having special kinds of what were supposed to be delicacies. If you have a pregnant sow, and if you trampled her to death, trampling the piglets inside her, and ate them, this was supposed to be a special gourmet delicacy. Plutarch didn’t think this was very good.

The other work that I should mention is because I edited an abridged edition of it. The Golden Ass by Apuleis, he was a second-century Christian hero, and thinker. An African, actually, he came from what is now Algeria. He has this really amusing novel, which I think deserves to be better known about a man that gets turned into a donkey. He gets interested in magic and the magic turns out wrong. He becomes a donkey for quite a long time. So, the rest of the novel is told through the eyes of the donkey. The donkey doesn’t get treated well by humans.

Jacobsen: [Laughing].

Singer: Clearly, Apuleis was sympathetic to the treatment of animals. The man who gets turned into a donkey. His family history include Plutarch. So, clearly, there is a link between Plutarch and Apuleis.

[End Part 1 of interview]

Singer discusses: non-human animal consideration; reasons people make changes in diet regarding animal welfare; and sentientism. 

Keywords: Animal Liberation Now, Australia, Chinese, Japanese, octopus, oyster, Peter Singer, Princeton University, Pythagoras, Sentientism, vegan, vegetarian.

Conversation with Professor Peter Singer on Meat-Like Foods and Sentientism: Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University (2)

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Things have really ramped up in the last couple decades in terms of consideration of animal welfare. Although, there is mass killing of non-human animals, certainly, in factory farms and elsewhere. However, I think with a lot of technological advancements; the conversations seem to be happening a lot more. Things just happening around meat grown through stem cells. Things of this nature. Has advancement of technology, in your opinion, changed some of the consideration of non-human animal welfare, simply for the fac that it may not be necessary to include as much suffering if you can get the same product in another manner that is more efficient?

Prof. Peter Singer: I am hopeful that cellular agriculture and plant-based analogues to meat are going to do that. I don’t think they’ve done that to a really significant scale. I think that’s largey because of cost. They are still more expensive than the standard meast products. If you buy an impossible burger or a beyond meat burger, it is going to cost you a little more than the ordinary beef burger. It may be just as good, but it is not clearly better. So, it needs to come down in price, I think, and then we need to get these other products that people are producing. There are chicken products, now, coming on the market, in Singapore anyway. They are selling chicken nuggets. I think they will start to come on the market here too. It is not as though you have been unable to nourish yourself because these high-tech meat-like products. You could always live and cheaply on plant proteins like lentils and beans of various sorts, and tofu, of course, is a product that has been around for millennia and takes a lot of different kinds of flavourings. I think it works well in a lot of dishes, particularly Chinese dishes as this is where it comes from – and Japanese dishes. So, you didn’t really need it. But some people wanted the taste in their mouth or the chewiness of meat. I hope these products will get cheaper and widely sold and eaten. 

Jacobsen: To the brass tax of the considerations about making those changes, what have been, realistically, the main reasons people have made those changes in their diet or their buying patterns, purchasing patterns?

Singer: I think there are three major factors as to why people are moving away from meat in their diet. Some, like me, are primarily concerned over what we are doing to animals and you don’t want to participate in this ruthless exploitation of literally tens of millions of animals giving them nightmarish lives without any consideration for their wellbeing. That’s been one big factor. The second is we are increasingly aware of is the contribution of meat to climate change. Climate change, itself, wasn’t an issue until the mid-1980s, then it will still focused on fossil fuels for a long time. It is only in the last 10 or 20 years that people have been more aware of the role meat plays in accelerating climate change. That’s the second factor. The third factor is health, I would divide the health factor into two. On the one hand, there are people who think, “I will be healthier if I don’t eat meat”. That is certainly a factor for many, many people. You live better. You feel better. You lower risk of cancer of the digestive system and of heart disease. I think there is good evidence of all of those benefits now. That is a big factor. There is also the public health aspect of it, not just what you eat, but what other eat – because factory farms are a great place for growing new viruses. We have alreay had one major pandemic come out of a factory farm. That was the Swine Flu pandemic, which preceded the Coronavirus. It didn’t kill as many people as the Coronavrus. But it killed a lot. The big risk is the next virus to come out from animals crossing to us is that it is grown out of a factory farm with so many animals stressed together. Humans go in and out to taker the animals out to kill them or to do routine maintenance. It could be both highly contagious as Coronavirus, but much more deadly. If that happens, we will be in a very serious problem. That’s a good public health reason for wanting to not take part in factory farmed products as well. 

Jacobsen: There’s a term “Sentientist” floating around. To myself, it matches, sort of, my own ethical considerations. I beieve you identify as such. How does this term – this concept – encapsulate a lot of the ethical thinking for you right now?

Singer: Well, look, the point is a sentient being, in the sense we’re using here, is on capable of suffering and feeling pain – and, hopefully, capable of experiencing pleasure and joy as well. But certainly, the capacity to feel pain is part of what it is to be a sentient being. It is a being with conscious experiences. The point of saying that you’re a sentientist is to say that you think that any being capable of feeling pain should have its interests given weight. I would say given similar weight to similar beings with similar interests. Beings that might have a similar interest. If an animal feels a certain amount of pain through – let’s say – being hit, then that is just as bad or equal to hitting a human being and causing the human being a similar amount of pain. The term “sentientist”, we talk about being vegan or vegetarian. They get termed if they eat animals or animal products. But it might not be the case that all animals are sentient. A good example of a non-sentient animal may be an oyster. Oysters have very simple nervous systems. They are unable to move away from sources of danger. So, it is arguable that they would have been less likely to evolve a capacity to feel pain, given that it wouldn’t do them much good as opposed to animals who can move away from sources of pain. So, if you are a sentientist, you might say, “I don’t eat birds and mammals, vertebrates generally. I don’t eat fish.” Perhaps, there is an invertebrate that is clearly sentient is an octopus, which is a mollusc. You might say, “If an animal is not sentient, then I don’t object to eating it, because you can’t cause it to suffer or feel pain. It doesn’t have that capacity.

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