Peter Singer’s Popular Ethics

Nick Harris, 9/16/24

Peter Singer’s Ethics in the Real World (Updated edition Princeton 2023) presents a popularist view of serious matters of ethics. According to Singer, the idea that moral judgments carry objective truth became unpopular in philosophical inquiry in the 1930s (8). From this position, Singer starts with this thesis of “logical positivism,” a discipline that arose to declare that the truth of moral judgments is something no one can prove in a logical manner. By starting with logical positivism, Singer can move forward to tackle personal views of ethics as valid sentiments and view how we can ward off illogical as well as nonsensical ethical relativism.

In the world of logical positivism, moral judgments are nothing more than personal attitudes defined by faith or emotions. We can set up faith and emotions as two separate lines of inquiry. The faith argument comes from religion and the individuals therein who view humanity as existing under the laws of God (or without the laws of God) as long as the viewpoint coincides with the faith. Others, and the ones that Singer tries to explain, see moral judgments as expressions of personal attitude. This view plays out in two ways:  either a moral judgment explains the avoidance of agony, or a moral judgment reflects a personal desire. In the former morality, evil is defined as the willful subjugation of physical pain upon another individual. In the latter morality, good results from whatever the individual desires.

The trouble with this two-fold system is that neither view truly considers the good that an individual should try to do to others, if at all. Singer addresses the avoidance of agony, either giving it or receiving it, through the work of Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons, 2017, as applied in Singer, “Introduction,” xi). Singer’s view of Parfit is that “to live ethically, all one needs to do is obey the generally accepted rules that begin with ‘You must not” (xi). Perhaps Singer’s Australian background puts him in the position of sparking the individual’s sense of accomplishment. His position connects the individual intrinsically to an aesthetic experience, a fulfillment of desire caused simply by putting oneself in a natural environment (what I think of as an Australian norm) and observing what happiness and awe can come of it (373).

Singer’s theses of good and evil touch in most every instance with aesthetic theory, hence why I am interested in it as applicable to literature and postmodernist inquiry. But Singer’s aesthetics is not a lofty pursuit. He grounds ethics and aesthetics in real-world experiences such as the consciousness of animals, the nature of human life and death, and the nature of political rights of the individual to vote, participate in activism, or even simply be a citizen of a political unity. The value judgments of art versus human health bring with them the very headaches in which Singer loves to indulge (the question of monetary donations for instance as explored on p. 201-202).

Perhaps these practical questions interfere with aesthetic readings such as the Hardy novel Jude the Obscure to which I consistently refer in these essays. But I argue that keeping the practical question of Singer in mind creates new vistas while immersing oneself in the tragedy of a man of nature condemned to forever seek out the wonders of the industrial age and the resultant life of the mind therein. Jude goes further and further away from his agricultural beginnings as he seeks the supposed comfort of a life of philosophical inquiry, only then to be confronted with the realities of a hard life of the search for sexual fulfillment coupled with gender inequality and the class system inequality that destroys him. All his lives—mental, physical, sexual, emotional—share an impact that makes Jude question the very inevitability of suffering. The artwork imparts this aesthetic to the reader through the formal and emotional quality of the literature. Singer’s popular ethics reminds us of this hard, naturalistic ethic present in the artistry of Hardy. The art intertwines itself with the reality, inescapable.