Top

Society

29-11-2023 | BOOK REVIEW

Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter

Princeton University Press, 2023, 464 pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-23786-2—Fully Updated and Expanded Edition

Author: Steven L. Johnson

Published in: Society

Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.

search-config

AI-assisted search

Off

Excerpt

Peter Singer, a renowned—and for some, reviled—Australian philosopher, is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. His new book (a shorter edition was published in 2016) consists of 90 brief essays on a wide range of issues within philosophy, ethics, bioethics, science and technology, politics, ecology, national and global public health and environmental policy, and even space colonization. As Singer explains in the Introduction (p. xvi), all of the essays contained in the original edition have been “fully updated” based on subsequent developments, research, and data, and this “expanded” edition includes 37 new essays addressing ethical issues related to more recent events and scientific developments, including the genetic modification of human embryos for various purposes, artificial intelligence, the COVID-19 pandemic (mandatory lockdowns and vaccination policies), the 2017 neo-Nazi white supremacist march in Charlottesville and the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and protests and riots that followed, the conservative political backlash in various countries stemming from the mass migration of refugees, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and the specter of nuclear war arising from it). The reference in the subtitle to “Things That Matter” alludes to Derek Parfit’s multi-volume magnum opus, On What Matters (2011 and 2017), which Singer believes persuasively established that there are “objective ethical truths that we can discover through careful reasoning and reflection” (pp. xiv).¹ …

Dont have a licence yet? Then find out more about our products and how to get one now:

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 102.000 Bücher
über 537 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Automobil + Motoren
Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Elektrotechnik + Elektronik
Energie + Nachhaltigkeit
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Maschinenbau + Werkstoffe
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Online-Abonnement

Mit Springer Professional "Wirtschaft" erhalten Sie Zugriff auf:

über 67.000 Bücher
über 340 Zeitschriften

aus folgenden Fachgebieten:

Bauwesen + Immobilien
Business IT + Informatik
Finance + Banking
Management + Führung
Marketing + Vertrieb
Versicherung + Risiko

Jetzt Wissensvorsprung sichern!

inform now

Singer also discusses Parfit’s book in his essay, “Does Anything Matter?” (pp. 8–11), and he credits Parfit with saving moral philosophy from the logical positivism, ethical emotivism, and moral subjectivism that dominated Anglophone philosophy since the 1930s, and from the nihilism such theories implied.

Singer cites in his Introduction an interesting empirical study finding that the average peer-reviewed academic journal article is read in full by only 10 people (p. xiii).

Originally published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring 1972), pp. 229–243, but included in Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life (The Ecco Press, 2000) and reissued in book form with two other essays as Famine, Affluence, and Morality (Oxford University Press, 2016).

One such influential book inspired by Singer is Peter Unger’s Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford University Press, 1996).

Such readers might consider Singer’s Writings on an Ethical Life (cited above), an anthology of some of his more academic philosophical writings and longer-form opinion pieces, or his Practical Ethics, 3rd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 2011), which is frequently used as an introductory text in university courses on ethics and applied ethics. For those interested in Singer’s work in bioethics, his Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994) would be a good start as well as his earlier book, co-authored with Helga Kuhse, Should the Baby Live?: The Problem of Handicapped Infants (Oxford University Press, 1986).

See, for example, Wesley J. Smith, The Culture of Death: The Age of “Do Harm” Medicine, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2016), and Richard John Neuhaus, “A Curious Encounter with a Philosopher from Nowhere,” First Things (February 2002), pp. 77-82.

See Harriet McBryde Johnson, “Unspeakable Conversations,” New York Times Magazine (February 16, 2003), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/16/magazine/unspeakable-conversations.html, last accessed May 7, 2023.

See, for example, Peter Berkowitz, “Other People’s Mothers: The Utilitarian Horrors of Peter Singer” [review of Singer’s A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, and Singer’s Practical Ethics, Second Edition], The New Republic (January 10, 2000), pp. 27–37; Thomas Nagel, “What Peter Singer Wants of You” [review of Singer’s The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty, and Jeffrey A. Schaler, ed., Peter Singer Under Fire: The Moral Iconoclast Faces His Critics], New York Review of Books (March 25, 2010); Jenny Teichman, “Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” [review of Singer’s A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation, and Dale Jamieson, ed., Singer and His Critics], The New Criterion (October 2000), available at https://newcriterion.com/issues/2000/10/dr-jekyll-mr-hyde, last accessed May 7, 2023.

For his defense of utilitarianism as “the most defensible ethical view” (p. xv), Singer refers readers to Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer, The Point of View of the Universe (Oxford University Press, 2014).

Malaka Gharib, “Why Peter Singer – The ‘Drowning Child’ Ethicist – Is Giving Away His $1 Million Prize,” NPR Goats and Soda interview (September 29, 2021), available at https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/29/1039417879/why-peter-singer-the-drowning-child-ethicist-is-giving-away-his-1-million-prize., last accessed November 14, 2023.

Title: Peter Singer, Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter
Princeton University Press, 2023, 464 pp., ISBN: 978-0-691-23786-2—Fully Updated and Expanded Edition
Author: Steven L. Johnson
Publication date: 29-11-2023
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: Society
Print ISSN: 0147-2011
Electronic ISSN: 1936-4725
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00935-9