Peter Singer

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

Philosopher Derek Parfit claimed that nothing matters unless ethical and other normative beliefs are objectively true. Parfit, who died on 1 January 2017, wrote a three-volume work, On What Matters (2011–17), because he believed that the meaningfulness of his life, and the lives of others who devote themselves to ethical thought ...

In its original meaning, the word ‘philosopher’ simply meant ‘lover of wisdom’. At a time when theories of knowledge were still in their infancy, it was applied to thinkers – often, by ...

On your way to work, you pass a small pond. On hot days, children sometimes play in the pond, which is only about knee deep. The weather’s cool today, though, and it’s early in the morning, so you are surprised to see a child splashing about in the pond. As you get closer you see that it is a very young child, just a toddler, who is flailing about, unable to stay upright or walk out of the pond ... If you don’t wade in and pull him out, he seems likely to drown. Wading in is easy and safe, but you will ruin the new shoes you bought only a few days ago, and get your suit wet and muddy ... What should you do?

This sequel to In Defense of Animals, published twenty years ago, contains fourteen new essays, three revised essays and one that has been reprinted unchanged. Claiming that ‘philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s’, Peter Singer devotes Part I to ‘The ideas’. The second edition displaces the now well-published philosophers found in the previous edition (e.g., Tom Regan, Stephen Clark, Mary Midgley) for a new generation of thinkers. They argue for ‘a new approach to the wrongness of killing, one that considers the individual characteristics of the being whose life is at stake, rather than that being’s species’. An arresting example is David DeGrazia’s suggestion that linguistically trained apes and dolphins are persons, while other members of their species are borderline persons. His justifications are that linguistically trained animals are exceptionally talented by comparison with their lower-IQ species confrères, and that learning a language means one is capable of more complex thought.

On the face of it, this book represents a strange project: to elaborate for the reader’s consideration the moral beliefs of a man whom the author judges (and judged in advance, one suspects) to be shallow, inconsistent, lacking moral and intellectual sobriety, and to have failed so often to act on the moral principles he repeatedly professes that he can fairly be accused of hypocrisy ...