October 7–14, 1999

20 questions

Peter Singer

interview by Vance Lehmkuhl

Peter Singer helped to found the modern "animal rights" (AR) movement with his 1975 book Animal Liberation, in which he argued that our willful ignorance of the pain and suffering of non-human animals is a moral error analogous to racism and sexism. His appointment to head Princeton University’s bioethics department, which he started this fall, has unleashed a howl of outrage from advocates for the disabled, stemming from what some see as a simple endorsement of infanticide: Singer has written that parents of a severely disabled, brain-damaged infant might be morally justified in killing it shortly after birth if it had no prospects of achieving self-awareness or pain-free living. Media reports have isolated this thread from the whole cloth of Singer’s ethical philosophy. In a recent phone conversation, City Paper discussed the controversy and its context.

You usually write with an obvious motive to change people’s behavior. Are you disappointed when people fail to act on your ideas?

Well first, of course, I’m disappointed that there are still people in the world who are not vegetarian — certainly people who could walk into a supermarket and buy vegetarian food, but instead choose to buy food that has come from the slaughterhouse. Yes, I am disappointed in that. On the other hand I’m pleased at how many have told me that they were influenced by Animal Liberation to change their way of living.… I still want to influence people to move to a lifestyle that does not involve inflicting unjustifiable suffering on any beings at all, and I will continue to be actively involved in the animal movement in this country as I was in Australia. It’s not just a matter of writing books or articles.

Have you ever personally advised someone face-to-face to carry out a mercy killing?

I have had people coming to me concerning their own life-and-death decision-making — that is, patients who did not want to continue to live — but I think I have only once or twice had conversations with doctors about questions relating to disabled infants they were treating. And as far as parents are concerned, well… if I have, it’s not been for a long time.

	"Americans tend to look at almost every issue as if it’s a question of rights; I don’t. People will say ‘I have a right to eat meat or wear fur,’ and they’re just trotting out ‘rights’ out of their — wherever."

Let’s say Princeton had hired a big-game hunter or ex-cattle rancher to head the department — do you think there would be an uproar?

Assuming that after doing so they were qualified in philosophy and ethics, and that they had a record of scholarship in publications that entitled them to the chair, I don’t think there’d be any uproar at all, no.

So someone who had personally caused multiple deaths for little or no reason would be more acceptable than someone who theorizes about allowing death?

Well, yes, but the difference is that people don’t care about people who routinely cause death to animals, and most of them are participating in the industry that does that all the time, even if they don’t do it hands-on themselves. Whereas people have enormous reservations — and, in a sense, properly so — about taking the life of any human being whatsoever. And the focus of your question illustrates the enormity of that gap, and of course that’s one of the things I’m trying to get people to think about.

Could there be a basic problem in referring to animals’ "rights?"

You know, Americans tend to look at almost every issue as if it’s a question of rights; I don’t. People describe me as an "animal rights advocate" and that’s not strictly correct.… While the language of rights has a use, particularly in political contexts, I don’t really like it as the foundation of moral argument, because it’s too intuitive, and people’s intuitions are different. People will say, "I have a right to eat meat, I have a right to wear fur," and they’re just trotting out "rights" out of their — wherever. Whatever they feel like doing, they’ve got a right to do. I’d rather look at the interests of animals and the wrongness of ignoring those interests by inflicting suffering or death unnecessarily.

Do you think stunts like last year’s mink "liberation" in England do more harm than good for the movement?

Yes, I do think that while many AR activists are very dedicated and committed, and while I understand their frustration at the slow pace of change, some of them are not thoughtful enough about the ethics or the consequences of what they’re doing — especially when it allows people to write off the AR movement as fanatics, extremists, or, worse still, terrorists. We must be aware that some people will slur and distort our aims and we must absolutely minimize the opportunities we give them to do so. And secondly I do not hold with releasing animals into an environment from which they have not come, and I think that to release thousands of minks into a hostile environment, you’re upsetting the balance of nature in that area, and also putting the AR movement directly in opposition to the environmental movement, which should be our natural allies in fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet. So it’s simply not a very clever thing to do.

But doesn’t your stand on disabled infants feed into the "AR people don’t care about humans" myth?

Well, at the time I first wrote on this, back in 1979, I did not imagine that people would so grossly distort what I was writing. I think that anyone who really reads that will see that the whole impetus for it comes out of a concern for the prevention of pointless suffering, in this case that of babies and small children. People will see that my position on both humans and animals stems from that motive. It was only quite some time subsequently that this kind of distorted view of it became prevalent in the press. By that time my writing was out there, and I still think the position is sound. I’m not going to change my tune just because people distort it; I’m just going to keep trying to get the message across, get people to hear it in the way it was intended.