Seoulscapade

It’s been a couple of months since I resigned from the Language Education Institute at SNU after 6 years on the job. I left with an overwhelming feeling of contempt for the place and how it is run.  My patience just ran out, and the most important thing to do then was to quit.

I’ve had to take a pay cut but that’s fine with me. I’m free lancing now and a hell of a lot happier. Admittedly, it was worry before some work came along but I’ve got some now that should last a while. Now I can work from home—an ideal situation that fits in well with my astronomy studies, independent temperament and inability to suffer any more clueless twits.

I won’t go into it to save myself some lawsuits, but I will describe a practice which it also done in Korea’s private companies. It’s truely ludicrous. This place had a system of temporary upper management. The Director’s term is 2 years or less and the Executive Director signs on for 2 years with a maximum 2 year extension. The institute was essentially a business run inside the university. However, it gets worse, only Humanties academics are given the top positions, not business people nor necessarily people with any experience.

The academic careerists are chosen according to the “network” and not by application. So, we had Humanities people who were clueless about business and about what we did, but they were in the position of running the business of the institute and our department! We used to joke that we should write a manual for these blow-ins so we didn’t have upheaval every 2 years or less. We’d have to adjust to the whims of whomever happened to .

So I ask the question, If you needed a manager for your business and you had the choice of employing for the long term businessperson with experience or a Humanities academic on a temporary basis whose main concern is their career, who would you choose? Or, let me put it another way. Which one of the two is the last person you would want running a business of any kind? . . . A reply isn’t necessay. I rest my case.

These jokers turned up the other day in front of Seoul National University’s modern Museum of Art. Here’s the official blurb for their antics:

Parfyme is an artist group consisting of Pelle Brage (b. 1978), Ebbe Dam Meinild (b.1980) & Laurids Sonne (b.1980). Parfyme has brought out several projects in public space within their own field of art, practical research and happenings. Highlighting the spontaneous action and using art as a tool for change, Parfyme uses their surroundings as playground for carrying out projects that covers everything from environmental reflections to thoughts on space and the way we use it and often presented with a great deal of humour.

The idea of this “installation” is very simple. The booth is the headquarters for the “artists” and the ideas boxes, complete with pens and paper, scattered about—you can see one above near the guy in the bumble-bee beanie—is their, umm, act. Actually, the idea boxes are basically the whole act, but it’s the public who are required to scribble down ideas and put them in the boxes, so the public, in effect, is doing the act, or rather the public is doing all of the thinking pertaining to the act. The best ideas were then pinned to the front of the booth, pictured below. The front of it is now covered in notepad papers with scrawls on them.

The “artists” only really had one idea. Build a booth and then just sit back and wait for the ideas of others to role in. Well, I’m going to fill out a slip of paper with my own idea and shove it in the box. It’ll go like this: “Why don’ t you bastards pack up and go home? Come back when you have actually cultivated a talent.”

You can just make out in the makeshift booth some sleeping bags. For a few nights, when it first “opened,” the jokers, or one of them at least, slept there. But nowadays the booth is completely empty. I guess the artists have left to perhaps to enjoy some warmer accommodation at nights.

One afternoon I passed the booth and there was a guy there, doing something at the little table they have to the right of the plastic booth. He was rushing about, busily walking to and fro, doing something at the table, with exacting purpose and speed. But I couldn’t see what he was trying to do, or what there was to really accomplish. Maybe he was trying to convey to observers the act of achievement in progress. It was like he was saying, “Look, I have a lot to do, and I’m really accomplishing something here.”

So, what the hell is this installation doing at MoA? It’s because the museum or gallery has an exhibition entitled “Temperance and Opulence – Art and Design works from Denmark,” and I presume these “happening” guests are part of it.

What a laugh to read that their “field of art” is “practical research and happenings.” That “field” would also describe just about anything anyone has ever done at anytime in the history of the human race. Yeah, they’ve pretty much got everything covered there, which means they can do anything and call it art. Nice strategy.

I can picture it now, how it was all conceived. Parfyme were getting pissed in a bar in Copenhagen after smoking some joints. Living off welfare was getting them down. They wanted to do something constructive with their lives. They wanted to travel to Asia.

They had received an art’s grant once for a “happening,” in which they sat in deck-chairs in a busy city mall, sun baking and sleeping, everyday for a week. It was called “Waking of the Oppressed,” and it was much celebrated among fellow installation artists around town, who were also sick of living off welfare, lounging around, and sleeping the daylight hours away.

After a few more Carlsbergs, and racking their brains to come up with the easiest and quickest piece of crap they could throw together to secure a grant, Parfyme hit on the idea that, since they were supported financially by others, why not get others to come up with their ideas as well? Then they could really sit back and relax. They drafted, on bar napkins, a cheap structure of wood and plastic they could nail together. Then they all went off to have another spliff to celebrate. And so it evolved from there.

These guys have worked out how to make life a permanent holiday. Well done!

Here’s the scene of another crash outside my office window at work. It looks a bit confused but I’ll clarify as best I can, though it’s still a mystery how it happened. The white car, bottom left, crashed into the black car, which was innocently parked beside the curb. What was the white car doing driving along the sidewalk, you might ask? I have no idea. It’s what makes the crash unique compared to the usual routine.

Over the winter season, this spot and a little further down is host to numerous accidents on a daily basis. Most involve delivery motorcyclists losing their traction in the wet and sliding along down the slope. It’s a treacherous patch.

I’ll be sitting at work some rainy days and I’ll hear the typical sounds of an accident in progress. First, there might be the panicked tooting of a horn to herald the event, if more than one vehicle is involved. Otherwise, I’ll just hear the tire’s skidding and clatter of a motorcycle hitting the road. That is followed by the sound of plastic and metal sliding along bitumen.

I used to leap up and look out. There would invariably be a guy in a helmet limping around on the road. His bike resting on its side would be farther down the road. Now, I don’t bother. I just hear the accident and think, there’s another pizza or ja jang myeun delivery guy down. These guys are always in and out of the campus delivering food.

The ja jang myeun I mentioned is a noodle and black bean dish, and it’s part of an amusing tradition at the university. If someone spends a lot of money on orders of ja jang myeun for dinner, it supposedly reflects the overtime they put in, hard at work, in their labs, and presumably well into the night. Rumor has it that some professors used to cultivate ja jang myeun reputations to make themselves look good. What a laugh.

As I said, I used to leap up and look out when I heard an accident, but I just don’t bother these days. The frequency of the accidents, the lack of any real trauma, and the routine scene that greets any witness have made me rather blasé. It’s a curious thing to observe in oneself—and a little disturbing.

In May, I was privileged to have the opportunity to attend two lectures given by Peter Singer for The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures, 2007, sponsored by the Korean Philosophical Society. Peter Singer is a world-renowned philosopher on ethics, and is the man credited with beginning the modern animal liberation movement with his groundbreaking book, Animal Liberation, published in 1975. He gave 4 lectures in all:

~ Understanding the Nature of Ethics
~ Ethics for One World
~ Ethics and Animals
~ Changing Ethics in Life and Death Decision Making

I didn’t think people outside of Korea would be aware of these or of where to obtain transcripts for them. For these reasons, I have finally gotten around to presenting them here. Click on the Peter Singer category for more.
Here are Peter’s Singer’s acknowledgments:

These lectures in part draw on and develop work that I have previously published in different form, as follows:

Lecture 1:
“Animal Liberation at 30,” New York Review of Books, vol. L, no. 8 (May 15, 2003), pp. 23-26.
“Response to Bernard Williams,” in Jeffrey Schaler, ed., Singer Under Fire, forthcoming, Open Court, 2008.

Lecture 2:
Rethinking Life and Death, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1995.

Lecture 3:
One World: Ethics and Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2002.

“What should a billionaire give – and what should you give?” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, December 17, 2006.

Lecture 4:
“Ethics and Intuitions”, The Journal of Ethics, vol 9, no. 3-4 (October 2005), pp. 331-352

The first lecture I went to was “Understanding the Nature of Ethics,” held on Wednesday, May 16, at 3 pm. The venue was SNU’s Auditorium Building 73. The next one I went to, “Ethics for One World” was at Soongshil University the next day. Unfortunately, the one I really wanted to be at was in Daejeon and the last one was over the other side of town. I’d already taken enough time off work.

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

1. Introduction

The traditional ethic of the sanctity of human life has been central to Jewish and Christian thinking for millenia. I shall argue that the traditional ethic cannot be defended in terms of public reasoning – that is, reasoning that can appeal to people independently of their religious beliefs. I shall begin by looking at the way in which we have, over the last 30 years, changed our understanding of when a human being is dead. I take up this seemingly settled issue in order to show that the change we have made is in fact an illogical one, and one that already represents a significant erosion of the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of human life – and yet one that few of us would wish to undo. Secondly, I shall consider how this question relates to decisions about those who we do not regard as dead, but who have irreversibly lost consciousness. From there I shall discuss the treatment of infants born with severe disabilities, touch upon abortion and the destruction of human embryos to obtain stem cells, and also consider the question of voluntary euthanasia, before concluding with a brief look at some broader issues.

2. Changing Conceptions of Death

In 1968 the legal definition of death, everywhere in the world, was based on the cessation of heartbeat and of the circulation of the blood. Since that year, with surprisingly little controversy, brain death has been accepted as a alternative criterion of death, not only in the United States, but in virtually every country of the world. Of all the developed nations, Japan was the most reluctant to accept this change, and to some extent has remained distinctive from other developed countries in not really accepting the new criterion of death. As we shall see, this scepticism is well-justified, evenif the practical consequences of the change are desirable.

The change in the definition of death was presented and accepted as an improved scientific understanding of the nature of death. It was therefore seen not as an ethical issue at all, but rather as a matter of medical science. This widely-held view is a mistake. The new criterion of death sprang from the suggestion put by Professor Henry Beecher of Harvard University, who was clearly motivated by the need to make organs available in good condition for the then-new procedure of organ transplantation. The Harvard committee that Beecher subsequently chaired did not claim, in its ground-breaking 1968 report, that its new definition of death reflected some scientific discoveries about, or improved scientific understanding of, the nature of death. It was, instead, because the committee saw the status quo as imposing great burdens on various people and institutions affected by it, and as preventing the proper use of the “life-saving potential” of the organs of people in “irreversible coma” that the committee recommended the new definition of death. But the judgment that it is good to avoid these burdens, and to ensure that organs can be used, is an ethical judgment, not a scientific one. To think that this definition was either a new scientific discovery, or merely a matter of clarifying a vagueness introduced by modern methods of intensive care, was a widely shared misconception.’ But it was in no-one’s interest – not that of doctors, hospitals, families of brain-dead patients, or potential organ recipients – to challenge the reassuring idea that accepting the new definition of death was a matter of taking the advice of experts on a technical and scientific matter. This may explain why the new definition has triumphed in a relatively uncontroversial way. But that situation is already unravelling.

Some patients who can be shown to have no brain function are quite evidently still living human organisms. They have been maintained in intensive care units – or even, in one case, at home – for long periods, and in the case of pregnant women, they have even supported fetuses who have grown to term inside them. If a human organism can “survive”, as an organism, for several years after all brain function has ceased, this shows that the brain is not essential for integrated organic functioning. True, the survival of these human beings is dependent on machines, but we do not consider a person on dialysis to be dead because her kidney function has been replaced by a machine. Similarly, we should not think of people whose brains have irreversibly ceased to function as dead because their brain functions have been replaced by machines or other techniques.

Attentive listeners will have noted that the passage I quoted earlier from the Harvard committee’s report refers to “irreversible coma” as the condition that it wishes to define as death. The committee also speaks of “permanent loss of intellect”. “Irreversible coma” is an odd term to use of someone who is dead, and it is by no means identical with the death of the whole brain. Permanent damage to the parts of the brain responsible for consciousness can mean that a patient is in a condition in which the brain stem and the central nervous system continue to function, but consciousness has been irreversibly lost. Patients in a persistent vegetative state are in this situation, although today they would not be said to be in a coma.

Admittedly, the Harvard committee report does go on to say, immediately following the paragraph quoted above: “we are concerned here only with those comatose individuals who have no discernible central nervous system activity.” But the reasons given by the committee for redefining death – the great burden on the patients, their families, the hospitals and the community, as well as the waste of organs needed for transplantation – apply in every respect to all those who are irreversibly comatose, not only to those whose entire brain is dead.

Why then did the committee limit its concern to those with no brain activity at all? One reason may be that the committee believed – as many others have believed since – that the bodily functions of people whose whole brain was dead could only be maintained for a day or two. Where the brain stem survives, the body does not need anything more than food, fluids and basic nursing care to keep functioning indefinitely. A second reason could be that in 1968, the only form of “irreversible coma” that could be reliably diagnosed – with no possibility of a patient being declared dead and then “waking up” – was that in which there was no discernible brain activity at all. Another possible reason for the committee redefining death only as far as those with no brain activity at all is that if the respirator is removed from such patients, they stop breathing and so will soon be dead by anyone’s standard. People in a persistent vegetative state, on the other hand, continue to breathe without mechanical assistance. So if the Harvard committee had included in its definition of death people who are in an irreversible coma but still have some brain activity, they would have been suggesting that people could be buried while they are still breathing.

We now know that the bodily functions of those whose brains have entirely ceased to function can be maintained for months or years. So the first possible reason for restricting the definition of death to those whose entire brains have ceased to function is no longer valid. Technology has also eliminated the second reason: although in some cases of patients in a long-term persistent vegetative state, we still lack any completely reliable means of saying when recovery is impossible, in a other cases new forms of brain imaging can establish that the parts of the brain associated with consciousness have ceased to exist, and hence that consciousness cannot return.

Thus of the three reasons for limiting the definition of death to those whose brains have entirely ceased to function, only the last – the problem of declaring patients dead when they are breathing spontaneously – remains.

One solution to the present unsatisfactory state of the definition of death, therefore, is to couple the implications of the reasons given by the Harvard committee for switching to brain death in the first place with our improved diagnostic abilities, and move on to a definition of death in terms of the irreversible loss of consciousness. With the irreversible loss of consciousness, we have lost everything that we value in our own existence, and everything that gives us reason to hope for the survival of someone we love.

The significance of consciousness, and its link with the brain, answers the fundamental question – “why the brain?” – which supporters of the whole brain death criterion have never been able to answer satisfactorily in any other way. The death of the brain is the end of everything that matters about a person’s life. Of course, the death of those parts of the brain required for consciousness, is also the end of everything that matters about a person’s life. So the definition of death in terms of the irreversible loss of consciousness means that the criterion for death is the irreversible cessation of function of what is variously referred to as the cortex, the cerebral hemispheres, or the cerebrum. To avoid the need to define this more precisely, I shall use the expression “the higher brain” to refer to whatever parts of the brain are required for consciousness.

Do we really want to introduce a new concept of death which implies that warm, spontaneously breathing human beings are dead? I doubt that it is wise to attempt such a revisionist redefinition of a term in common use. “Dead” is a term applied much more widely than human beings, or conscious beings. Living things with no brain at all, let alone a higher brain, can be alive, and they can die. Why fiddle with a term that we all understand quite well? Even the much more modest revision proposed by the Harvard committee has yet to be absorbed into the way most people think about death. It is common to read newspaper headlines like “Brain-Dead Woman Gives Birth, then Dies”. If we try to tell relatives that their loved one is dead when he or she is lying on a bed, with no machines in sight, breathing normally, they are simply not going to believe us. And with good reason: for like the proponents of the initial shift to brain death, we would be guilty of trying to disguise an important ethical decision as a matter of scientific fact.

We cannot go back to the traditional definition of death, for then we would lose the chance to obtain many organs that save people’s lives. But equally, we cannot go forward and define death in terms of the irreversible loss of consciousness. But while most people would have difficulty in believing that someone lying on a bed, breathing normally, is dead, they do distinguish between different brain functions, not for the purposes of separating the living from the dead, but because there are some brain functions that we care about, and others that do not matter. If then, we ask which brain functions do matter, I believe that most people would answer that it is, minimally, those associated with consciousness. If it could be shown that vital organs were removed from patients who still retained the capacity for conscious experience, the likelihood of a public outcry would be much greater than if it were reported – as in fact it has been reported – that organs are being taken from patients whose brains continue to secrete hormones, and who thus are not legally dead, in the sense that their brains have not entirely ceased to function.

Stressing the importance of consciousness may suggest that we should move to a higher brain conception of death; but this is not the only possible conclusion to draw. To claim that human beings die when they have irreversibly lost the capacity for consciousness is too paradoxical. Instead we could accept the traditional conception of death, but reject the ethical view that it is always wrong intentionally to end the life of an innocent human being. We could then regard it as ethically acceptable (subject to the appropriate consent being given) to discontinue life support, or to remove organs for transplantation, when there has been an irreversible loss of consciousness. We would thus achieve the same practical outcome as we would achieve by redefining death in terms of the irreversible loss of consciousness. We would, in the terms used by the Harvard committee, have relieved the burden on families, hospitals and those in need of hospital beds, placed by the need to care for those who can never return to consciousness. We would have relieved this burden, not only when it arises from those whose whole brain has ceased to function, but also when it arises from those whose brain stem continues to operate. We would have done this without having to declare dead – in any sense – those who breathe unaided. Last but by no means least, we would have made our ethical judgments transparent, thus advancing public understanding of the issues involved rather than hindering it.

The only serious objection I can see to this proposal is the claim that, no matter how logically compelling it may be, it is so out of touch with reality that it stands no chance of success. After all, it is a head-on challenge to the traditional doctrine of the sanctity of all human life. Better, some will say, to do our best to push back the extent of that doctrine’s reach, by extending the definition of death to cover those who have irreversibly lost consciousness, than to hurl ourselves vainly against the doctrine’s citadel. Better, in other words, to maintain the fiction that brain death really is death, and indeed to try to spread this fiction even wider.

I would not deny that there are occasions when a fiction serves a useful purpose and is better not disturbed. But this does not seem to be one of them. For one thing, the fiction is coming apart anyway; and on the other, the traditional sanctity of life doctrine is increasingly being abandoned by both medical practice and the law, if not yet in the United States, then in other countries like The Netherlands, Belgium, and Great Britain. Truth is generally a better basis for ethics than fiction.

3. Life and death decision-making for embryos fetuses and infants.

I have shown that even those who want to hold fast to a traditional view of the sanctity of all human life must face difficult problems in relation to humans whose brains have irreversibly ceased to function. To reach a coherent and consistent solution to these problems, we need to dig deeper, and question something that we ordinarily take for granted, the idea that it is always wrong to take the life of an innocent human being. This is, to many people, a shocking suggestion, for the sanctity of human life is something that we scarcely dare question. Yet philosophers ought to question just those beliefs that we routinely take for granted, including this one, and I hope I have now shown that the questions are already raised even by something that is a matter of broad consensus, namely the shift to a definition of death in terms of the irreversible cessation of brain function. So here is one way to make progress with this problem. Ask yourself: “Is it worse to kill a human being than it is to kill, say, a chicken?” Unless you are a vegetarian, you are certainly going to say yes, it is. And even if you are a vegetarian – as I am – you are very likely going to think – as I do – that when someone kills people randomly in the street or in a school, that is a greater tragedy than what happens daily at a slaughterhouse. But why? Unless we take refuge in religious teachings, which not all of us share, the answer has to be because of some difference between humans and animals. That difference, however, cannot merely be the fact that we belong to one species and chickens, for instance, belong to another. To think that mere species membership alone could make such a crucial moral difference would be a kind of species-racism – more briefly, speciesism. Suppose there were intelligent Martians, very like us, and entirely peacable and friendly to us, but of a different species. Would it be acceptable to kill them, just because they are not members of our species? Surely not.

So if it is worse to kill human beings at random than to kill nonhuman animals, the difference must have something to do with the kinds of beings that humans are. And I would suggest, more specifically, that it must have something to do with the higher mental capacities that humans have – capacities that nonhuman animals do not have. This cannot be merely the capacity to feel pleasure or pain, or to suffer from the severing of a relationship like that between mother and child, for all mammals have these capacities. To give us a reason for thinking it much worse to kill typical humans than it is to kill beings of other species, the capacities must go beyond these – they might include, not merely awareness, but self-awareness, or possibly the capacity for making plans for the future. Here we have, I believe, a reason for distinguishing between the wrongness of killing beings that is based on something that is clearly morally relevant. The fact that a being is capable of understanding that it has “a life” does make it worse, other things being equal, to end that life. Then, and only then, are we ending the life of a being that knows it is alive, and can see itself as existing over time. Then, and only then, does the being have any conception of what it might lose by being killed, or have any capacity to have desires for the future that are thwarted by being killed.

But at this point it will become obvious that while typical humans – the humans who get killed when a suicide bomber blows himself up in a public square – have these capacities, and have them to a degree that a nonhuman animal does not, some humans do not have them. Newborn infants, for example, do not have them. And, while you might immediately object that a newborn infant has the potential to become a being with intellectual capacities far superior to those of any nonhuman animal, if this is supposed to be the reason why it is as bad to kill a newborn infant as an older human being, we shall have to acknowledge that the human fetus also has a very similar potential to that of the infant, and hence the same reason would make it very seriously wrong to kill a human fetus.

Some people, particularly in the United States, will endorse this conclusion. But in my view it is misguided, both for fetuses and for embryos. The world population is more than six billion, and is heading for somewhere around 9 or 10 billion – a figure that will strain our planet’s resources to the limits of their capacity, especially the ability of the atmosphere to absorb our carbon dioxide emissions = a topic I will discuss in my next lecture. We do not think it obligatory, or even desirable, for fertile couples to bring as many human beings as possible into existence, even though each one of them would, in all probability, become a unique, rational, self-aware human being. And on the same grounds, I do not think that the fact that a human fetus would, in all probability, become a unique, rational, self-aware being is a reason against having an abortion.

Since research into the use of stem cells has been widely discussed in Korea, I shall add that what I have said about fetuses applies even more clearly to the early human embryo that is destroyed in order to obtain human embryonic stem cells. Again, the fact that these embryos are human in the sense of being a member of the species Homo sapiens is, for the reasons given in my first Dasan lecture, and also above, not a ground for thinking that they have a right to life. We should not favor our own species merely because it is our own. And the embryo, when it is in vitro, cannot even develop further without assistance, both from scientists and from a woman who will accept it into her body. Obviously, the embryo at this early stage has no capacity for feeling pain or pleasure, or for having any conscious experiences at all. If, as I have argued, its potentiality is not a sound basis for attributing a right to life to it, then there is no ethical objection to destroying it, as long as we have the consent of the people from whom the egg and sperm came. If stem cells really hold the promise of cures for major diseases that afflict millions, and the best source for these stem cells is a human embryo, then we could argue that there is even an ethical obligation to obtain stem cells in that way.

4. The treatment of infants with severe disabilities.

I can now begin to explain my views on the issue of life-and-death decision making for infants with disabilities. For the reason I have just quickly sketched, I do not think that killing any newborn infant is morally equivalent to killing a rational and self-conscious being. This does not mean, of course, that killing infants is a matter of moral indifference. On the contrary, to kill an infant is normally very wrong indeed, but normally it is wrong primarily because of the harm it does to the parents, who have conceived the child, and already love it and wish to nurture it. The death of a newborn infant is generally a tragedy for the parents, not for the infant who has not even glimpsed the prospects of the life that might have been in store for it.

What difference, then, does disability make to our life-and-death decision-making for newborn infants? I became interested in the treatment of severely disabled newborn infants in the late 1970s when I learned that it is common practice for doctors to deal with such cases by “letting nature take its course.” This means that no operations are performed, or no antibiotics given, and the babies die slowly over many days, weeks, or even months. Parents are often not consulted, but simply told that there is nothing that can be done for their child. This seems to me an evasion of moral responsibility, and often grossly inhumane. Yet on investigating the prospects for some of the more severely disabled infants, I had to accept that it was not always good to prolong life, no matter what its prospects might be. But who should make this difficult decision? The infant, of course, cannot.

The parents are, in normal circumstances, the people most affected by whether their infant lives or dies, and they should, on the basis of the fullest possible information, have the principal say in the decision whether or not the resources of modern medicine should be used to keep their child alive. I accept that doctors may have an unduly negative view of life with a particular disability. I therefore urge parents in doubt over such a decision not to rely only on information from their doctors, but to contact groups representing those with the particular disability, or their parents or carers, to broaden their sources of information.

Nevertheless, parents will still sometimes decide, on reasonable grounds, that it is better that the child should not live. What should happen then? Around the time I took up my appointment at Princeton, when the controversy about my views on this topic was given a lot of publicity, I received a phone call from a doctor who directs a neonatal intensive care unit, and deals with such cases every day. He told me that, after consulting with parents, if they agree that it is better that their child should not be kept alive, he will turn off respirators, and even withdraw the tubes that supply the baby with food and fluids. But he will not give the baby a lethal injection. He said that he sees an important moral distinction there, but he could not explain to me in what it lay. I told him that I can understand why, psychologically, he perceives the two as different, but that I can see no important moral distinction between allowing death to occur by the deliberate withholding of available medical treatment and actively intervening to hasten death and ensure that it comes swiftly and humanely. In fact, I think the latter course, precisely because it does involve less suffering, is often the morally better one to take.

Not all doctors, of course, are as ready as this doctor was to consult with parents and withdraw treatment, even when the prospects for a baby are very poor. Around the same time that I spoke to the doctor, I received an email from a woman I will call Mrs B:

My son, John [not his real name], was born almost 2 1/2 years ago 11 weeks premature and weighing only 1 lb 14oz. They assured me that because he was already 29 weeks and had no intracrainial hemorrhages that he would be fine; he would just need to catch up with other kids his birth age. That is not the case. John has spastic diplegia cerebral palsy with underlying right hemiplegia…, has sensory problems, and has speech delays. We don’t know what his level of intellectual functioning will be, although people tell me he will probably be of “normal” intelligence with perhaps numerous learning disabilities. He is certainly more functional than some children with CP and has at least a small chance at a reasonably “normal” life, but that is not the issue.

My husband and I love our son (middle of three), but had someone told me, “Mrs. B. your son will have numerous disabilities down the road. Do you still want us to intubate him?”, my answer would have been no. It would have been a gut wrenching decision, but it would have been for the best. It would have been in the best interest for John, for us, and for our other children. I am saddened beyond words to think of all he will have to cope with as he grows older.

This is not the only letter of this kind I have received, and I do not think that Mrs B is an atypical mother. Many parents of children with severe disabilities judge the lives of their children to be such that it would have been better if they had died at or soon after birth. Others, of course, take a very different view.

Mrs B goes on to make another point that is also relevant to the question of how most of us would act when faced with the option to choose whether to have a child with a serious disability:

This is definitely not the life I would have chosen for myself either. My husband and I have never made it a secret that we were not cut out to be parents of a severely handicapped child, and had always said that if we were to find out we were having one, we would abort. I felt I was not a special enough person to deal with having that kind of a child.

This is, evidently, a common view. Prenatal diagnosis is routinely recommended for women who become pregnant over the age of 35, and the overwhelming majority of women of that age act on the recommendation. If the tests show that the fetus is affected by a condition such as Down syndrome, or spina bifida, almost all women will terminate the pregnancy. Their motivation may be mixed. In part, like Mrs B, they may not see themselves as cut out to be the mother of a child with a severe disability. But, wanting the best for “their child”, they may also think that it is better to terminate a life that has started badly, and perhaps try again.

In thinking about these issues, we should not forget that most couples today, at least in the developed world, plan their families. They will have perhaps two or three children. The decision to abort a fetus that has, say, Down syndrome, is not a decision that is “anti-children”, still less “anti-life”. It is a decision that says: “Since I will only have two children, I want them to have the best possible prospects for a full and rich life. And if, at the outset, those prospects are seriously clouded, I would rather start again.”

This is surely a reasonable view to take. Does it reflect a prejudice against the idea that life with a disability can be worth living? If that is a prejudice, it is one that is very widely held. Most people believe that, other things being equal, it is better to have children without disabilities. Otherwise, why would be spend money on research to find ways of overcoming conditions like paraplegia?

It is curious that many of us seem to accept such reasoning when it comes to preventing the births of children with disabilities, sometimes even when this involves ending a life during pregnancy, and yet we are shocked by exactly the same reasoning as soon as the baby has been born. I am not sure why. If there is one thing that the opponents of abortion are right about, it is surely that birth does not mark any decisive change in the nature of the being itself. The development of the fetus into infant is a gradual one. Perhaps the most significant difference that birth makes is that the infant can more easily be given up for adoption. That is why, where the disability is not a very serious one, if there are couples keen to adopt a child, that is a better outcome than ending its life.

Apart from that distinction between the late fetus and the newborn, I can see no reason for drawing the line at birth – unless it is the need to have some non-arbitrary line that compels us to take our stand with birth. I have suggested that the real moral dividing line occurs later, when self-awareness begins. But here too there is no sharp line to be drawn. That is why, at one point, my colleague Helga Kuhse and I proposed that a breathing space of 28 days should be allowed after birth, in which parents and doctors together should have discretion to make life and death decisions about a newborn child. But I now think this is too arbitrary to work – so I will merely say that these decisions should be made as soon after birth as the accurate diagnosis of the infant’s condition, and the parents’ need for due consideration, permits.

I want to conclude this section of my lecture by emphasising that what I have been discussing is in the context of infants, and parents’ decisions about infants. None of it has any direct application to older children or adults with disabilities. The fact that a person is in a wheelchair, or blind, has nothing at all to do with his or her status as a “person”, and therefore is in no way relevant to the seriousness of ending that person’s life against his or her will. It is, I admit, true that I would allow parents to end the lives of children who would later grow up to be in wheelchairs, or blind. So people might say to me – as some have – that if my views had been widely followed, they would not be alive today. But that is also true in many cases in respect of abortion, and it might also be true in some cases because of prenatal counselling, since parents may have been advised to, for example, obtain donor semen to avoid a genetic disability. Does anyone see this as a reason to stop prenatal counselling? And no doubt there are many people alive today who would not be alive if their parents had not been able to have an abortion, because then their parents would not have had another child.

Finally, I would like to say again, as I have said many times before, that I believe that people with disabilities should be given the fullest possible support from the community in integrating into the community, and being enabled to receive an education, and to live and work as normally as they possibly can.

5. Voluntary Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide.

Another challenge to the traditional ethic comes from the increasing emphasis on the rights of patients to make their own decisions about medical care. In a free society, those with one ideological position about the wrongness of killing are not entitled be in a position to prevent an informed, competent terminally ill patient and a willing doctor from making and acting on the patient’s own judgment about when his or her life is no longer worth living. It is therefore odd that those who have claimed to be defenders of individual rights and freedoms have not all come to the support of the legalisation of voluntary euthanasia. How can anyone who thinks that the Government ought not to intrude unnecessarily in the private lives of its citizens hold that the Government should interfere in the private decisions of terminally ill patients and their doctors about when it is time to die?

The great irony of the work of the right-to-life advocates who sought, in vain, to prolong the life of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman whose husband and parents had a bitter court battle over whether her feeding tube should be withdrawn, is that the outcome of all the publicity about the case was a surge in the number of people in the United States completing advance declarations making it clear that they do not wish to continue to live in circumstances like those in which she was living for the fifteen years before her death. Thus the fight over the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube is likely to significantly increase the removal of feeding tubes. More broadly, the case has revived interested in the full range of right-to-die questions, including issues like active voluntary euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide that, because they require a patient to be competent to make decisions, raise ethical questions very different from those at issue in the Schiavo case itself.

The nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that individuals are, ultimately, the best judges and guardians of their own interests. So, in a famous example, he said that if you see people about to cross a bridge you know to be unsafe, you may forcibly stop them in order to inform them of the risk that the bridge may collapse under them, but if they decide to continue, you must stand aside and let them cross, for only they know the importance to them of crossing, and only they know how to balance that against the possible loss of their lives. Mill’s example presupposes, of course, that we are dealing with beings who are capable of taking in information, reflecting and choosing. Anyone who values individual liberty should agree with Mill that the person whose life it is, should be the one to decide if that life is worth continuing. If a person with unimpaired capacities for judgment comes to the conclusion that his or her future is so clouded that it would be better to die than to continue to live, the usual reason against killing – that it deprives the being killed of the goods that live will bring – is turned into its opposite, a reason for acceding to that person’s request.

Voluntary euthanasia will be morally unacceptable to some members of our society. Their views are, however, implicitly respected in the very idea of voluntary euthanasia – it is an option (like palliative care and the withholding of treatment) available to those who want it, and is not a mode of dying that must be taken up by everyone. Palliative care and non-treatment will remain the preferred option for many people. The fact, however, that palliative care can give many people the kind of dignified death they want does not mean that it is appropriate for everyone.

So it is scarcely relevant to argue, as many do, that there are few terminally ill patients who cannot be helped by palliative care. The figure may be as low as 5%. The fundamental point would still stand even if the percentage were only 0.05%: no patient should be made to die in ways that, while meeting the moral or religious precepts of some, are anathema to their own.

6. Letting Die

There is a further, broader, implication of the position I have defended about life and death. Just as we should be critical of the distinction between allowing to die and intentional killing in the case of the medical treatment of a severely disabled newborn, so too we should question this distinction when it comes to our failure to do enough to save the lives of people in absolute poverty in the world’s least developed countries. Here we are “allowing to die” by withholding aid, in order to have more to spend on ourselves. While this may not be exactly the same as killing, it is uncomfortably close in its outcome, and it is relevant to an estimated 18 million deaths from poverty-related causes every year. But this is a large topic and I will leave it for the next lecture.

A number of famous people have visited SNU including such digatories as Kofi Annan, but I’ve only gone out of my way to see two so far: Jane Goodall and Peter Singer.

A couple of years ago I saw a banner mentioning a Jane Goodall, written in Korean, and with help I had it deciphered, discovering that she was giving a lecture one late afternoon. Fortunately, it was at a time after work. This was a big thing for me, to see someone who’s something of a legend and apparently like minded in her view on animals. I didn’t even know she was still alive.

The lecture was mainly about promoting some initiatives she was behind, but it was still great to see her in person. At question time, Koreans again embarrassed themselves by launching into extended monologues about what they are about and what they are doing, before asking an actual question. I’d seen it happen before, but I still don’t know why they do that. I didn’t want to hear them, I wanted to hear her. Thankfully, the announcer jumped in to put a stop to it.

At the end people lined up at a book signing, and keen to do the same. However, I had an end of semester function to attend for my Korean class. How I wished to abandon it. But I just couldn’t, so I asked the girls I went with to take my book to get it signed when they got theirs done. That was a real shame, missing out on talking to her. I wish now I had not “done the right thing” by turning up at the Korean class function.

I saw Peter Singer only a few days ago. I actually took two afternoons off work to go to two of his lectures. He was giving in four in all for the 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures in Philosophy, sponsored by the Korean Philosophical association.

His four lectures were:

• Understanding the Nature of Ethics
• Ethics for One World
• Ethics and Animals
• Changing Ethics in Life and Death
  Decision Making

The first lecture above was at Seoul National so I simply headed from my office across the rain soaked campus to the venue. A nice booklet of the lecture in Korean and English was made available. From that, I had the gist of the lecture before it began.

That was fortunate because once the lecture did begin, after the preliminary speeches of no consequence, his every paragraph was followed by a lengthy Korean translation. This meant that the lecture dragged on somewhat and Singer could not elaborate too much. In other words, it was lengthy but the content wasn’t. I was fighting the urge to drop off to sleep. Credit must go to the translator, though, it couldn’t have been an easy job.

The second one was at Seoul’s Soongshil University, which is not far away Seoul National, and it followed the same laborious format. One spokesperson even did some of the same joke from the day before, noting how much rain there had been, and something about “Singer in the rain”. . .

At the Seoul National lecture pictured above, I reflected that Peter Singer and I had a number of things in common there: we were the only two western males in attendence; we were both Australian; and we were both vegetarians. That’s where it ends, though, because he’s famous at those things and I’m a nobody.

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

Throughout Western civilization, nonhuman animals have been seen as beings of no ethical significance, or at best, of very minor significance. Aristotle thought that animals exist for the sake of more rational humans, to provide them with food and clothing. In the book of Genesis, man is given dominion over the animals, and only humans are made in God’s image. St Paul asked “Doth God care for oxen?” but it was a rhetorical question – he assumed that the answer was obviously no. Later Christian thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas reinforced this view, denying that the suffering of animals is any reason, in itself, for not harming them or for showing kindness towards them. (The only reason they offered for not being cruel to animals was that it may lead to cruelty to humans; the animals themselves were of no account.)

Most Western philosophers accepted this attitude. Descartes even denied that animals can suffer. Kant did not, but he thought only rational beings can be ends in themselves, and animals are mere means. There were, however, a few exceptions to this dominant attitude. Montaigne challenged human arrogance, and Hume thought we owed “gentle usage”, although not justice, to animals. The strongest dissent to the dominant view came from the British utilitarian writers, Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, each of whom insisted that the suffering of animals matters in itself. Bentham went so far as to look forward to the day when animals will be recognized as having rights. But even the classical utilitarians relegated their comments on animals to the margins of their philosophical writings. Their thinking was influential in leading to laws that sought to prohibit gross acts of cruelty to animals, but it did not lead to reconsideration of the assumption of the priority of human interests when they conflict with the interests of animals.

In the East, the tradition is different. Both in Hinduism and in Buddhism, humans and animals are seen as closely connected. The Hindu idea that we may be reincarnated as an animal links us to animals in a way that is completely abhorrent to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic traditions. Compassion for all sentient beings is at the core of Buddhist teachings. Both the Indian king Ashoka, and the Tokugawa shogun Tsunayoshi, known as the “dog shogun” were far ahead of their Western contemporaries in making laws to protect animals. Nevertheless, in Buddhism animals are thought of as “lower” than humans – it is clearly a negative thing to be born as an animal. And while it would seem that the Buddhist precept of compassion to all sentient beings would lead to radically different practices towards animals, in fact we find that practices towards animals do not differ significantly between Buddhist and Western countries.

Against this background, let me introduce my own ideas. More than thirty years ago, I published an article in The New York Review of Books that began with these words:

We are familiar with Black Liberation, Gay Liberation, and a variety of other movements. With Women’s Liberation some thought we had come to the end of the road. Discrimination on the basis of sex, it has been said, is the last form of discrimination that is universally accepted and practiced without pretense, even in those liberal circles which have long prided themselves on their freedom from racial discrimination. But one should always be wary of talking of “the last remaining form of discrimination.”

In the text that followed, I urged that despite obvious differences between humans and nonhuman animals, we share with them a capacity to suffer, and this means that they, like us, have interests. If we ignore or discount their interests, simply on the grounds that they are not members of our species, the logic of our position is similar to that of the most blatant racists or sexists who thinks that those who belong to their race or sex have superior moral status, simply in virtue of their race or sex, and irrespective of other characteristics or qualities. Although most humans may be superior in reasoning or other intellectual capacities to non-human animals, that is not enough to justify the line we draw between humans and animals. Some humans –infants, and those with severe intellectual disabilities – have intellectual capacities inferior to some animals, but we would, rightly, be shocked by anyone who proposed that we inflict slow, painful deaths on these intellectually inferior humans in order to test the safety of household products. Nor, of course, would we tolerate confining them in small cages and then slaughtering them in order to eat them. The fact that we are prepared to do these things to nonhuman animals is therefore a sign of “speciesism” – a prejudice that survives because it is convenient for the dominant group – in this case, not whites or males, but all humans.

In the early 1970s, to an extent barely credible today, scarcely anyone thought that the treatment of individual animals raised an ethical issue worth taking seriously. There were no animal rights or animal liberation organizations. Animal welfare was an issue for cat and dog lovers, best ignored by people with more important things to write about.

Today the situation is very different. Issues about our treatment of animals are often in the news. Animal rights organizations are active in all the industrialized nations and have had a significant influence in some. A lively intellectual debate has sprung up. (The most comprehensive bibliography of writings on the moral status of animals lists only 94 works in the first 1970 years of the Christian era, and 240 works from 1970 and 1988, when the bibliography was completed. The tally now would be in the thousands.) Nor is this debate simply a Western phenomenon – leading works on animals and ethics have been translated into most of the world’s major languages, including Japanese, Chinese and Korean.

How well has the position I outlined in that first venture into this field stood up to the variety of criticisms and arguments that have been raised against it over the last thirty years?

To assess the debate, it helps to distinguish two questions. First, can speciesism itself – the idea that it is justifiable to give preference to beings simply on the grounds that they are members of the species Homo sapiens – be defended? And secondly, if speciesism cannot be defended, are there other characteristics about human beings that justify us in placing much more moral significance on what happens to human beings than on what happens to nonhuman animals?

The view that species is in itself a reason for treating some beings as morally more significant than others is often assumed but rarely defended. Some who write as if they are defending “speciesism” are in fact defending an affirmative answer to the second question, arguing that there are morally relevant differences between human beings and other animals that entitle us to give more weight to the interests of humans. The late Bernard Williams, however, defended speciesism in an unpublished paper entitled “The Human Prejudice” which will be published in a forthcoming collection of his essays, and also, with my response, in a collection of critical essays about my work to be called Singer Under Fire. Since Williams is the most distinguished and able philosopher to have attempted to defend speciesism against my own critique of it, I will spend a little time discussing his defense.

Williams begins with a discussion of different possible views of the place of human beings in the universe. He rejects religious and anthropocentric views according to which the universe revolves around us, either literally or metaphorically. But the problem with such views, he says, is not merely that we overestimate our significance from the cosmic point of view, but that we assume that there is such a thing as a “cosmic point of view” at all. Hence the claim that we have some, but perhaps relatively little, significance, is rejected as a muddle. Instead Williams prefers the Nietzschean view that “once upon a time there was a star in a corner of the universe, and a planet circling that star, and on it some clever creatures who invented knowledge; and then they died, and the star went out, and it was as though nothing had happened.”

It may be that human existence, or even all sentient life on this planet, will one day come to an end, and it will be “as though nothing had happened,” but in fact something will have happened, and there is no muddle involved in thinking that the universe will, timelessly, have been worse if all sentient beings who ever lived on this planet lived in unrelieved misery than it would have been if the lives of all these beings was filled with happiness and satisfaction. Just how much of a difference this will make in any overall judgment of the state of the universe will depend on something we do not know: the proportion of sentient life in the universe as a whole that is to be found on this planet. In the unlikely event that the Earth is the only place in the universe where sentient beings exist, or ever will exist, then our judgment of how well the universe has gone will depend entirely on how well the existence of sentient beings on Earth has gone. But if our planet is only one among billions of planets, each of which had, has, or will have, billions of sentient beings, then how well sentient existence on our planet goes is a very minor factor in any overall judgment of how well the universe goes.

To say this does not involve the quasi-religious claim that the universe actually has a purpose or a point of view. But the denial of a purposeful universe does not compel us to accept that the only sense in which our existence matters is that it matters to us. We can still maintain that our lives, and the satisfaction or frustration of our preferences, matters objectively. At least, there is nothing that Nietzsche, or Williams, says that refutes this possibility. All that is needed is the ability to imagine an impartial observer who puts herself in the position of all of the sentient beings involved, and considers which of various possible universes she would prefer, if she were living all those lives.

Williams’ purpose in arguing against the idea of a cosmic point of view is to suggest that all our values are necessarily “human values.” Of course, in one sense, they are. Since we have yet to encounter any nonhumans who articulate, reflect upon and discuss their values, all the values we have are human, or at least have been developed by human beings from behavioral dispositions we inherited from our pre-human ancestors. Still, the fact that our values are human in this sense does not exclude the possibility that our distinctively human nature includes an ability to develop values that would be accepted by any rational being capable of empathy with other beings. Nor – and this is the most important point – does the human nature of our values tell us anything about what our values can or should be, and in particular, whether we should value the pains, pleasures and lives of nonhuman animals less highly than we value our own pains, pleasures and lives.

Williams, to his credit, does not attempt to argue that because our values are human values, concern for animals is somehow misguided. On the contrary, he acknowledges that “it is itself part of a human, or humane, outlook to be concerned with how animals should be treated, and there is nothing in what I have said to suggest that we should not be concerned with that.” Instead Williams’s argument is directed to the idea that we do not have to justify having a bias or prejudice in favor of human beings over other animals

As we have seen, from the very beginning of my writing on these issues, I have drawn parallels between racism, sexism and speciesism. In each of these instances, I argue, a dominant group develops an ideology that justifies treating outsiders in ways that are to its benefit. This ideology also disregards or discounts the interests of these outsiders – they simply don’t matter as much as the interests of the insiders do. The analogy between racism, sexism and speciesism is useful, in part because it leads us to see humans, not as the only beings who matter, but as a dominant group that uses other beings for its own ends. Moreover, the analogy raises questions about the use of mere biological differences as the justification for differences in how much consideration we give to others.

To this analogy, Williams objects that speciesism is not like racism or sexism, and is not morally objectionable. It is true, of course, that the parallel between racism, sexism and speciesism is inexact. Williams gives some of the reasons why this is so. The differences between normal humans and, say, kangaroos, are vastly greater than the differences between people of different races, or between men and women. I said that myself in the first edition of Animal Liberation, when I wrote: “There are many areas in which the superior mental powers of normal adult humans make a difference: anticipation, more detailed memory, greater knowledge of what is happening, and so on.” The claim that speciesism is morally objectionable is not affected by such arguments, because I define specisism as discrimination on the basis of species, not as discrimination on the basis of superior mental powers, even if those superior mental powers typically are possessed by members of our species and not by members of other species.

The most curious aspect of Williams’s discussion of speciesism, however, is that he never discusses the cases in which this discrimination is most evident – cases involving human beings who do not have mental powers who are superior to those of a dog or a pig, but nevertheless are accorded the same superior moral status as other humans. Consider the fact that we are prepared to subject chimpanzees, monkeys, pigs and dogs to painful and lethal experiments, when we regard it as a violation of human rights to subject humans to such experiments – and here, “humans” includes humans who, perhaps because of a genetic abnormality, or an accident at birth, never have had, nor will have, intellectual abilities comparable to these animals. Does this not show a prejudice in favor of humans that has nothing to do with mental abilities or with any of the other features that Williams discusses in distinguishing humans from nonhuman animals? Any one who defends our present treatment of animals needs to respond to this possibility. It is not, after all, a purely hypothetical one. In many instances, the use of severely brain-damaged human beings would be beneficial for medical science, because there are significant differences between species, and results from research on nonhuman animals can be misleading. Yet we refuse to contemplate such research, while continuing all the time to do millions of experiments on nonhuman animals at a higher level of intellectual awareness than at least some of these humans.

When it comes to the crunch, Williams last resort in defense of “the human prejudice” is surprisingly crude. He asks us to imagine that our planet has been colonized by benevolent, fair-minded and far-sighted aliens who, no doubt fair-mindedly and on the basis of full information, judge it necessary to “remove us” – that is, kill us. In this situation, Williams says, we should not discuss the rights and wrongs of the aliens’ policies. Even if they are acting fairly and for the greater good of all, the only question, Williams thinks, is: “Which side are you on?”

It’s odd that Williams should first deny the analogy between racism and speciesism, and then resort to “which side are you on?” as the ultimate bulwark of his argument. For it is a question we have heard before. In times of war, or racial, ethnic, religious or ideological conflict, it is used to evoke group solidarity and suggest that any questioning of the struggle is treason. McCarthyists asked it of those who opposed their methods of fighting communism, and now the Bush administration has used it against its critics to imply that by criticizing the policies of the administration, they are giving support to terrorists. “Which side are you on?” divides the world into “us” and “them” and demands that the mere fact of this division transcend ethical issues about what is the right thing to do.

In these circumstances, the right thing to do, and the courageous thing to do, is not to listen to the tribal instincts that prompt us to say “My tribe (country, race, ethnic group, religion, species, etc) right or wrong” but to say: “I’m on the side that does what is right.” Although it is fantastic to imagine that a fair-minded, well-informed, far-sighted judge could ever decide that there was no alternative to the “removal” of our species in order to avoid much greater injustice and misery, if this really were the case, we should reject the tribal – or species – instinct, and answer Williams’s question in the same way, by being on the side that does what is right.

Before leaving this issue of the parallel between racism and speciesism, I should mention one other argument that has been made in defense of speciesism: the claim that just as parents have a special obligation to care for their own children in preference to the children of strangers, so we have a special obligation to other members of our species in preference to members of other species.

Advocates of this position usually pass in silence over the obvious case that lies between the family and the species. For example, Lewis Petrinovich, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Riverside, and an authority on ornithology and evolution, says that our biology turns certain boundaries into moral imperatives – and then lists “children, kin, neighbors, and species.” If the argument works for both the narrower circle of family and friends, and the wider sphere of the species, it should also work for the middle case: race. But Petrinovich is plainly to embarrassed to draw that conclusion. An argument that supported preferring the interests of members of our own race over those of members of other races would be less persuasive, today, than one that allowed priority only for kin, neighbors, and members of our species. But if race is not a morally relevant boundary, why should species be morally relevant?

In 1983, Robert Nozick argued that we can’t infer much from the fact that we do not yet have a theory of the moral importance of species membership, because the issue had not, until recently, seemed pressing, and so no one had spent much time trying to formulate such a theory. Since Nozick wrote that, however, many philosophers have given a great deal of attention to the issue of the moral importance, or otherwise, of species membership, but none of them has succeeded in saying anything at all convincing. Nozick’s comment therefore has taken on a different significance. It seems increasingly likely that there can be no successful justification of it.

That takes us to the second question. If species is not morally important in itself, is there something else that happens to coincide with the species boundary, on the basis of which we can justify the inferior consideration we give to nonhuman animals?

Those who regard morality as a kind of social contract say that it is the lack of a capacity to reciprocate. Peter Carruthers, for example, argues that ethics arises out of an agreement that if I do not harm you, you will not harm me. Since animals cannot take part in this social contract we have no direct duties to them. The difficulty with this approach to ethics is that it also means we have no direct duties to small children, or to future generations yet unborn. If we produce radioactive waste that will be deadly for thousands of years, is it unethical to put it into a container that will last 150 years and then drop it into a convenient lake? If it is, ethics cannot be based on reciprocity.

Many other ways of marking the special moral significance of human beings have been suggested: the ability to reason, self-awareness, possessing a sense of justice, language, autonomy, and so on. But the problem with all of these allegedly distinguishing marks is, as noted above in our discussion of Williams, that some humans are entirely lacking in these characteristics and few want to consign these humans to the same moral category as nonhuman animals.

The appeal to our treatment of human beings whose intellectual abilities are not superior to those of nonhuman animals, in order to demonstrate the speciesism of our existing practices towards animals, has become known by the tactless label of “the argument from marginal cases.” It is a powerful argument against the way we currently draw the boundary between beings with special moral status and beings who lack that status, but it also shows that a critique of speciesism has implications for how we think about humans, as well as how we think about animals. These implications some find alarming. I shall discuss them more fully in my next lecture. For the purposes of today’s discussion, only a brief summary of the issue is necessary. If we accept the prevailing moral rhetoric that asserts that all humans have the same set of basic rights, irrespective of their intellectual level, the fact that many nonhuman animals – let’s say, at least, all normal birds and mammals – are as rational, self-aware and autonomous as some human beings looks like a firm basis for asserting that all animals have these basic rights, including, presumably, a right to life. If, on the other hand, humans with profound intellectual disabilities are as lacking in rights as we currently believe nonhuman animals at the same mental level are, then it seems that we may use these humans in painful and lethal research, as we currently do with nonhuman animals.

Some argue that because in normal conditions human beings are members of a moral community protected by rights, abnormality does not cancel membership of this community. Thus Roger Scruton claims that even though humans with profound intellectual disability do not really have the same claims on us as normal humans, we would do well to treat them as if they did. But slave-owning societies had no difficulty in drawing lines between humans with rights and humans without rights. Nor is it clear why humans are to be elevated above other animals because of the characteristics they normally possess, rather than those they actually have. This argument seems to appeal to a kind of unfairness in excluding those who “fortuitously” fail to have the required characteristics. If the “fortuitousness” is merely statistical, it carries no moral relevance, and if it is intended to suggest that the lack of the required characteristics is not the fault of the abnormal humans, then that is not a basis for separating abnormal humans from nonhuman animals.

I conclude that the debate of the past thirty years has not revealed any fundamental objections to the idea that all sentient beings – all beings with interests – are entitled to equal consideration of their interests. Such a position does, however, face the inevitable difficulties of estimating what those interests are. The interest a being has in continued life – and hence the wrongness of taking that being’s life – will depend in part on whether the being is aware of itself as existing over time, and is capable of forming future-directed desires. A being who is incapable of seeing itself as existing over time cannot want to go on living, and so death cannot thwart that desire. To that extent characteristics like self-awareness and a sense of the future do make a difference to how serious a harm is done by killing a being. It might be objected that even a fish will struggle for its life if it is pulled out of the water. Is this a sign that it is self-aware, and wants to go on living? But the answer is that it is not. A fish pulled out of the water is certainly in distress, because it cannot breathe, and it presumably is suffering as it slowly suffocates. It struggles because of that distress, but it would be wrong to draw from that struggle the conclusion that it knows that it exists over time, and wants to continue to live.) Again, I shall say more about this issue of the wrongness of killing in the next lecture.

I should, however, say something about the boundaries of sentience. My view is that all sentient beings are entitled to equal consideration of interests. By “sentient beings” I mean beings with interests, and the capacity to feel pain is sufficient for a being to have interests – such a being has, at least, an interest in not feeling pain. But which beings have that capacity?

No one can directly observe the consciousness of another being. The only consciousness of which we have direct experience is our own. In all other cases, we can only infer the existence of consciousness by analogy. When other animals are in circumstances that would cause us pain, and they behave much as we would, we have some reason for believing that they are experiencing what we experience when we are in pain. The analogy grows stronger when we discover that they have nervous systems very like ours, transmitting impulses to brains like ours. Add the knowledge that we have a common evolutionary origin – animals are not clever little robots built by toy companies to mimic animal behavior – and it becomes reasonable to assume that they have conscious experiences as we do. So it seems clear that all mammals can feel pain, and there is little doubt about birds either. There has been some controversy about fish, and also about invertebrates. But a recent study of the behavior of fish strongly suggest that they are capable of feeling pain. With crustacea and insects it is more difficult to be confident of this. In some respects, their behavior appears to be more rigidly programmed, in a way that may not require consciousness. But we cannot be sure, and therefore the most ethical course of action is to give them the benefit of the doubt, and avoid, where possible, doing things that will cause them to suffer if they are capable of suffering.

Some people are skeptical about the impact of moral argument on real life. They believe that moral argument is really a rationalization of what we wish to do, and rarely or never does it change anyone’s mind. The animal movement offers a counterexample to this view. As James Jasper and Dorothy Nelkin observed in The Animal Rights Crusade: The Growth of a Moral Protest, “Philosophers served as midwives of the animal rights movement in the late 1970s.” This movement has led to significant reforms in the ways in which experiments are performed on animals, and, especially in the European Union, to laws phasing out some of the worst forms of factory farming, including keeping veal calves and sows in crates so small that they cannot walk or even turn around, and keeping hens in very small wire cages without any kind of nesting box to lay their eggs in, or enough room to perform basic instintual behaviors. These reforms in the European Union will affect hundreds of millions of animals, and transform large industries – all because of an ethical concern for the welfare of animals. Now it seems that the United States is beginning to follow Europe’s example. Following referenda in Florida and Arizona that have banned some of the cruelest factory farm practices, the largest pig producer in the world, Smithfield, has announced that it will voluntarily phase out keeping its sows in individual crates. Canada’s largest pig producer, Maple Leaf, has now said it will do the same. Now big veal producers in the United States have also announced that they will be phasing out the cruel individual stalls they have been using for veal calves. So here is an area of everyday life in which philosophy has played a truly critical role in society, not only at the level of ideas, but in instigating significant changes in society.

It is noteworthy that this modern philosophical challenge to the way we think about nonhuman animals came from writers in what is sometimes called the “analytic” tradition, that is, the tradition of English-language philosophy. Thinkers in the continental European tradition, the tradition of Heidegger, Foucault, Levinas, and Deleuze, played no role at all. Despite the much-vaunted “critical stance” that these thinkers are said to take to prevailing assumptions and social institutions, this extensive body of thought has largely failed to grapple with the issue of how we treat animals. Why should this have been so?

Of course, it is possible to ask the same question of philosophy in the analytic tradition before the 1970s, and some of the possible answers are common to all philosophical traditions. Just as it was convenient for the slave-traders and slave-owners to believe that they were justified in treating people of African descent as property, so too it is convenient for humans to believe that they are justified in treating animals as things that can be owned, and to deny that they have interests that give rise to moral claims upon us. But there are other, more specific factors involved in the failure of the continental tradition to challenge orthodoxy regarding animals, even when philosophers outside that tradition were actively engaged in debating the issue. One reason may be that the British tradition of Hume, Bentham and Mill already had reached the conclusion that the capacity for experiencing pain and pleasure is what is crucial to moral status. In contrast, the continental tradition, focused more on Kant, made the ability to reason, and with it the capacity for autonomy, the crucial requirement. Still, it is astonishing that so few of Kant’s followers noticed that this gave rise to a problem about the status of human infants and humans with profound intellectual disabilities. Clearly, if the ability to reason or to act autonomously, is what makes human beings “ends in themselves” rather than just the means to the ends of others, then obviously some human beings are just means to the ends of others, not ends in themselves.

The real lesson to be learned from the failure of continental European philosophy to grapple with the issue of the moral status of animals, is that to adopt a “critical stance” requires us to be critical about vague rhetorical formulations that appear profound or uplifting, but do more to camouflage weaknesses in reasoning than to hold them up for critical scrutiny. Philosophy should be less respectful of the authority of the “great” philosophers of the past, and more ready to punch a whole in inflated rhetoric that lacks clear argument – even if doing so makes us as unpopular as Socrates became when he did the same thing in ancient Athens.

My original New York Review essay, from which I quoted at the beginning of this lecture, ended with a paragraph that saw the challenge of the animal movement as a test of human nature:

Can a purely moral demand of this kind succeed? The odds are certainly against it. The book holds out no inducements. It does not tell us that we will become healthier, or enjoy life more, if we cease exploiting animals. Animal Liberation will require greater altruism on the part of mankind than any other liberation movement, since animals are incapable of demanding it for themselves, or of protesting against their exploitation by votes, demonstrations, or bombs. Is man capable of such genuine altruism? Who knows? If this book does have a significant effect, however, it will be a vindication of all those who have believed that man has within himself the potential for more than cruelty and selfishness.

So how have we done? Both the optimists and the cynics about human nature could see the results as confirming their views. Significant changes have occurred, in animal testing and other areas of animal abuse. Many big corporations, like Revlon, Avon and Bristol-Myers, used to routinely test their products on animals. They would immobilize thousands of rabbits in wooden boxes, and then, while the rabbits were fully conscious, place ingredients to be used in cosmetics directly into their eyes. Then the technicians would return a day or two later and measure the damage done to the eye. Sometimes very caustic or acidic substances would be placed in their eyes, and the eyeball would blister. One can only imagine how excruciating this must have been for the rabbit. Fortunately, as a result of the activities of the animal movement, these corporations no longer test their products on animals, and the eye test has largely disappeared. Fur is another area in which some progress has been made. In many European countries, and in North America, fur is much less popular than it was, because of publicity about the suffering of animals in the fur industry.

By far the most significant area of animal abuse by humans, however, is in farming, because the numbers of animals used there is so vast. In the United States alone, ten billion land animals are raised and killed for food each year. As I have mentioned, in Europe, whole industries are being transformed because of the concern of the public for the welfare of farm animals. Now this transformation may be beginning to happen in North America. Perhaps most encouraging for the optimists is the fact that millions of activists have freely given up their time and money to support the animal movement, many of them changing their diet and lifestyle to avoid supporting the abuse of animals. Vegetarianism and even veganism (avoiding all animal products) are far more widespread in North America and Europe than they were thirty years ago, and although it is difficult to know how much of this relates to concern for animals, undoubtedly some of it does.

On the other hand, despite the generally favorable course of the philosophical debate about the moral status of animals, popular views on that topic are still very far from the basic idea of equal consideration for the interests of beings irrespective of their species. Most people still eat meat, and buy what is cheapest, oblivious to the suffering of the animal from which the meat comes. Notwithstanding the gains made by the modern animal movement, it has to be admitted that on a global scale, the situation for animals is getting worse, not better. The gains I have mentioned are dwarfed by the huge increase in factory farming in Asia, especially China, but including also many other Asian nations that have an increasing, and increasingly prosperous, middle class. Korea, I am sure, is among them. The overwhelming majority of these factory-reared animals live miserable lives, entirely indoors, never knowing fresh air, sunshine or grass until they are trucked away to be slaughtered. In short, the outcome so far indicates that as a species we are capable of altruistic concern for other beings; but imperfect information, powerful interests, and a desire not to know disturbing facts, have limited the gains made by the animal movement.

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

1. Introduction

In this lecture I want to discuss what I see as the two ethical greatest failures of the industrialized nations in their relations with the rest of the world. The first of these is the issue of anthropogenic climate change, and the second is the response of these nations to the problem of global poverty. Although these are distinct issues, both of them challenge the way in which we draw the boundaries of our moral communities. To solve them, we need to extend these boundaries to include not only members of our own nation, but the entire population of our planet.

Today there is no longer any serious dispute about the fact that human activities are changing the climate of our planet. Climate change is not going to be a bad thing for every part of the world. It will help to make the frozen north of Russia and Canada more livable and more productive. Billions of the world’s poorest people, however, will have their lives put at risk by more erratic rainfall patterns, with some arid regions turning into deserts, and rising sea levels inundating fertile but low-lying delta regions that are home for tens of millions of peasant farmers in countries like Bangladesh and Egypt. Global warming will also mean more forest fires; hurricanes hitting cities that at present are too far from the equator to be affected by them; tropical diseases spreading beyond their present zones; the extinction of species unable to adapt to warmer temperatures; retreating glaciers and melting polar ice-caps; and rising sea levels inundating coastal areas. A far worse scenario cannot be ruled out: some scientists believe that the melting of the ice caps could release huge amounts of methane that accelerate further warming, forming a cloud layer so dense as to block out heat from the sun and cause the planet to go into a deep freeze that extinguishes life on earth.

Public discussions of climate change have generally focused on scientific, economic and political aspects. But climate change is an ethical issue, and among the most vital ethical issues we face today. The best way to understand how global warming is an ethical problem is to think of it as a question about how best to divide a scarce resource that no one owns. The scarce resource is the atmosphere, or more specifically, the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gases without changing the planet’s climate in harmful ways. We might compare the situation of the atmosphere, in this respect, to that of a lake surrounded by 200 different villages which depend on the lake for fish, an important part of their food supply. Each of these villages puts its wastes into the lake, but the amount of waste going into the lake varies considerably from village to village. The total amount is rising steadily, however, and experts predict that if the level of sewage is not reduced, the ecology of the lake will change, and some, or perhaps even all, of the fish will die.

Clearly, the villages need to agree on an acceptable amount of waste to go into the lake and, once that level has been agreed upon, to allocate each village a quota for the amount of waste it can put into the lake. There are different possible ways of allocating this quota. One would be to ask which villages have brought about the current problem. If some villages have, historically, put far more waste into the lake than others, it might be argued that they are the ones that should get the lowest quotas for the future – and perhaps even that they ought to compensate the villages that have put little or no waste into the lake for any reduced fish catch that they may suffer. In environmental law, this is known as the “polluter pays” principle. It is a fundamental point of economic theory that for markets to work efficiently, all costs should be “internalised” – that is, included in the costs of production – which means that if a producer emits pollution that harms any third parties, the producer should have to pay for the costs of cleaning up the pollution and/or compensating those affected by it.

Another possible principle would be to ignore the past, and give every village an equal waste disposal quota. But if the villages were unequal in population size, this would be unfair to those who live in the larger villages. A fairer sollution would be to divide the total amount of waste that the lake can handle by the number of people living around the lake, thus obtaining a per capita amount of acceptable pollution. Multiplying this per capita amount by the number of people living in each village would then yield the village’s quota for putting sewage into the lake. In the absence of other relevant factors, this is a self-evidently fair way to divide a common resource to which no individual, or group of individuals, has a stronger claim than any other. It is the same rule we use when dividing a pie among a group of, say, ten people, each of whom is hungry enough to want at least a quarter of the pie, but none of whom have any entitlement to more of the pie than any of the others.

If there are wide differences of wealth between the villages around the lake, a third possible principle might be considered. In such circumstances, some hold that it is fair for the better-off to make greater sacrifices than the worst-off – especially if the hardship suffered by the worst-off is due to the circumstances of their birth, the abilities they have inherited, or other circumstances for which they cannot be held responsible. If this principle is sound, the better-off villages should accept far stricter quotas than those villages that are badly-off.

I have identified three principles that might plausibly be held to govern the distribution of a scarce resource in circumstances like those we now face with regard to global warming. To decide which of these principles should apply would take us deep into contentious areas of normative ethics. But in practical terms, the choice between the principles is less relevant than one might at first think, because all three of them point in the same direction. Over the past two centuries, the nations that industrialized first emitted large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of it is still there, and that is why the atmosphere has exhausted its capacity to absorb more greenhouse gases without a change in the planet’s climate. Using the principle that the polluter should pay, it therefore seems reasonable that the developed countries, rather than the developing countries, should currently bear the burden of dealing with the problem of global warming. But if we forget about the past and switch to the equal share rule that we use when we cut up a pie, we also reach the outcome that the developed countries are the ones that need to cut their emissions most drastically. Developed nations account for three-quarters of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions while constituting only one-quarter of the world’s population. The United States, for example, uses at least five times its national quota under a system of equal per capita shares. Turning to the third principle, that the better-off should make greater sacrifices than the poor, leads to the same conclusion: it is the developed nations that are better off, and should be bearing the largest share of the burden of avoiding climate change.

By using more than their fair share of the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb our waste gases, the rich nations are, in all likelihood, inflicting devastating future losses on the poor farmers of developing nations – people who have no ability to mitigate the consequences of loss of rainfall, or rising sea levels. When President George W. Bush was asked, early in his presidency, if he intended to do anything about this situation, he replied: “We will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America.” Although Bush might not use the same language today, in the face of greater concern about climate change, there is nothing he has actually done that indicates any departure from this “America First” philosophy. A recent report prepared by his administration has shown that U.S. emissions are steadily increasing, and will grow 11 percent from 2002 to 2012.

Perhaps it might be objected that the principle of fairness that holds for dividing up a limited amount of food cannot be applied to the situation of greenhouse gas emissions. But then, the onus is on those who say this to suggest a different principle of fairness. And I am not aware of any plausible conception of fairness that could entitle the rich nations to continue their current practices of using such a large share of the limited capacity of our atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gases without bringing about disastrous climate change.

When the U.S. refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, it made other nations bear the burden of taking the first steps toward dealing with the problem of global warming. Of course, the Kyoto Protocol is not, in itself, enough but it is a first step.

Remember that people in the rich nations are continuing their high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, not so that they can survive, but so that they can maintain their present high levels of material comfort, driving their cars and turning on the airconditioning whenever they feel like it. As every foreigner who visits the US notices, most buildings are overheated in winter and excessively air-conditioned in summer – a minor symptom of a national habit of extravagantly wasteful energy usage. Despite a lot more talk about saving energy, nothing much has changed in recent respect. When in New York last summer, I went out on a warm evening to see An Inconvenient Truth, the Al Gore movie about global warming, the cinema was so cold I had to wear a jacket.

Today a few rich nations are unjustly appropriating a scarce resource that belongs to all nations, and to which they have no greater claim than any other nation. In order to avoid imposing some modest costs on themselves, they are putting in peril the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Some will object that for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to a fifth of what they are now – as the equal per capita shares principle suggests it should do – would cause a major economic crash, especially if this were to be done in, say, a single decade, and this would be bad for everyone. We don’t really know if that is the case, but it would be unwise to take the risk. We do need to take consequences into account, and especially costs for the poor and disenfranchised. But no one is suggesting that, in the foreseeable future, the US should aim to cut back its emissions to anything approximating what its global fair per capita share would be. The point of teasing out the implications of the equal per capita share view is that it shows us just how outrageous the current stance of the US is. The US is like a greedy person who, when the pie has been cut up so that everyone who wants pie can have an equal slice, takes five slices instead of just one, and then walks away, leaving it to the others to figure out how to adjust the remaining portions of the pie. Moreover, this greedy person is already overfed, while many of the others who were hoping for a slice of pie are severely underfed.

There is, in any case, an obvious solution to the concern that an equitable solution may increase overall costs. The Kyoto Protocol already permits developed countries to sell entitlements to emit greenhouse gases that they do not need to use themselves. Because the developing nations have no binding quotas in the first round of Kyoto cuts, they have nothing to sell. But if the Kyoto Protocol were based on equal per capita shares, the developing nations would see that they have nothing to lose, and a great deal to gain, by agreeing to be bound by the same rules as the developed countries. They would then be able to sell their quota. India, for example, would have a quota proportionate to its population of around one billion, but on current emissions it would require only about a third of that amount. So it would be able to sell on the world market entitlements to emit more than 600 million per capita shares. The United States and other developed nations would bid for those entitlements, and others that would be offered by other developing nations. As long as the total global quota is a significant reduction on present global emissions, this system would provide every country with an incentive to reduce its emissions – the developed nations, so that they would not need to buy so much from others, and the developing nations, so that they would have more of their quota free to sell. As a result the developed nations would be able to avoid the kind of drastic reductions in emissions required by a system based on equal per capita shares without saleable quotas, but to do so they would have to transfer some of their wealth to the developing nations. There would be nothing unfair about such a transfer, for it represents the fact that the wealth of the developed nations is made possible by their use of a resource that they do not own. They would simply be paying the rent.

Instituting a global system of trading emission quotas would also answer the objection that equal per capita shares would lead to inefficient production, in greenhouse gas terms. The present system of uncontrolled emissions allows developed nations like the United States to reap economic benefits for themselves, while imposing costs on third parties who do not share in the benefits of the polluters’ high productivity. A system of equal per capita entitlements combined with a market in emissions quotas would, by internalising the true costs of production, lead to a more economically efficient outcome. Admittedly, implementing such a system would be a serious challenge for existing global institutions. It would require measuring each country’s emissions and applying some form of sanction to countries that exceed their quotas. Somehow this challenge would have to be met. Climate change is a global problem, and it is difficult to envisage any solution that does not require effective global institutions.

Now I shall turn to the issue of global poverty. We are living in a world in which more than a billion people live at a level of affluence never previously known, while roughly a billion other people struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of less than one U.S. dollar per day. Most of the world’s poorest people are undernourished, lack access to safe drinking water or even the most basic health services and cannot send their children to school. According to Unicef, the United Nations Children’s fund, more than 10 million children die every year ― about 30,000 per day ― from avoidable, poverty-related causes. In this situation, what obligations do the wealthier nations have? And what obligations do we – residents of those wealthier nations, who every day spend not just one dollar, but usually many dollars, on luxuries and purchases that are trivial, not things we really need – have?

Last June the investor Warren Buffett took a significant step toward reducing those deaths when he pledged $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and another $6 billion to other charitable foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill and Melinda Gates to their foundation, has made it clear that the first decade of the 21st century is a new “golden age of philanthropy.” Gates’s and Buffett’s donations will now be put to work primarily to reduce poverty, disease and premature death in the developing world. According to the Global Forum for Health Research, less than 10 percent of the world’s health research budget is spent on combating conditions that account for 90 percent of the global burden of disease. In the past, diseases that affect only the poor have been of no commercial interest to pharmaceutical manufacturers, because the poor cannot afford to buy their products. The Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), heavily supported by the Gates Foundation, seeks to change this by guaranteeing to purchase millions of doses of vaccines, when they are developed, that can prevent diseases like malaria. GAVI has also assisted developing countries to immunize more people with existing vaccines: 99 million additional children have been reached to date. By doing this, GAVI claims to have already averted nearly 1.7 million future deaths.

Philanthropy on this scale raises both factual and ethical questions. Does it do any good? Should we praise the rich for giving so much or criticize them for not giving still more? Is it troubling that such momentous decisions are made by a few extremely wealthy individuals? And what obligations do we, who are not among the superrich, have to the poor?

Some people believe that if the rich have worked hard to earn their money, they are entitled to keep it. As long as they have not themselves caused the plight of the poor, they are under no obligation to give them anything. But we should recognize that there is a lot of good luck in being rich. People can earn large amounts only when they live under favorable social circumstances, and they don’t create those circumstances by themselves. Warren Buffett has acknowledged that society is responsible for much of his wealth. “If you stick me down in the middle of Bangladesh or Peru,” he said, “you’ll find out how much this talent is going to produce in the wrong kind of soil.” The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it.

In any case, even if we were to grant that people deserve every dollar they earn, that doesn’t answer the question of what they should do with it. We might say that they have a right to spend it on lavish parties, private jets and luxury yachts, or, for that matter, to flush it down the toilet. But we could still think that for them to do these things while others die from easily preventable diseases is wrong. In an article I wrote more than three decades ago, at the time of a humanitarian emergency in what is now Bangladesh, I used the example of walking by a shallow pond and seeing a small child who has fallen in and appears to be in danger of drowning. Even though we did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond, almost everyone agrees that if we can save the child at minimal inconvenience or trouble to ourselves, we ought to do so. Anything else would be callous, indecent and, in a word, wrong. The fact that in rescuing the child we may, for example, ruin a new pair of shoes is not a good reason for allowing the child to drown. Similarly if for the cost of a pair of shoes we can contribute to a health program in a developing country that stands a good chance of saving the life of a child, we ought to do so.

Perhaps, though, our obligation to help the poor is even stronger than this example implies, for we are less innocent than the passer-by who did nothing to cause the child to fall into the pond. Thomas Pogge has argued that at least some of our affluence comes at the expense of the poor. He bases this claim not simply on the usual critique of the barriers that Europe and the United States maintain against agricultural imports from developing countries but also on less familiar aspects of our trade with developing countries. For example, he points out that international corporations are willing to make deals to buy natural resources from any government, no matter how it has come to power. This provides a huge financial incentive for groups to try to overthrow the existing government. Successful rebels are rewarded by being able to sell off the nation’s oil, minerals or timber.

In their dealings with corrupt dictators in developing countries, Pogge asserts, international corporations are morally no better than someone who knowingly buys stolen goods ― with the difference that the international legal and political order recognizes the corporations, not as criminals in possession of stolen goods but as the legal owners of the goods they have bought. This situation is, of course, beneficial for the industrial nations, because it enables us to obtain the raw materials we need to maintain our prosperity, but it is a disaster for resource-rich developing countries, turning the wealth that should benefit them into a curse that leads to a cycle of coups, civil wars and corruption and is of little benefit to the people as a whole.

In this light, our obligation to the poor is not just one of providing assistance to strangers but one of compensation for harms that we have caused and are still causing them. It might be argued that we do not owe the poor compensation, because our affluence actually benefits them. Living luxuriously, it is said, provides employment, and so wealth trickles down, helping the poor more effectively than aid does. But the rich in industrialized nations buy virtually nothing that is made by the very poor. During the past 20 years of economic globalization, although expanding trade has helped lift many of the world’s poor out of poverty, it has failed to benefit the poorest 10 percent of the world’s population. Some of the extremely poor, most of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa, have nothing to sell that rich people want, while others lack the infrastructure to get their goods to market. If they can get their crops to a port, European and U.S. subsidies often mean that they cannot sell them, despite ― as for example in the case of West African cotton growers who compete with vastly larger and richer U.S. cotton producers ― having a lower production cost than the subsidized producers in the rich nations.

The remedy to these problems, it might reasonably be suggested, should come from the state, not from private philanthropy. When aid comes through the government, everyone who earns above the tax-free threshold contributes something, with more collected from those with greater ability to pay. Much as we may applaud what Gates and Buffett are doing, we can also be troubled by a system that leaves the fate of hundreds of millions of people hanging on the decisions of two or three private citizens. But the amount of foreign development aid given by the developed nations is woefully inadequate. The United States is the largest donor of government aid in absolute terms, but as a percentage of its gross domestic product, the U.S. ranks near the bottom, giving only 0.22 percent of its gross national income in foreign aid, or just 22 cents for every $100 the nation earns. (These figures are for 2005, the most recent year for which data is available on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] website.) Australia gave 0.25 percent of its gross national income. Japan gives a little more, 0.28 percent. But Korea’s record is much worse. In 2005 Korea’s foreign aid amounted to only 0.10 cent of its gross national income, just one tenth of one percent, a figure that is well below that of all the OECD Development Assistance Committee nations. (Greece is at the bottom of the OECD Development Assistance Committee nations, giving 0.17 percent of its gross national income.) As Cho Kun-ho, vice-president of the Federation of Korean Industries said last October, “Korea’s present foreign aid is hardly adequate considering that its economic power is ranked 12th in the world. Without a drastic increase in overseas aid, Korea may be considered a stingy member of the international community.” The good news, however, is that Korea’s aid did increase quite drastically between 2004 and 2005 – by almost 60 percent – and one can hope that the path will continue upward.

For several years now, the only countries to exceed the United Nations recommended target of 0.7 percent of gross national income have been Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, and Luxemburg. They do far better than all other nations, but even they give less than 1 percent of their income. This is still not enough to stop avoidable poverty-related deaths that are occurring all the time, nor is it so much as to be involve any significant hardship to the donor nations. As things now stand, therefore, there is no country in the world in which the case for individual contributions to relieve global poverty can be refuted by the argument that one’s government has taken care of the problem.

Aid has always had its critics. Carefully planned and intelligently directed private philanthropy may be the best answer to the claim that aid doesn’t work. Since non-government organizations are unconstrained by diplomatic considerations or the desire to swing votes at the United Nations, they can more easily avoid dealing with corrupt or wasteful governments. They can go directly into the field, working with local villages and grass-roots organizations. Of course, as in any large-scale human enterprise, some aid can be ineffective. But provided that aid isn’t actually counterproductive, even relatively inefficient assistance is likely to do more to advance human wellbeing than luxury spending by the wealthy.

The rich, then, should give – not just rich nations, but rich individuals. But who are “the rich” and how much should they give? Bill Gates may have given away nearly $30 billion, but that still leaves him sitting at the top of the Forbes list of the richest Americans, with $53 billion. His 66,000-square-foot high-tech lakeside estate near Seattle is reportedly worth more than $100 million. Property taxes are about $1 million. Among his possessions is the Leicester Codex, the only handwritten book by Leonardo da Vinci still in private hands, for which he paid $30.8 million in 1994. Has Bill Gates done enough? More pointedly, you might ask: if he really believes – as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation website proclaims – that all lives have equal value, what is he doing living in such an expensive house and owning a Leonardo Codex? Are there no more lives that could be saved by living more modestly and adding the money thus saved to the amount he has already given?

Yet we should recognize that, if judged by the proportion of his wealth that he has given away, Gates compares very well with most of the other extremely rich people in the world. Consider, for example, Gates’s former colleague and Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. Allen, who left the company in 1983, has given, over his lifetime, more than $800 million to philanthropic causes. Very, very few people will ever be able to give nearly as much. But Forbes magazine lists Allen as the fifth-richest American, with a net worth of $16 billion. He owns the Seattle Seahawks, the Portland Trailblazers, a 413-foot oceangoing yacht that carries two helicopters and a 60-foot submarine. He has given only about 5 percent of his total wealth.

Is there a line of moral adequacy that falls between the 5 percent that Allen has given away and the roughly 35 percent that Gates has donated? Few people have set a personal example that would allow them to tell Gates that he has not given enough, but one who could is Zell Kravinsky. A few years ago, when he was in his mid-40s, Kravinsky gave almost all of his $45 million real estate fortune to health-related charities, retaining only his modest family home in Jenkintown, near Philadelphia, and enough to meet his family’s ordinary expenses. After learning that thousands of people with failing kidneys die each year while waiting for a transplant, he contacted a Philadelphia hospital and donated one of his kidneys to a complete stranger. In Kravinsky’s view, to withhold a kidney from someone who would otherwise die means valuing one’s own life at 4,000 times that of a stranger, a ratio Kravinsky considers “obscene.”

What marks Kravinsky out from the rest of us is that he takes the equal value of all human life as a guide to life, not just as a nice piece of rhetoric. Buffett says he believes in giving his children “enough so they feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” That means, in his judgment, “a few hundred thousand” each. In absolute terms, that is far more than most Americans are able to leave their children and, by Kravinsky’s standard, certainly too much. But even if Buffett left each of his three children a million dollars each, he would still have given away more than 99.99 percent of his wealth. When someone does that much ― especially in a society in which the norm is to leave most of your wealth to your children ― it is better to praise them than to cavil about the extra few hundred thousand dollars they might have given.

Philosophers like Liam Murphy and Kwame Anthony Appiah at Princeton contend that our obligations are limited to carrying our fair share of the burden of relieving global poverty. They would have us calculate how much would be required to ensure that the world’s poorest people have a chance at a decent life, and then divide this sum among the affluent. That would give us each an amount to donate, and having given that, we would have fulfilled our obligations to the poor.

What might that fair amount be? One way of calculating it would be to take as our target, at least for the next nine years, the Millennium Development Goals, set by the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000. On that occasion, the largest gathering of world leaders in history jointly pledged to meet, by 2015, a list of goals that include:

– Reducing by half the proportion of the world’s people in extreme poverty (defined as living on less than the purchasing-power equivalent of one U.S. dollar per day).
–Reducing by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
–Ensuring that children everywhere are able to take a full course of primary schooling.
–Ending sex disparity in education.
–Reducing by two-thirds the mortality rate among children under 5.
–Reducing by three-quarters the rate of maternal mortality.
–Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of H.I.V./AIDS and halting and beginning to reduce the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
–Reducing by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water.

Last year a United Nations task force, led by the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs, estimated the annual cost of meeting these goals to be $121 billion in 2006, rising to $189 billion by 2015. When we take account of existing official development aid promises, the additional amount needed each year to meet the goals is only $48 billion for 2006 and $74 billion for 2015. This is really quite a modest amount of money. Consider, for instance, the fact that in the United States alone, there are 14,400 taxpayers earning a minimum of $5,000,000. There earnings total $184 billion. It would be no great hardship for them to give away a third of their annual income, for that would still leave each of them with an annual income of at least $3.3 million. The total amount that would be yielded by such a donation $61 billion, or more than the extra aid Sachs calculated was needed for 2006.

Now suppose that others around the world who are also very rich – even if not quite as rich as these – were to give a significant proportion of their income to meeting the goals set at the Millennium Development Summit. We can imagine a sliding scale, according to which those who earn more than $2,000,000 but less than $5,000,000 give a quarter of their income, those who earn between $1,000,000 and $2,000,000 give a fifth, and so on. Using a similar scale, and not going below those who are in the top ten percent of United States income earners, I calculate that wealthy people in the U.S. could contribute more than $400 billion annually while still remaining financially very comfortable. If we broaden this picture to include wealthy people all over the world, we could easily double that figure. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

If we are obliged to do no more than our fair share of eliminating global poverty, the burden will not be great. But is that really all we ought to do? Since we all agree that fairness is a good thing, and none of us like doing more because others don’t pull their weight, the fair-share view is attractive. In the end, however, I think we should reject it. Let’s return to the drowning child in the shallow pond. Imagine it is not 1 small child who has fallen in, but 50 children. We are among 50 adults, unrelated to the children, picnicking on the lawn around the pond. We can easily wade into the pond and rescue the children, and the fact that we would find it cold and unpleasant sloshing around in the knee-deep muddy water is no justification for failing to do so. The “fair share” theorists would say that if we each rescue one child, all the children will be saved, and so none of us have an obligation to save more than one. But what if half the picnickers prefer staying clean and dry to rescuing any children at all? Is it acceptable if the rest of us stop after we have rescued just one child, knowing that we have done our fair share, but that half the children will drown? We might justifiably be furious with those who are not doing their fair share, but our anger with them is not a reason for letting the children die. In terms of praise and blame, we are clearly right to condemn, in the strongest terms, those who do nothing. In contrast, we may withhold such condemnation from those who stop when they have done their fair share. Even so, they have let children drown when they could easily have saved them, and that is wrong.

Similarly, in the real world, it should be seen as a serious moral failure when those with ample income do not do their fair share toward relieving global poverty. It isn’t so easy, however, to decide on the proper approach to take to those who limit their contribution to their fair share when they could easily do more and when, because others are not playing their part, a further donation would assist many in desperate need. In the privacy of our own judgment, we should believe that it is wrong not to do more. But whether we should actually criticize people who are doing their fair share, but no more than that, depends on the psychological impact that such criticism will have on them, and on others. This in turn may depend on social practices. If the majority are doing little or nothing, setting a standard higher than the fair-share level may seem so demanding that it discourages people who are willing to make an equitable contribution from doing even that. So it may be best to refrain from criticizing those who achieve the fair-share level. In moving our society’s standards forward, we may have to progress one step at a time.

For more than 30 years, I’ve been reading, writing and teaching about the ethical issue posed by the juxtaposition, on our planet, of great abundance and life-threatening poverty. Yet it was not until I calculated how much America’s top 10 percent of income earners actually make that I fully understood how easy it would be for the world’s rich to eliminate, or virtually eliminate, global poverty. It has become much easier over the last 30 years, as the rich have grown significantly richer. Measured against our capacity, the Millennium Development Goals are indecently, shockingly modest. If we fail to achieve them ― as on present indications we well might ― we have no excuses. The target we should be setting for ourselves is not halving the proportion of people living in extreme poverty, and without enough to eat, but ensuring that no one, or virtually no one, needs to live in such degrading conditions. That is a worthy goal, and it is well within our reach.

Peter Singer
The 10th Dasan Memorial Lectures 2007

1. Introduction

Many philosophers who do normative or applied ethics appear to believe that the role of moral philosophers is to take our common moral intuitions as data, and seek to develop the theory that best fits those intuitions. My view, on the contrary, is that we should be ready to challenge the intuitions that first come to mind when we are asked about a moral issue. In today’s lecture I will argue that recent research in neuroscience gives us new and powerful reasons for taking a critical stance toward common intuitions. But I will begin by placing this research in the context of our long search for the origins and nature of morality.

In the Louvre Museum in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi. Such mythical accounts, bestowing a divine origin on morality, are common. In Plato’s Protagoras there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who, living in small groups and with inadequate teeth, weak claws, and lack of speed, were no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another. The biblical account of God giving the Ten Commandments to Moses on Mt. Sinai is, of course, another example.

In addition to these mythical accounts, for at least 2500 years, and in different civilizations, philosophers have discussed and written about the nature of ethics. Plato himself was evidently not content with the account he offered in Protagoras, for in his dialogues he discusses several other possibilities. In the Republic alone, we have Thrasymachus’s skeptical claim that the strong, acting in their own interests, impose morality on the weak, Glaucon’s social contract model, and Socrates’ proto-natural law defense of justice as the outcome of a harmony of the different parts of human nature.

Among the questions philosophers have considered are: whether ethics is objectively true, or relative to culture, or entirely subjective; whether human beings are naturally good; and whether ethics comes from nature or from culture. They have regarded such questions as having a practical, as well as theoretical, significance. Getting the answers right, they believe, will enable us to live in a better way.

Many of these thinkers were skilled observers of their fellow human beings, as well as being among the wisest people of their times. Consider, for example, the work of Mencius, Aristotle, Niccolo Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and David Hume. There are many things about human nature that they understood very well. But none of them had the advantage of a modern scientific approach to these issues. Today we have that advantage. Hence it would seem odd if we could not improve on what they wrote.

In what follows, I summarize some of the new knowledge of ethics we now possess, knowledge that was not available to any of the great philosophers I have listed. Then I will consider what normative significance this new knowledge has. What, if anything, should it contribute to our debate over how we ought to act?

2. Evolutionary Theory and the Origins of Morality

The single most important advantage we have over the great moral philosophers of the past is our understanding of evolution and its application to ethics. Although the philosophers I have mentioned were able to free themselves from the myth of the divine origin of morality and to explain morality in naturalistic terms, they lacked a proper understanding of how our norms may have arisen by natural selection with the gene as the basic unit for the transmission of inherited characteristics between generations. Without this knowledge, they could observe our feelings and attitudes but not explain them adequately. To see what evolutionary theory can add to even the greatest of the pre-Darwinian thinkers who have speculated about the origins of morality, consider David Hume’s discussion of morality in his justly celebrated Treatise of Human Nature.

Hume opens his discussion of justice by asking the question whether justice is a natural or an artificial virtue. In discussing that question he writes:

A man naturally loves his children better than his nephews, his nephews better than his cousins, his cousins better than strangers, where every thing else is equal. Hence arise our common measures of duty, in preferring the one to the other. Our sense of duty always follows the common and natural course of our passions.

Hume gets very close to an evolutionary understanding of the common sense of duty, but he could not explain, as modern evolutionary theory can, why “the common and natural course of our passions” takes the form it does. We now understand that the genes that lead to the forms of love Hume describes are more likely to survive and spread among social mammals than genes that do not lead to preferences for one’s relatives that are typically proportional to the proximity of the relationship. For we share more genes with our children than with our cousins, and more with our cousins than with strangers.

We can also now provide a deeper explanation of the truth of Hume’s converse, and more controversial, observation that “there is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself.” Much as we may regret it, most human beings lack a general feeling of benevolence for the strangers we pass in the street. In evolutionary terms, when we consider the species as a whole, the unit of selection is too large for natural selection to have much impact. Despite the picture books we had as children, early human life was not, by and large, a struggle for survival between humans and sabre-tooth tigers. It was much more often a struggle for survival between different human beings. There is no evolutionary advantage in concern for others simply because they are members of our species. In contrast to the selection of individual organisms within the species, which is going on all the time, selection between different species happens too slowly and too rarely to play much of a role in evolution.

Note, however, the factors that Hume lists as generating love for others: personal qualities, services, and relation to oneself. Relatedness we have already discussed. Personal qualities may generate positive feelings because they are likely to be of benefit to us, or to a small group to which we belong. In contrast to selection between species, which is rare and of little importance in evolution, selection within the species, between smaller, isolated breeding groups, happens much more often. These smaller groups do compete with each other and, in comparison with species, are relatively short-lived. The countervailing pressures of selection at the level of the individual or the gene would still apply, but less effectively. In some circumstances, there could be selective pressures that favor self-sacrifice for the benefit of the group. There would also, of course, be countervailing pressures favoring self-interested actions that do not benefit the group. If, however, the group develops a culture that rewards those who risk their own interests in order to benefit the group, and punishes those who do not, the cost-benefit ratio would be tilted so as to make benefiting the group more likely to be compatible with leaving offspring in the next generation.

The third exception that Hume mentioned was “services”. Here again he touches upon a focus of recent evolutionary theory, which has meshed with game theory in exploring such situations as the Prisoners’ Dilemma. This work enables us to give a fuller and more persuasive answer than Hume could to the question with which he began his discussion of justice.

Hume asked whether justice is a natural or an artificial virtue, and answered that it is an artificial one. By that he meant that “the sense of justice and injustice is not derived from nature, but arises artificially, though necessarily from education, and human conventions.” He adds that though the rules of justice are artificial, this does not mean that they are arbitrary. Justice is, for Hume, a human invention, though one that is “obvious and absolutely necessary.” But justice is not, at least not in its origins, a human invention. We can find forms of it in our closer nonhuman relatives. A monkey will present its back to another monkey, who will pick out parasites; after a time the roles will be reversed. A monkey that fails to return the favor is likely to be attacked, or scorned in the future. Such reciprocity will pay off, in evolutionary terms, as long as the costs of helping are less than the benefits of being helped and as long as animals will not gain in the long run by “cheating”―that is to say, by receiving favors without returning them. It would seem that the best way to ensure that those who cheat do not prosper is for animals to be able to recognize cheats and refuse them the benefits of cooperation the next time around. This is only possible among intelligent animals living in small, stable groups over a long period of time. Evidence supports this conclusion: reciprocal behavior has been observed in birds and mammals, the clearest cases occurring among wolves, wild dogs, dolphins, monkeys, and apes.

Many features of human morality could have grown out of simple reciprocal practices such as the mutual removal of parasites from awkward places. Suppose I want to have the lice in my hair picked out and I am willing in return to remove lice from someone else’s hair. I must, however, choose my partner carefully. If I help everyone indiscriminately, I will find myself delousing others without getting my own lice removed. To avoid this, I must learn to distinguish between those who return favors and those who do not. In making this distinction, I am separating reciprocators and nonreciprocators and, in the process, developing crude notions of fairness and of cheating. I will strengthen my links with those who reciprocate, and bonds of friendship and loyalty, with a consequent sense of obligation to assist, will result.

This is not all. As we see with monkeys, reciprocators are likely to react in a hostile and angry way to those who do not reciprocate. More sophisticated reciprocators, able to think and use language, may regard reciprocity as good and “right” and cheating as bad and “wrong.” From here it is a small step to concluding that the worst of the nonreciprocators should be driven out of society or else punished in some way, so that they will not take advantage of others again. Thus a system of punishment and a notion of desert constitute the other side of reciprocal altruism.

So Hume was not entirely wrong to say that justice is an artificial virtue, but he was not entirely right either. The basic rule of reciprocity, which includes the ability to detect cheats and the sense of indignation required to exclude them, is natural in the sense that it has evolved, is part of our biological nature, and is something we share with our closer nonhuman relatives. But the more detailed rules of justice typical of human, language-using societies are refinements on the instinctive sense of reciprocity, and so may be considered artificial.

Our biology does not prescribe the specific forms our morality takes. There are cultural variations in human morality, as even Herodotus knew. Nevertheless, it seems likely that all these different forms are the outgrowth of behavior that exists in social animals, and is the result of the usual evolutionary processes of natural selection. Morality is a natural phenomenon. No myths are required to explain its existence.

3. How Humans Make Moral Judgments

Against this background understanding of the origins of morality, I turn to some recent scientific research that helps us to understand more specific moral decisions and behavior. To explore the way in which people reach moral judgments, Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at the University of Virginia, asked people to respond to the following story:

Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are travelling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decided that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At the very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love but decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret between them, which makes them feel even closer to each other. What do you think about that, was it OK for them to make love?

Haidt reports that most people are quick to say that what Julie and Mark did was wrong. They then try to give reasons for their answer. They may mention the dangers of inbreeding, but then recall Julie and Mark used two forms of birth control. Or they may suggest that the siblings could be hurt, even though it is clear from the story that they were not. Eventually, many people say something like: “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” Evidently, it is the intuitive response that is responsible for the judgment these people reach, not the reasons they offer, for they stick to their immediate, intuitive judgment, even after they have withdrawn the reasons they initially offered for that judgment, and are unable to find better ones.

One example on its own would not show much, but Haidt has assembled an impressive body of evidence for the view that moral judgments in a variety of areas are typically the outcome of quick, almost automatic, intuitive responses. Where there is more deliberate, conscious reasoning, it tends to come after the intuitive response, and to be a rationalization of that response, rather than the basis for the moral judgment.

If we turn to our growing knowledge of the parts of the brain involved in ethical decisions, we can gain further insight from experiments using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, or fMRI, conducted by Joshua Greene and others. Greene designed the experiments to throw light on the way in which people respond to situations known in the philosophical literature as “trolley problems.” In the standard trolley problem, you are standing by a railroad track when you notice that a trolley, with no one aboard, is rolling down the track, heading for a group of five people. They will all be killed if the trolley continues on its present track. The only thing you can do to prevent these five deaths is to throw a switch that will divert the trolley onto a side track, where it will kill only one person. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should divert the trolley onto the side track, thus saving four lives.

In another version of the problem, the trolley, as before, is about to kill five people. This time, however, you are not standing near the track, but on a footbridge above the track. You cannot divert the trolley. You consider jumping off the bridge, in front of the trolley, thus sacrificing yourself to save the imperilled people, but you realize that you are far too light to stop the trolley. Standing next to you, however, is a very large stranger. The only way you can stop the trolley killing five people is by pushing this large stranger off the footbridge, in front of the trolley. If you push the stranger off, he will be killed, but you will save the other five. When asked what you should do in these circumstances, most people say that you should not push the stranger off the bridge.

Many philosophers, including Judith Jarvis Thomson, see the problem posed by this pair of cases like this. In both cases you bring about the death of one person to save five, but we judge your action as right in the standard trolley case, and as wrong in the footbridge case. What is it that makes the difference between these two cases? These philosophers thus take the moral intuitions elicited by the cases as correct, and seek to justify them. But every time a seemingly plausible justifying principle has been suggested, other philosophers have produced variants on the original pair of cases that show that the suggested principle does not succeed in justifying our intuitive responses. For example, some philosophers suggested that the difference between the standard trolley case and the footbridge case is that in the latter the stranger is used as a means to save the others. Thus pushing the stranger off the footbridge violates the Kantian injunction not to use another person merely as a means, while throwing the switch does not. Unfortunately for proponents of this neat explanation, we can imagine a case in which throwing the switch does not cause the trolley to run down an altogether different track, but makes it go around a loop before it reaches the five people threatened by it. On that loop, the very large stranger is lying. Because he is so large, his body will bring the trolley to a stop, but not before it kills him. To divert the trolley around this loop does use the stranger as a means to saving the life of the other five, but most people consider it would be right to do it. They thus judge this case as closer to the standard case of throwing the switch than to the case of pushing the stranger off the footbridge.

Unlike the many philosophers who have tried to justify our intuitions in these situations, Greene was more concerned to understand why we have them. He thought that the roots of the differing judgments we make about the two situations may lie in our different emotional responses to the idea of causing a stranger’s death by throwing a switch on a railway track, and pushing someone to his or her death with our bare hands. As Greene puts it:

Because people have a robust, negative emotional response to the personal violation proposed in the footbridge case they immediately say that it’s wrong… At the same time, people fail to have a strong negative emotional response to the relatively impersonal violation proposed in the original trolley case, and therefore revert to the most obvious moral principle, “minimize harm,” which in turn leads them to say that the action in the original case is permissible.

Greene used fMRI imaging, which provides a real-time image of activity in different parts of the brain, to test this hypothesis. He predicted that people asked to make a moral judgment about “personal” violations like pushing the stranger off the footbridge would show increased activity in areas of the brain associated with the emotions, when compared with people asked to make judgments about relatively “impersonal” violations like throwing a switch. But he also made a more specific prediction: that the minority of subjects who do consider that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge would, unless they were psychopaths, be giving this response in spite of their emotions, and therefore they would take longer to reach this judgment than those who say that it would be wrong to push the stranger off the footbridge, and also longer than they would take to reach a judgment in a case that did not arouse such strong emotional responses.

Greene’s predictions were confirmed. When people were asked to make judgments in the “personal” cases, parts of their brains associated with emotional activity were more active than when they were asked to make judgments in “impersonal” cases. More significantly, those who came to the conclusion that it would be right to act in ways that involve a personal violation, but minimize harm overall – for example, those who say that it would be right to push the stranger off the footbridge – took longer to form their judgment than those who said it would be wrong to do so.

When Greene looked more closely at the brain activity of these subjects who say “yes” to personal violations that minimize overall harm, he found that they show more activity in parts of the brain associated with cognitive activity than those who say “no” to such actions. These are preliminary results, based on a limited amount of data. But let us assume that they are sound, and speculate on what might follow from them, in conjunction with the other scientific information relevant to the origins of ethics, as outlined above.

4. Normative Implications

Let me begin with a warning against a common error. The direction of evolution neither follows, nor has any necessary connection with, the path of moral progress. “More evolved” does not mean “better”. So while I have claimed that evolutionary theory explains much of common morality, including the central role of duties to our kin, and of duties related to reciprocity, this is not in any sense a justification of these elements of common morality.

The impossibility of deducing ethical conclusions from the facts of evolution does not mean that recent advances in our scientific understanding of ethics have no normative significance at all. These advances are highly significant for normative ethics, but in an indirect way. To appreciate this, we need to look at the current debate over methodology in normative ethics.

A dominant theme in normative ethics for the past century or more has been the debate between those who support a systematic normative ethical theory – utilitarianism and other forms of consequentialism have been the leading contenders – and those who ground their normative ethics on our common moral judgments or intuitions. In this debate, the chief weapons of opponents of utilitarianism have been examples intended to show that the dictates of utilitarianism clash with moral intuitions that we all share. Perhaps the most famous literary instance occurs in The Karamazov Brothers, where Dostoevsky has Ivan challenge Alyosha to say whether he would consent to build a world in which people were happy and at peace, if this ideal world could be achieved only by torturing “that same little child beating her chest with her little fists.” Alyosha says that he would not consent to build such a world on those terms. Hastings Rashdall thought he could refute hedonistic utilitarianism by arguing that it cannot explain the value of sexual purity. H. J. McCloskey, writing at a time when lynchings in the American South were still a possibility, thought it a decisive objection to utilitarianism that the theory might direct a sheriff to frame an innocent man in order to prevent a white mob lynching half a dozen innocents in revenge for a rape. Bernard Williams offered a similar example, of a botanist who wanders into a village in the jungle where twenty innocent people are about to be shot. He is told that nineteen of them will be spared, if only he will himself shoot the twentieth. Though Williams himself did not say that it would necessarily be wrong to shoot the twentieth, he thought that utilitarianism could not account for the difficulty of the decision.

Initially, the use of such examples to appeal to our common moral intuitions against consequentialist theories was an ad hoc device lacking metaethical foundations. It was simply a way of saying: “If Theory U is true, then in situation X you should do Y. But we know that it would be wrong to do Y in X, therefore U cannot be true.” This is an effective argument against U, as long as the judgment that it would be wrong to do Y in X is not challenged. But the argument does nothing to establish that it is wrong to do Y in X, nor what a sounder theory than U would be like. In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls took the crucial step towards fusing this argument with an ethical methodology when he argued that the test of a sound moral theory is that it can achieve a “reflective equilibrium” with our considered moral judgments. By “reflective equilibrium” Rawls meant that, where there is no inherently plausible theory that perfectly matches our initial moral judgments, we should modify either the theory, or the judgments, until we have an equilibrium between the two. The model here is the testing of a scientific theory. In science, we generally accept the theory that best fits the data, but sometimes, if the theory is inherently plausible, we may be prepared to accept it even if it does not fit all the data. We might assume that the outlying data are erroneous, or that there are still undiscovered factors at work in that particular situation. In the case of a normative theory of ethics, Rawls assumes, the raw data is our prior moral judgments. We try to match them with a plausible theory, but if we cannot, we reject some of the judgments, and modify the theory so that it matches others. Eventually the plausibility of the theory and of the surviving judgments reach an equilibrium, and we then have the best possible theory. On this view the acceptability of a moral theory is not determined by the internal coherence and plausibility of the theory itself, but, to a significant extent, by its agreement with those of our prior moral judgments that we are unwilling to revise or abandon. In A Theory of Justice Rawls uses this model to justify tinkering with his original idea of a choice arising from a hypothetical contract, until he is able to produce results that are not too much at odds with our ordinary ideas of justice.

The model of reflective equilibrium has always struck me as dubious. The analogy between the role of a normative moral theory and a scientific theory is fundamentally misconceived. A scientific theory seeks to explain the existence of data that are about a world “out there” that we are trying to explain. Granted, the data may have been affected by errors in measurement or interpretation, but unless we can give some account of what the errors might have been, it is not up to us to choose or reject the observations. A normative ethical theory, however, is not trying to explain our common moral intuitions. It might reject all of them, and still be superior to other normative theories that better matched our moral judgments. For a normative moral theory is not an attempt to answer the question “Why do we think as we do about moral questions?” Even without an evolutionary understanding of ethics, it is obvious that the question “Why do we think as we do about moral questions?” may require a historical, rather than a philosophical, investigation. On abortion, suicide, and voluntary euthanasia, for instance, we may think as we do because we have grown up in a society that was, for the best part of 2000 years, dominated by the Christian religion. We may no longer believe in Christianity as a moral authority, but we may find it difficult to rid ourselves of moral intuitions shaped by our parents and our teachers, who were either themselves believers, or were shaped by others who were.

A normative moral theory is an attempt to answer the question “What ought we to do?” It is perfectly possible to answer this question by saying: “Ignore all our ordinary moral judgments, and do what will produce the best consequences.” Of course, one would need to give some kind of argument for this answer. My concern now is not to give this argument, or any other argument for possible alternatives to whatever theory best explains our intuitive judgments. My point is that the model of reflective equilibrium, at least as presented in A Theory of Justice, appears to rule out such an answer, because it assumes that our moral intuitions are some kind of data from which we can learn what we ought to do.

Let us return for a moment to the trolley problem cases. As mentioned before, philosophical discussions of these cases from Judith Jarvis Thomson onwards have been preoccupied with the search for differences between the cases that justify our initial intuitive responses. If, however, Greene is right to suggest that our intuitive responses are due to differences in the emotional pull of situations that involve bringing about someone’s death in a close-up, personal way, and bringing about the same person’s death in a way that is at a distance, and less personal, why should we believe that there is anything that justifies these responses? If Greene’s initial results are confirmed by subsequent research, we may ultimately conclude that he has not only explained, but explained away the philosophical puzzle. (I say that we may ultimately reach this conclusion because of course Greene’s data alone cannot prove any normative view right or wrong. Normative argument is needed, of the kind I shall sketch below, to link those data with a particular normative view.)

This becomes clearer when we consider how well Greene’s findings fit into the broader evolutionary view of the origins of morality outlined earlier in this paper. For most of our evolutionary history, human beings have lived in small groups, and the same is almost certainly true of our pre-human primate and social mammal ancestors. In these groups, violence could only be inflicted in an up-close and personal way – by hitting, pushing, strangling, or using a stick or stone as a club. To deal with such situations, we have developed immediate, emotionally-based responses to questions involving close, personal interactions with others. The thought of pushing the stranger off the footbridge elicits these emotionally-based responses. Throwing a switch that diverts a train that will hit someone bears no resemblance to anything likely to have happened in the circumstances in which we and our ancestors lived. Hence the thought of doing it does not elicit the same emotional response as pushing someone off a bridge. So the salient feature that explains our different intuitive judgments concerning the two cases is that the footbridge case is the kind of situation that was likely to arise during the eons of time over which we were evolving; whereas the standard trolley case describes a way of bringing about someone’s death that has only been possible in the past century or two, a time far too short to have any impact on our inherited patterns of emotional response. But what is the moral salience of the fact that I have killed someone in a way that was possible a million years ago, rather than in a way that became possible only two hundred years ago? I would answer: none.

Thus recent scientific advances in our understanding do have some normative significance, and at different levels. At the particular level of the analysis of moral problems like those posed by trolley cases, a better understanding of the nature of our intuitive responses suggests that there is no point in trying to find moral principles that justify the differing intuitions to which the various cases give rise. Very probably, there is no morally relevant distinction between the cases. At the more general level of method in ethics, this same understanding of how we make moral judgments casts serious doubt on the method of reflective equilibrium. There is little point in constructing a moral theory designed to match considered moral judgments that themselves stem from our evolved responses to the situations in which we and our ancestors lived during the period of our evolution as social mammals, primates, and finally, human beings. We should, with our current powers of reasoning and our rapidly changing circumstances, be able to do better than that.

A defender of the idea of reflective equilibrium might say that these arguments against giving weight to certain intuitions can themselves be part of the process of achieving equilibrium between a theory and our considered moral judgments. The arguments would then lead us to reject judgments that we might otherwise retain, and so end up with a different normative theory. Making the model of “reflective equilibrium” as all-embracing as this may make it salvageable, but only at the cost of making it close to vacuous. For with this change, the “data” that a sound moral theory is supposed to match have become so changeable that they can play, at best, a minor role in determining the final shape of the normative moral theory.

What I am saying, in brief, is this. Advances in our understanding of ethics do not themselves directly imply any normative conclusions, but they undermine some conceptions of doing ethics which themselves have normative conclusions. Those conceptions of ethics tend to be too respectful of our intuitions. Our better understanding of ethics gives us grounds for being less respectful of them.

5. Conclusion: A Way Forward?

Whenever it is suggested that normative ethics should disregard our common moral intuitions, the objection is made that without intuitions, we can go nowhere. There have been many attempts, over the centuries, to find proofs of first principles in ethics, but most philosophers consider that they have all failed. Even a radical ethical theory like utilitarianism must rest on a fundamental intuition about what is good. So we appear to be left with our intuitions, and nothing more. If we reject them all, we must become ethical skeptics or nihilists.

There are many ways in which one might try to respond to this objection, and I don’t have the time here to review them all. So let me suggest just one possibility. Haidt’s behavioral research and Greene’s brain imaging studies suggest the possibility of distinguishing between our immediate emotionally based responses, and our more reasoned conclusions. In everyday life, as Haidt points out, our reasoning is likely to be nothing more than a rationalization for our intuitive responses – as Haidt puts it, the emotional dog is wagging the rational tail. But Greene’s research suggests that in some people, reasoning can overcome an initial intuitive response. That, at least, seems the most plausible way to account for the longer reaction times in those subjects who, in the footbridge example, concluded that you would be justified in pushing the stranger in front of the trolley. These people appear to have had the same emotional responses against pushing the stranger, but further thought led them to reject that emotional response and to give a different answer. The preliminary data showing greater activity in parts of their brain associated with cognitive processes suggests the same conclusion. Moreover the answer these subjects gave is, surely, the rational answer. The death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five people. That reasoning leads us to throw the switch in the standard trolley case, and it should also lead us to push the stranger in the footbridge, for there are no morally relevant differences between the two situations. (Although we may decide to withhold our praise from people who are capable of pushing someone off a footbridge in these circumstances. As Henry Sidgwick pointed out in The Methods of Ethics, it is important to distinguish between the utility of an action, and the utility of praising or blaming that action. We may not wish to praise those who are capable of pushing strangers off high places, for fear that they will do it on other occasions when it does not save more lives than it costs.)

It might be said that the response that I have called “more reasoned” is still based on an intuition, for example the intuition that five deaths are worse than one, or more fundamentally, the intuition that it is a bad thing if a person is killed. But if this is an intuition, it is different from the intuitions to which Haidt and Greene refer. It does not seem to be one that is the outcome of our evolutionary past. We have already noted Hume’s observation that “there is no such passion in human minds as the love of mankind, merely as such” and as we have seen, there is a good evolutionary reason for why this should be so. Thus the “intuition” that tells us that the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five is not like the intuitions that tell us we may throw the switch, but not push the stranger off the footbridge. It may be closer to the truth to say that it is a rational intuition, something like the three “ethical axioms” or “intuitive propositions of real clearness and certainty” to which Henry Sidgwick appeals in his defense of utilitarianism in The Methods of Ethics. The third of these axioms is “the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other.”

Perhaps here, after finding ourselves in broad agreement with David Hume for so much of this paper, we find the need to appeal to something in Hume’s polar opposite, Immanuel Kant. Kant thought that unless morality could be based on pure reason, it was a chimera. Perhaps he was right. In the light of the best scientific understanding of ethics, we face a choice. We can take the view that our moral intuitions and judgments are and always will be emotionally based intuitive responses, and reason can do no more than build the best possible case for a decision already made on nonrational grounds. That approach leads to a form of moral skepticism, although one still compatible with advocating our emotionally-based moral values and encouraging clear thinking about them. Alternatively, we might attempt the ambitious task of separating those moral judgments that we owe to our evolutionary and cultural history, from those that have a rational basis. This is a large and difficult task. Even to specify in what sense a moral judgment can have a rational basis is not easy. Nevertheless, it seems to me worth attempting, for it is the only way to avoid moral skepticism.

This logo on the banner was something I came up with. I didn’t received any recognition or royalties for it, but to be fair, a lot of other people were involved in the process and they probably didn’t either.

It all started with a call to my office from my Institutes’s Executive Director, who asked for some assistance. In her office, she said that she needed a slogan for some kind of banner to do with the University’s 60th anniversary. Could I think of anything? I said I would need a little time and retreated to my office, where I came up with 12 slogans to choose from. I thought my job was done until I took them back and was asked which one I liked most. I nominated 3 on the spot without really having time to consider it.

One of those I chose contained the expression that was selected, “Soaring Ever Higher,” which I felt carried the risk of being slightly corny. I explained that it had been inspired by an abstract sculpture on campus with wings aligned with the four compass points, depicting the flight to intellectual heights, or something like that (see below). It’s a kind of Neoplatonic notion that has been linked to SNU in the past, as far as I know.

A week later, I was called down again to confirm that they had selected and intended to use was OK. It’s lucky I had been because they had modified 60th Anniversary to 60Years Anniversary. I put them straight on that one.

A little time passed before one night when I was walking home and nearly ran into this 4 to 5 metre high structure, erected near the student dorms, with my slogan on it. I was a bit stunned, not because it wasn’t there the day before but because I’d been told my slogan would be used on a banner—a single banner, I had presumed. Shortly after, I noticed a larger monolithic structure near SNU’s front gate. It was rather strange, like some cut diamond (the significance of its shape eludes me to this day).

Next I saw my slogan on the sides of all of the university’s buses and on banners under every lamppost throughout the university! It didn’t stop there. I checked SNU’s website and sure enough, there it was: “Soaring Ever Higher”! What a laugh. Posters appeared featuring it. They were surprising, done with a grey minimalist design with the slogan in tiny letters in a corner.

For the period of the celebrations, over several months, my slogan was all over campus. I couldn’t go anywhere without seeing it. And it amused to me walk past where people could see it, or even be there when they were taking pictures, like the family below, knowing that I was its author.

Except for the strange structure near the gate, everything was tastefully done, I think, by not being overdone, and by the use of decent colour coordinations.

It sure was an education to me about how some things come about. To think that what I dashed off in my office one afternoon was transformed into logo seen all over campus—well, it was both perplexing and amusing. After a few months, it was all gone as if it had never happened.

Seoul National University is a major part of my life now, but before applying for a job here, I’d never heard of the place. It’s a big campus, nestled within the cradling ranges of the Gwanak mountains. The campus site was establish in 1975, although the university itself has been around for some 60 years or so. Its faculty buildings were previously scattered around downtown Seoul. Here’s a panorama taken from my workplace, close to the main gate above. The campus extends right back to the foot of the mountains.

I believe the campus site formerly served as a private golf course, and there’s a restaurant and function centre on a peak overlooking SNU that was supposedly once the clubhouse. By the way, it has large dried fish poked in some of its metal light fittings along the restaurant wall, for good luck.

Construction is still going on around campus, including rooftop additions of extra floors to old buildings. There are few alternatives other than to build upwards. Across from where I work they are building a huge complex of several buildings where there once stood a car park, some tennis courts, and a small hill, which they carted away. Near all of that is the following structure, one of the weirder ones on campus.

It has something to do with business admin, I think, and has attracted various nicknames, one being the aquarium and another the kindergarten. I guess it falls into the “what were they thinking?” category.

Another building only recently completed is the Museum of Art, known as MoA, which is perhaps more aesthetically pleasing to most people. I’ve been to a couple of shows there and found it a great place to see art because it’s so spacious inside. Personally, I’d love the design as my house.

That one is close to the main gate, and not much further away is the gym, housed in the building below. I thought about joining but it’s too expensive. I imagine a lot of SNU students with rich parents go there.

These radically shaped buildings are all in close proximity to each other, but they do not reflect the general trend at SNU, which is conservative to match its reputation. Others a distinctly ugly. I heard that this can be blamed in part on corruption and cutting corners in the days when the campuses earlier buildings, like the main library, were under construction.

The campus has a wealth of natural areas like this grassed area up near the foot of the tallest peak of the Gwanak mountain range. This place is really popular with families and couples on the weekend.

North and in the distance, on the right, the Namsan Tower can be seen, which overlooks downtown Seoul. For a bit of trivia: if you traveled in a direct line from the tower to where this picture was taken, and then kept going straight for 7000 kms, you’d hit Perth, Western Australia.

Not far from that grassed area is a water fall.

This water flows off somewhere into pipes and I guess it ends up at other water areas on campus. A large pond is situated around the centre of the campus and some of the water may end up there. It’s a tranquil setting despite a constant bustle around it. One autumn I stumbled across this semi-functional sculpture on a bank by the pond. And my caption for it? Mind where you sit!

Since I’ve started a seasonal theme, I might as well keep going. In spring, especially around the 2nd and 3rd week of April, the campus explodes with colour.

Cherry blossoms beautify campus roads.

It’s all a stark contrast to winter.

Here’s where I used to emerge after hiking over snow covered hill on the way to work.

I guess I should end this brief photo essay with what ends life on campus for most students, graduation day.

Check out the look of unrestrained satisfaction and pride on that guy’s face in orange. Perhaps no one has told him unemployment is on the rise in Korea.

They pack everyone in this hall and churn their way through the ceremony. On such a day, before I even arrive at work, tent restaurants have been set up along the main thoroughfare near the graduation hall and throughout the day there is a traffic jam there.