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Preface 1 Singer and the Practical Ethics Movement 1 Preface Singer and the Practical Ethics Movement DALE JAMIESON This book is a celebration of the work of Peter· . honor people by criticizing them Sing.' .f Smger. Smce philosophers wn come in for analysis and appr~isal .el tShi mlgs on a Wide array of topics . III S vo ume Smger' t h· Peter Singer is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth VieWS, his normative theory , and h·IS su b stanttve. posif. s meh aet Ical as the moral status of animals th .t f h IOns on suc matters century. While other philosophers have been more important ill the devel­ are all subjected to scrutiny' Si e sa~cI yo. uman life, and famine relief opment of the discipline, none has changed more lives. Newsweek maga­ supplement what he h .. nger s rephes to his critics importantly "ille observed that "the modem [animal rights] movement may be dated to essential reading for an~~::~~~u:y ~r:tt;nllon these issues and will be the publication of Animal Liberation.,,1 For many years this book was Many people helped to make thea;r;se:t ~~uundersta?d his views. given away by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, one of the Lapore's enthusiastic invitation and St S· h~e pOSSible. It was Ernie organizations founded in the wake of Animal Liberation and now one of the project going and sustained it C e~~ m~ IS steady support that got the largest and most effective animal rights organizations in the world. On the Henry R. Luce Foundation· a~ e on 0 lege m conjunction with Paul McCartney's 1993 world tour copies of Animal Liberation were sold support and the E . I proVided funds for research and staff alongside T-shirts. Thus far Animal Liberation has sold more than 400,000 , nVlronmenta Impacts Grou f h N . for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) pot e atlOnal Center copies in nine languages. Altogether Singer is responsible ill whole or part being completed. Kelly Knutsen and ;:: my home while the book was for producing twenty-seven books, most of which sell significantly better Carleton, and Baat Enosh er£ d la Lackey proVided support at than books by other philosophers. Practical Ethics, for example, has sold NCAR. I am indebted to Ba~t f~~~th v:nous electronic miracles at over 100,000 copies ill ten languages. Singer has also authored a vast humor. I also thank John Taylor ~ hi er competence and her good number of articles and reviews that have appeared in journals ranging s Finally, Peter Singer was unfailingl~r hel ;~Od and pattent copy-editing. from The Philosophical Review to the New York Times. able and discussing his work with ihu m makmg hiS papers avail­ Peter Singer was born ill Melbourne, Australia, on July 6, 1946. His gratitude for their hospitality durin me. .e enttre Smger falll11y has my parents were Viennese Jews who escaped ill 1938, shortly after the S. g my VISit to Melbourne Anschluss incorporated Austria into the German Reich. They fled to mce most of us produce so few book . people to acknowledge I believe th t II s and there are so many worthy Australia because that was the only country that would accept them, This book is dedicated ;0 all those a a blioOks should have dedications. sponsored by a man whom Peter's mother had met only once through a . woeh b eve tliatphil h· . mutual acquaintance when he was a tourist ill Vienna. By the time Peter an acadenuc exercise or a way of k' . asop y 18 not Just for improving ourselves and mak~a ;~g a hvmg, but also an illstrument was born, his father was a successful importer of coffee and tea and his book is dedicated to those who loo:g t the world better. In parttcular this mother was practicillg medicine, a profession for which she had trailled in "Why not the best?" a emselves and others and wonder, Austria. Eager to integrate their children into Australian society, the Smgers spoke only English at home and sent Peter to a prestigious Dale Jamieson Protestant school. He went on to Melbourne University, where as an Northfield, Millnesota undergraduate he studied law, history, and philosophy. In 1969 he 2 JAMIESON SINGER AND THE PRACTICAL ETHICS MOVEMENT 3 receiv~~ an MA in philosophy, writing a thesis on "Why should I be moral. A scholarshIp allowed Singer to complete his graduate stud' . movement and the rebirth of feminism, the apparent consensus of the Oxford, where he received his BPhil in 1971 and served R dlelifs:," 1950s was shattered by student protests and black militancy. In the lecturer from 1971 to 1973. as a c .e United States there was a clear "disconnect" between what was going In 1972, Singer published "Famine, affluence and morality" in the fIrst on in the university and what was happening in the streets. This was volume of a new Journal, Philosophy and Public Affairs Thi f I symbolized by the disruption of John Searle's ethics classes at Berkeley. whICh has been reprinted more than two doze f .: s ar IC e, Searle wanted to lecture on deriving an "ought" from an "is," while several reasons. In style it was an unconventio:al1~, 18 l::;portant f~r students wanted to discuss the war in Vietnam. As an undergraduate at that it was written in simple, direct prose with fe~ r osop cal ess'J,y ill San Francisco State in the late 1960s, I was vividly aware of this split sophical texts. Rather than beginning from'Kant Ar' t e;~rences to ph!lo­ between philosophY and life. Ethics in the classroom was W. D. Ross and P. H. Nowell-Smith but it was Martin Luther King, Che Guevara, and the Ical moral question, it addressed events that wer~ oc~~~r~'g o:s as::;Peothet­ Wfltillg. The artJcle began with these words' "As I 't thi · N g r Was Black Panthers who dominated our conversations outside of class. In 1971 I '. Wfl e s, m ovember d.' ~eop e ,~~ dYillg ill East Bengal from lack of food shelter and 1968, the year in which student insurrections broke out all over the me lea care. mger went on to present his readers with ~ stark ~oral world, the biggest news in academic philosophy was the growing hege­ challenge. On the basis of some apparently simple I 'bl . mony of truth-conditional semantics. But the philosophers who made a a d th t ' P ausl e prennses· he r,;;;e a we ought to transfer our resources to those who are worsdoff difference to the events of 1968 were not Quine and Davidson but Marx u: we reach the point at which further transfers would hann and Marcuse. The frustration that many of us felt was not merely that re t an they w?uld benefIt others. Singer Was asking his readers to usi.:o Marx and Marcuse were not discussed in classes, but that the very con­ th:: opera tICkets, theIr Wille cellars, and private schools for their c~dr~~ cerns that motivated them seemed to have been banished from academic ~ ; accoutr~ments of the sophisticated, upper-middle class life favored philosophy. While there is a lot to be said for working in philosophy of language, even during wartime, in retrospect it seems inevitable that the a~outa~a:~ ::~sde=::,~:~ore, Singer Was completely nnapologetic concerns of real life could not forever be excluded from the academy, especially in a discipline that has a long history of concern with substant­ ive normative questions. ::: :~:~f~~: 1~:ll~~~ c~m~~~~~~~~:~' f~:~:~~e~~na~::e:~c~:ldy Wit~iit~ By the late 1960s, a group of elite East Coast philosophers, including CUSSlOn ... IS not enough Wh t' th·. s Thomas Nagel, John Rawls, and Judith Jarvis Thomson, had formed the (and personal) affairs if' a IS e pomt of relatIng philosophy to public . t t kin we do not take our conclusions seriously? In this Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy and were discussing such topics illS anee, a g OUf conclusion seriously means acting upon it. 3 . as racism, abortion, affirmative action, and the morality of war. Soon Sin . h thereafter a group of philosophers at Rockefeller University launched ger was wfltillg t ese words at a new moment' h'l Philosophy and Public Affairs. The practical ethics movement soon ~:re ~an f~ee~ years before, in 1956, Peter Laslet~ h~dl ~:~~~~d ~!~~~ swept the country. in ~o osop y ead, and moral philosophy clearly was among the walk­ The philosophers who were turning their attention to matters of urgent "i~eolo:dedhl ~ 1960, ill The End of Ideology, Daniel Bell declared that public interest were not exclusively moral and political philosophers. In th U '. wd ~ once was a road to action, has come to be a dead end ,,4 Since the issues that they discussed were of broad interest, yet had largely chall:nge~~bou~a~~~h:eli::sa:~d~~:~ad atgrefement that fundamen;al been ignored by professional philosophers, they were fair game for who­ I I b sor 0 country to create had ever wanted to take them up. Ironically, just as Russell turned out to be arge y een resolved by the affluent society of the 1950s 5 Th . till the most politically active major philosopher of the century, so logicians problems of the future were in the basic science .' . ~ III e eclua and philosophers of science helped to bring practical ethics back into the solutio~s.
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