How are we to live? Ethics in an age of self-interest Peter Singer was born in Australia in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, New York University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of California at Irvine, and La Trobe University. He is now Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director of the Institute of Ethics and Public Affairs, and Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne. Professor Singer has written and edited more than twenty books on ethics and related areas of philosophy. He is best known for his book Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, which spawned the international animal liberation movement. He is the author of the major article on ethics in the current edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, and co-editor of the journal Bioethics. Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS viii « PREFACE ix A Mandarin book Published by Random House Australia Australia CHAPTER 1 The ultimate choice 1 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, NSW 2061 Ivan Boesky's choice 1 http://www.randomhouse.com.au The Ring of Gyges 9 First published in Australia in 1993 by the Text Publishing Company 'What in the hell are we doing this for?' 11 Reprinted 1993, 1994 The end of history or the beginning of secular ethics? 14 This Mandarin edition reprinted by Random House Australia, 1997 Ethics and self-interest 21 Copyright © Peter Singer 1993 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this CHAPTER 2 'What's in it for me?' 26 publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or A failing social experiment 26 transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, The loss of community 34 recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. CHAPTER 3 Using up the world 45 Typeset in Garamond by Bookset Pry Ltd, Melbourne Printed and bound in Australia by Australian Print Group Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Adam Smith? 45 National Library of Australia Living on our inheritance 49 Cataloguing-in-Publication data How an overflowing sink makes Adam Smith obsolete 55 Singer, Peter. How are we to live? When are we well off? 57 Bibliography. Includes index. CHAPTER 4 How we came to be living this way 65 A perverse instinct 65 ISBN 1 86330 431 2 Aristotle on the art of making money 67 1. Ethics. 2. Self-interest - Moral and ethical aspects. I. Title. Can a merchant be pleasing to God? 69 170 Luther's calling and Calvin's grace 77 The religious and the secular converge 80 The consumer society 88 A withered greening 90 The Reagan years: 'Enrich thyself 93 vi How are we to live? Contents vii CHAPTER 5 Is selfishness in our genes? 99 CHAPTER 11 The good life 260 The biological case for selfishness 99 Pushing the peanut forward 260 Caring for our children 103 The escalator of reason 268 Caring for our kin 108 J Toward an ethical life 277 Caring for our group 115 NOTES 281 CHAPTER 6 How the Japanese live 125 Japan: A successful social experiment? 125 INDEX 303 The corporation as an ethical community 127 The self and the group 141 CHAPTER 7 Tit for Tat 152 Caring for those who care for us 152 Doing better with Tit for Tat 167 Self-interest and ethics: An interim conclusion 180 CHAPTER 8 Living ethically 182 Heroes 182 A green shoot 189 Why do people act ethically? 198 CHAPTER 9 The nature of ethics 202 A broader perspective 202 The gender of ethics 207 Jesus and Kant: Two views on why we ought to live ethically 212 Beyond Jesus and Kant: The search for an ultimate answer 220 CHAPTER 10 Living to some purpose 230 The myth of Sisyphus and the meaning of life 230 Of housewives, Aboriginal Australians and caged hens 232 The struggle to win 238 The inward turn 244 A transcendent cause 253 Acknowledgements Preface I owe thanks to many people. Di Gribble of Text Publishing Is there still anything to live for? Is anything worth pursuing, suggested that the time was right for a book on this theme, and apart from money, love, and caring for one's own family? If so, Michael Heyward of the same firm advised me after the book what could it be? Talk of 'something to live for' has a faintly reached the draft stage. An Australian Research Council Grant religious flavour, but many people who are not at all religious made it possible for Margaret Parnaby to provide part-time have an uneasy feeling that they may be missing out on some- research assistance, gathering materials, checking references and thing basic that would give their lives a significance it now lacks. providing critical comments at every stage of the work. Her Nor do these people have a deep commitment to any political work has helped to put flesh on the bare bones of the outline I creed. Over the past century political struggle has often filled had planned. Various drafts were read by Aaron Asher, Stephen the place that religion once held in other times and cultures. No Buckle, Paola Cavalieri, Lori Gruen, Helga Kuhse, Shunici one who reflects on recent history can now believe that politics Noguchi, Julian Savulescu, Renata Singer, Henry Spira and alone will suffice to solve all our problems. But what else can we Tomasaburo Yamauchi. Each gave me helpful comments and, live for? In this book I give one answer. It is as ancient as the collectively, they have made the book — whatever faults it may dawn of philosophy, but as much needed in our circumstances still have — much better than it would have been otherwise. today as it ever was before. The answer is that we can live an ethical life. By doing so we make ourselves part of a great, cross- cultural tradition. Moreover, we will find that to live an ethical life is not self-sacrifice, but self-fulfillment. If we can detach ourselves from our own immediate preoccu- pations and look at the world as a whole and our place in it, there is something absurd about the idea that people should have trouble finding something to live for. There is, after all, so much that needs to be done. As this book was nearing completion, United Nations troops entered Somalia in an attempt to ensure that food supplies reached the starving population there. Although this attempt went badly wrong, it was at least a hope- ful sign that affluent nations were prepared to do something about hunger and suffering in areas remote from them. We may learn from this episode, and future attempts may be more suc- cessful. Perhaps we are at the beginning of a new era in which How are we to live? Preface xi we will no longer simply sit in front of our television sets watch- world really were full of people who take so little care of their ing small children die and then continue to live our affluent lives own lives, never mind the lives of others, there would be nothing without feeling any incongruity. It is not only the dramatic and that anyone could do, and our species would probably not be newsworthy major crises that require our attention, though; there around for very much longer. But the ways of evolution tend to are countless situations, on a smaller scale, that are just as bad eliminate those who are that crazy. There may be a few around and are preventable. Immense as this task is, it is only one of at any one time; no doubt big American cities shelter more than many equally urgent causes to which people in need of a worth- their fair share of them. What is truly disproportionate, though, while objective could commit themselves. is the prominence that such behaviour has in the media and in The problem is that most people have only the vaguest idea the public mind. It is the old story of what makes news. A of what it might be to lead an ethical life. They understand million people doing something every day that shows concern ethics as a system of rules forbidding us to do things. They do for others is not news; one rooftop sniper is. This book is not not grasp it as a basis for thinking about how we are to live. blind to the existence of vicious, violent and irrational They live largely self-interested lives, not because they are born people, but it is written in the conviction that the rest of us selfish, but because the alternatives seem awkward, embarrass- should not live our lives as if everyone else is always inherently ing, or just plain pointless. They cannot see any way of making likely to be vicious, violent and irrational. an impact on the world, and if they could, why should they In any case, even if I am wrong, and crazy people are much bother? Short of undergoing a religious conversion, they see more common than I believe, what alternative is left to us? The nothing to live for except the pursuit of their own material self- conventional pursuit of self-interest is, for reasons that I shall interest. But the possibility of living an ethical life provides us explore in a later chapter, individually and collectively self- with a way out of this impasse. That possibility is the subject of defeating.