Malcolm Gladwell spells that out in The Tipping Point, a book all activists should read. The Effective Altruism movement urges funders to donate to charities that can prove how many animals they help. One of the top recommendations is a group that urges food companies to stop using eggs from hens in battery cages. That effort will surely help end that one hideous farming practice and ease some of the suffering of billions of animals. But those approaching the companies would have no success if other activists weren’t changing public opinion, pushing the envelope, and putting societal pressure on those companies to at least make some improvements. It’s worth noting that any choice of litmus test for inclusion in the circle is, to some degree, culturally determined.
Which animals deserve moral consideration?
9 I say “most” here because whether some animals (e.g., insects) are sentient is controversial, and others (e.g., bivalves) are widely thought not to be sentient. His conduct hurt me personally as I struggled to disentangle myself from our destructive relationship but was lured back, with my first ever Los Angeles Times piece being the bait he dangled. The three other guests were one of our movement’s most prominent leaders, a celebrity supporter, and a potential donor who had flown in for the meal. It was one of the most humiliating and professionally damaging nights of my life. When the editor asked whose byline should go first, Singer acknowledged privately to me that I had done the bulk of the work – twice – but said that because his name was more recognizable, the piece would be more widely read and thus be better for animals if his went first.
Another factor, of course, is the presence of activists who are willing to work damn hard to push the boundaries of the circle. “Reason enables us to take the point of view of the universe,” he told me. The same is true for the belief that black people should have the same rights as white people.
After consulting with lawyers, I decided not to appeal the court’s ruling, that my sexual harassment claim against Peter Singer had been filed beyond the statute of limitations. I learned that over 90 percent of appeals fail, and that a judge would need to commit a glaring mistake, as opposed to making a surprising but legally justifiable ruling, before a higher court would overrule. It was too risky and too expensive to proceed with an appeal while not knowing her thinking. The original claim was for $4 million, with the amended complaint increasing punitive damages after I learned, in 2022, that his behavior had not changed. Peter Singer, however, has said that animal experimentation is justified if the good done to others outweighs the harm inflicted on the animals, even making that point with regard to terminal primate research. While I acknowledge there may be reasonable people who agree, who should not be shouted down or shamed, especially given that they may currently be in the majority, I am sorry to see one of them trying to carry the torch for the animal liberation movement.
But Singer quickly became so defensive and enraged that he used the c word in order to humiliate me, as he misrepresented an embarrassing event from our past. Then he walked out of the dinner, at which he was the guest of honor. Though Peter Singer eventually told me he had slept with about thirty women in our movement, my claim refers to just a few, whose lives, like mine, were profoundly damaged by their dealings with him.
- I can imagine us having laws against eating sentient animals, even as we continue to repress certain classes of people.
- He omitted that part as he summed up the issue to the San Francisco auditorium, surely calling into question the ethics professor’s honesty.
- That stunned numerous women, with Haggis then insisting on going to court against one who accused him of rape.
- One debate common to both movements is whether incremental reforms do more harm than good.
- Everyone reading this sentence likely (hopefully!) agrees that women deserve the same rights as men.
- In 1975 there weren’t many good vegetarian or vegan cookbooks so it made sense to include recipes.
That is an important point because Peter Singer has publicly accused me of being untruthful. I hope that anybody who questions him will ask him to name any untruth in this essay or the lawsuit, for I am aware of none. The affair resumed, briefly, for what was one of the lowest points of my life. It took a toll, which eventually proved insurmountable, on my primary relationship with a man who had unreservedly supported me and my work for animals.
Many factors enabled the moral circle to expand in the past
I understand that the organizers did not know that for the last few decades Peter Singer has been treating our movement like his personal harem and was, at the time of the conference, fighting that claim in court. It’s entirely possible that we’ll have expanded it in some respects and narrowed it in others. I can imagine us having laws against eating sentient animals, even as we continue to repress certain classes of people.
- In order to answer these practical ethical questions, then, we would have to figure out not only who or what deserves moral consideration but also how to treat the things that deserve moral consideration.
- That ruling reflected the effect of my having no legal counsel in confronting Singer’s law firm.
- These are questions that activists for the rights of animals, nature, and robots all grapple with as they use the idea of the moral circle to mount their arguments.
- The approach below is what philosophers call consequentialist.
- If Peter Singer and I are forced back into court under a different claim, we will face a different California judge.
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He believes rational thought has played a major role in expanding the moral circle over the centuries. Some go even further and argue that all living organisms deserve moral consideration.11 This view is biocentrism. I hear from people who tell me about his latest anti-animal liberation statement, thinking I might want to use it as ammunition to take him down, but I don’t. For 20 years I felt like I was covering for him, betraying myself, and betraying the women in our movement and the movement itself. Finally, when the horrible truth of our relationship was thrown in my face, I felt forced to stand for myself and the female activism experience.
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They’re allies in the movement against factory farming, and a world of conscientious omnivores would produce much less meat and dairy products, with vastly less suffering. Effective Altruism may be helpful for fields that most people already acknowledge matter – human life, for example. And it may work in the field of basic animal welfare, within the framework of humans having the right to breed, own, and kill animals. Ratiocentrism has the plausible implication that if rational space aliens exist, they also deserve moral consideration.
On the relative value of human and animal lives
It is unclear, however, what it takes to be potentially rational. But then Peter Singer is in no ethical position to discuss diet on behalf of our movement. It is probably impossible to be totally vegan in this society – car tires aren’t even vegan – so we must all draw our own lines. Eating animals, however, is well beyond the cheat level of most people who would consider themselves to be part of the animal rights movement. Yet in his most recent Guardian interview, Singer announces that he has no objection to eating oysters because he doesn’t think they can suffer. Examples like these complicate the Western narrative of moral progress.
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He walked out of the fundraising dinner at which he was the guest of honor, and during our next contact he quit the DawnWatch board. The “consent” is questioned in my complaint as it was achieved via deceit, with the married man attesting to an “arrangement” with his wife that did not exist, and his choosing not to reveal that I was becoming one of three current lovers other than his wife. The day I learned of the other women, I broke off our sexual relationship. I was lured back into his orbit a few months later, with the offer of a co-writing credit for a Los Angeles Times piece. larabet casino That kind of professional pressure to achieve close contact also calls “consent” into question.
Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation, published in 1975, exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them. Now, nearly 50 years on, Singer, 76, has a revised version titled Animal Liberation Now. It comes on the heels of an updated edition of his popular Ethics in the Real World, a collection of short essays dissecting important current events, first published in 2016. Singer, a utilitarian, is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. In addition to his work on animal ethics, he is also regarded as the philosophical originator of a philanthropic social movement known as effective altruism, which argues for weighing up causes to achieve the most good. He is considered one of the world’s most influential – and controversial – philosophers.
The claim that all adult human beings deserve moral consideration has been denied throughout much (or most) of human history, but it is clear to us now that their reasons for doing so were not good ones. It is much better for the climate than meat from animals and for animal suffering. And while it is true that it still suggests that meat is desirable, there are people who are unwilling to make that switch to becoming vegan or vegetarian. The companies’ use of fetal bovine serum to develop their products is regrettable and I am pleased that many companies have found alternatives and stopped using it, but if there are no alternatives, its use can be justified. This case has been taxing, of course, but I could not continue to be silent with that silence tacitly covering for horrendous behavior.