Peter Singer (Australian Heroes)

Peter Singer - Philosopher.
Australians seem to celebrate their sporting heroes and ignore those individuals that make outstanding contributions to the world outside the field of sport. Instead of focusing on The Americas Cup (sailing) , The Davis Cup (Tennis) , Football, Cricket (The Ashes) , Golf (Greg Norman) , I would like to focus on unsung heroes of Australia. Anyone can make a suggestion and I will take up the story.

Published in 1975, Animal Liberation was a major formative influence on the animal liberation movement. Although Singer rejects rights as a moral ideal independent from his utilitarianism based on interests, he accepts rights as derived from utilitarian principles, particularly the principle of minimizing suffering. Singer allows that animal rights are not exactly the same as human rights, writing in Animal Liberation that "there are obviously important differences between human and other animals, and these differences must give rise to some differences in the rights that each have." So, for example an animal does not have the right to a good education as this is meaningless to them, just as a man does not have the right to an abortion. But he is no more skeptical of animal rights than of the rights of women...

Singer argues against what he calls speciesism: discrimination on the grounds that a being belongs to a certain species. He holds the interests of all beings capable of suffering to be worthy of equal consideration, and that giving lesser consideration to beings based on their having wings or fur is no more justified than discrimination based on skin color. In particular, he argues that while animals show lower intelligence than the average human, many severely retarded humans show equally diminished mental capacity, and intelligence therefore does not provide a basis for providing nonhuman animals any less consideration than such retarded humans. Singer does not specifically contend that we ought not use animals for food insofar as they are raised and killed in a way that actively avoids the inflicting of pain, but as such farms are few and far between, he concludes that the most practical solution is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet.

Consistent with his general ethical theory, Singer holds that the right to physical integrity is grounded in a being's ability to suffer, and the right to life is grounded in, among other things, the ability to plan and anticipate one's future. Since the unborn, infants and severely disabled people lack the latter (but not the former) ability, he states that abortion, painless infanticide and euthanasia can be justified in certain special circumstances, for instance in the case of severely disabled infants whose life would cause suffering both to themselves and to their parents.

In his view the central argument against abortion is It is wrong to kill an innocent human being; a human fetus is an innocent human being; therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus. He challenges the second premise, on the grounds that its reference to human beings is ambiguous as between human beings in the zoological sense and persons as rational and self-conscious. There is no sanctity of human life that confers moral protection on human beings in the zoological sense. Until the capacity for pain develops after "18 weeks of gestation", abortion terminates an existence that has no intrinsic value (as opposed to the value it might have in virtue of being valued by the parents or others). As it develops the features of a person, it has moral protections that are comparable to those that should be extended to nonhuman life as well. He also rejects a backup argument against abortion that appeals to potential: It is wrong to kill a potential human being; a human fetus is a potential human being; therefore it is wrong to kill a human fetus.