Interview With Peter Singer

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November 23, 2008 THE SUN-HERALD

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EXTRA COVER STORY

‘TheelevationofPeterSinger...deeplytroublesme,justasitwouldif

Vocal ... (clockwise from bottom left) Peter Singer and a friend carry a coffin of furs in protest at the sale of fur; Professor Singer with a white mouse; the philosopher campaigning against overcrowded sow stalls; protesting at the Royal Melbourne Show in 1986; the philosopher at Princeton; addressing animal rights activists in Sydney. Photos: Jon Reid, Julian Kingma, Joe Sanljak, Sandy Scheltema, Michael Nagle

Thecontroversy O

n a weekday evening, in a skyscraper high above 42nd Street in New York City, Australian philosopher Peter Singer holds court. Known for controversial views on euthanasia and animal rights, Singer has a new target in his crosshair. Just days earlier, the US economy dramatically came off the rails, financial institutions collapsed and Wall Street crashed. So, with acute timing, the subject of his lecture, hosted by the Australian Consulate, is the ethical conflict between rich and poor. Singer is blunt – there are more than a billion people living on less than a dollar a day and we – you, me, him, her, all of us – should help fix that situation. It is, says Singer, our ethical and moral duty. ‘‘A billion people is a sixth of the world’s population,’’ he says. ‘‘It is obviously very disturbing that there are a lot of people who do not have the income to meet their basic needs. ‘‘Then there are these people who are living at a level of affluence that is extraordinary. You are very probably part of that.’’ While Singer may be considered something of a wild card, his audience is anything but, made up of mainly Australian expatriates working in the US banking and

Peter Singer aroused anger for his support of euthanasia and animal rights. So who will he upset with his views on world poverty, asks MATTHEW HALL. finance industry. Rob Hulls, Victoria’s Deputy Premier, is in the second row. ‘‘Think of all the things we do that we don’t have to think very much about,’’ Singer asks his audience, explaining how comparatively affluent they are. ‘‘Travel is one of them. Being able to control the temperature where you live. Being able to have fresh fruit and vegetables all year round. The number of hours that you have to work just to meet your basic needs.’’ Singer shifts his argument up a gear. ‘‘The events on September 11, 2001 when 3000 people died in New York and at the Pentagon, got a lot of headlines and television footage. Everybody thinks about that again and again. ‘‘But they don’t think that on September 11, 2001 about 27,000 children died preventable deaths and

that it has been happening every day since. That doesn’t make television very often. It is not dramatic. It is just part of the background of the world that we live ...’’ Ouch. Professor Peter Singer was born in Melbourne 62 years ago on July 6 – the same day as George Bush. Married to Renata and with three adult children (Ruth, Marion and Esther) in Australia, Singer’s academic career led him from the University of Melbourne to prestige at Oxford, Monash and New York universities and, since 1999, to be a professor of bioethics at Princeton University, in New Jersey. His reputation for straight talk blew up with the 1974 publication of Animal Liberation. That book became a touchstone for the animal rights movement when he argued some humans demonstrated lesser mental capacity than some animals.

Controversial? He also argued euthanasia might be legitimately employed for severely handicapped infants. Critics compared Singer with Nazis (ironically, his Jewish parents fled Europe for Australia to escape persecution). ‘‘That does not mean that it is all right to kill such a baby,’’ he says on his website. ‘‘It only means that the wrong done to the infant is not as great as the wrong that would be done to a (fully developed) person who was killed.’’ Singer’s views have won him some support as well as criticism. Steve Forbes jnr, publisher and chief executive of Forbes Inc and a Republican presidential candidate in 1996 and 2000 is one of Singer’s more high-profile critics. Forbes is on Princeton’s board of trustees and withdrew his substantial funding of the university upon news of Singer’s appointment, which was also welcomed in some quarters with death threats and bomb scares. In an open letter to the university at the time, Forbes wrote: ‘‘The elevation of Peter Singer to a place of honour in an endowed chair of bioethics deeply troubles me just as it would if such an honour were bestowed upon an anti-Semite or a racist.’’ Singer says he has developed a thick skin over the years. ‘‘Criticism

affected me a great deal initially but there’s been a lot of it going on now for 20 years,’’ he says. ‘‘It can be annoying, particularly when I feel people haven’t bothered to read my stuff or try and understand it. ‘‘The criticism I receive has been mixed with a lot of praise from people for whom my work has made a positive difference. ‘‘I tend to focus on the positive. I certainly want to stimulate people to think. Hopefully some of this controversy has led them to think about issues that I have raised.’’ So billionaire Forbes will probably pay little attention to Singer’s latest book, due next year, titled The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty. In an office tucked into a corner of Princeton’s school of ethics, Singer is not bending the argument he began at the consulate a few weeks earlier. If anything, he’s even more fired up. ‘‘The book argues that ending large-scale mass poverty is something that can be done if we put our minds to it,’’ he says. ‘‘There is something seriously wrong with us if we are allowing 10million children to die each year from avoidable causes. ‘‘You don’t see as much poverty walking around the streets of Sydney or Melbourne as you might in New York but all of the major XTRA

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THE SUN-HERALD November 23, 2008

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COVER STORY EXTRA

such an honor were bestowed upon an anti-Semite or a racist.’ – Steve Forbes jnr.

king’snewcause industrialised countries are insulated from real global poverty,’’ he says. ‘‘The way most people connect with global poverty is through their television sets or their computers.’’ Singer says the events which have unfolded at a rapid pace in the world of finance since his lecture at the consulate support his argument. Wall Street collapsed and the US Government eventually endorsed a rescue package to inject billions of dollars into failed financial institutions. Angry critics of rescue packages complained that failed executives who oversaw financial meltdowns should not receive parachute payments worth millions of dollars as part of the bail-out. Perhaps they had a point. After October’s taxpayer-funded rescue was announced, not only did insurance giant AIG give goodbye cheques worth millions to departing staff but top bosses were sent to a $US440,000 ($688,000) retreat at an exclusive spa in California. Ethics? Morals? Singer suggests you mind your step. ‘‘There is a feeling that the people who got rich over the past few years shouldn’t get bailed out,’’ he says. ‘‘Everyone has this [sense of] schadenfreude, that, yes, they have had their fall, but are we going to create more economic problems

that are going to hurt us all by not bailing them out? It is an ethical and moral minefield. ‘‘It is possible that some people who deserve to be facing bankruptcy because of what they have done will be bailed out and they will continue to live a comfortable life. ‘‘If that is the price of preventing unemployment from doubling then that is a price well worth paying.’’ Realism over idealism, however, makes Singer uncomfortable. He links the world’s super-rich to impacting on global warming at a far more significant rate than the rest of the population. Money, he argues, has a heavy carbon footprint. He cites former Microsoft owner Paul Allen and his rich-boy toys as a classic example of fat-cat folly. Allen, he says, owns a private yacht that cost $200 million to build. On the flipside, it should be argued, Allen is one of the world’s richest people and is acknowledged as a philanthropist who regularly donates vast sums of money to medical research and the arts. Singer’s minefield explodes again. ‘‘I am told that in one hour of running the engines [on Allen’s yacht] at full capacity, it uses as much fuel as an average driver of a VW Jetta would use in 17

years,’’ Singer says. ‘‘It is a vastly inefficient way of moving around the planet. ‘‘Should we think something is wrong with this if we live in a world where there are 27,000 children dying every day? ‘‘Is it possible to actually be a morally decent person and choose to put your money into things as extravagant as that? ‘‘Climate change is the great ethical challenge we face. It is a global problem – not just one for Australia. ‘‘The atmosphere is a limited common resource and no nation owns it.’’ Earlier this year President Yoweri

‘All the major industrialised countries are insulated from real global poverty.’

Museveni of Uganda announced at an African Union summit that developed countries were ‘‘committing aggression’’ against African nations by causing global warming. ‘‘It seems extreme but it is a justified comment,’’ says Singer, explaining that Australia and North America are among the highest emitters of greenhouse gases, while the poorest nations are the lowest. ‘‘We think that, as a nation, Australia doesn’t engage in aggression. ‘‘For nations like Canada and the US and Russia, global warming is not going to be all that bad. It may make some parts in the north of those countries better for agriculture than they are now. But global warming is a disaster for Africa. ‘‘If the rain fails, many millions of subsistence farmers will become refugees, they will have nowhere to go, and quite possibly large numbers of them will die. ‘‘It is a disaster for Australia too but no one is going to starve to death. Families might have to leave the land, they might no longer be able to farm; they will go to Melbourne or Sydney and hopefully find jobs. ‘‘If they don’t find jobs, they will have a good social security system that will mean at least they don’t starve. There is no such safeguard in Africa.’’

Morally, Singer argues, every person on the planet has an obligation to each other, the affluent even more so. Money does equal power but power should be an enabler to do the right thing. ‘‘These people see it as a priority to buy large yachts or sports teams with the spare cash that they have,’’ he says. ‘‘I can’t see that anyone who would stop to think just for a little bit would think that is wise. ‘‘There is some kind of blindness and some kind of self-indulgence. They just don’t look at the larger picture. It is hard to imagine that they don’t know what is happening.’’ That said, Singer is buoyed by President-elect Barack Obama’s victory in the US presidential election. Change and hope, it now appears, need not be banished from our vocabulary. ‘‘America has changed dramatically in a way that you would not have thought possible four years ago when Bush was re-elected,’’ Singer says. ‘‘Religious issues, hostility to anything a little different or exotic, and wariness about somebody who is actually smart, seemed like real barriers to political change in America. ‘‘Now they no longer do – and a huge change for America is also a huge change for the world.’’

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