In this exclusive interview with the Institute of Art and Ideas, in the run up to HowTheLightGetsIn London 2022, groundbreaking ethicist and philosopher Peter Singer clarifies his stance on moral objectivity, the role of intuitions in ethics and where we draw the line for holding people responsible for inaction.

In various interviews you have stated that you have moved from moral anti-realism - the view that there are no objective moral values - to moral realism - the view that there are objective moral truths. What initiated this shift?

For many years, after studying at Oxford, I considered myself a universal prescriptivist – the position taken by R.M. Hare, who was my supervisor for much of my time at Oxford. Hare always insisted that, even for prescriptivists, reason had an important role to play in reaching moral judgment. But the problem was for Hare, reason only had this role because of what he argued was the logic of moral concepts.  So if you don’t use moral language – in other words, become an amoralist – it seems that you have no reason, other than self-interest, to avoid, say, gratuitously punching someone in the face.

I tried for many years to find ways of avoiding this conclusion, within the prescriptivist framework, but eventually had to admit that I could not do so.  Around this time, I read an early draft of Parfit’s On What Matters, and that showed me that ethical objectivism – a term both Parfit and I prefer to “moral realism” – is a viable alternative that explains why we have reasons not to gratuitously inflict harm on others. To summarise, moral objectivism/or moral realism means that moral judgments can be true or false, and that in principle all rational beings would agree about them. 

___

So if you don’t use moral language – in other words, become an amoralist – it seems that you have no reason, other than self-interest, to avoid, say, gratuitously punching someone in the face

___

Does your shift to moral realism have anything to do with the argument that you made in 'Ethics and Intuitions' in 2005, that intuitions are not a good basis for grounding moral judgements?

It has more to do with the idea that we can distinguish between some intuitions, and that we have grounds for rejecting some, but not all of them, depending on what we know of how those intuitions arose.

From Ethics and Intuitions (2005):

‘The "intuition" that tells us that the death of one person is a lesser tragedy than the death of five is not like the intuitions that tell us we may throw the switch [that drops one person from a trapdoor to stop a trolley that will kill five], but not push the stranger off the footbridge [to save five]. It may be closer to the truth to say that it is a rational intuition, something like the three "ethical axioms" or "intuitive propositions of real clearness and certainty" to which Henry Sidgwick appeals in his defence of utilitarianism in The Methods of Ethics. The third of these axioms is "the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other."

SUGGESTED READING Animal Pain and New Mysticism About Consciousness By Bence Nanay