Review of Peter Singer's Ethics in the real world: 82 brief essays on things that matter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 355 pp.

Abstract

Review of Peter Singer's Ethics in the real world: 82 brief essays on things that matter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 355 pp.Ethics in the real world is a collection of short essays, columns, and opinion pieces written by philosopher Peter Singer between 2001 and 2016. Each of the pieces constitutes a short chapter, in which Singer reflects on pressing moral and social issues. Many of these issues are familiar from Singer's previous work. They include animal suffering and the ethics of eating meet (do we have a moral duty to become vegans?), the sanctity of life (under what conditions are abortion and euthanasia morally permissible?), public healthcare (should we attempt to prolong a person's life at all costs?), sex and gender (should incest be criminalized?), doing good and effective altruism (can there be such a thing as evidence-based charity?), politics and global governance (will polluters pay for climate change?), and science and technology (is resistance against genetically modified organisms warranted?).Apart from a short introduction and some added postscripts, all of the book's pieces have been published before. To read a book with this format-an ensemble of earlier-published opinion pieces, on a diversity of topics and aimed at a general audience-might seem like browsing over a page-a-day calendar. It is to Singer's merit that reading his book is a worthwhile endeavor, in spite of its lack of novelty and the format's inherent limitations. Singer is a provocative, well-informed and hands-on philosopher, with a lucid and engaging writing style. The collection provides a comprehensive and accessible overview of themes that are central to Singer's ethics. It will specifically be of interest to those not yet acquainted with his work, but may appeal to anyone with an interest in applied ethics and social policy.Rather than summarizing each of its 82 chapters, in what follows I make three general observations about the book. The first observation concerns Singer's engagement with public philosophy, the second his use of methods in applied ethics and the third the distinctively cosmopolitan character of Singer's utilitarianism. I conclude with a remark about the societal relevance of applied philosophy.Singer's essay collection belongs to the tradition of public philosophy-that is, the tradition of doing philosophy in public, nonacademic settings. The topics he addresses and the terms in which he frames them are meant to appeal to a general audience. He notes, sarcastically, that[t]here is a view in some philosophical circles that anything that can be understood by people who have not studied philosophy is not profound enough to be worth saying. To the contrary, i suspect that whatever cannot be said clearly is probably not being thought clearly either (p. x).Indeed, insofar as popularizing is a matter of style, Singer succeeds admirably: his essays are well-structured, engaging, and exemplarily clear. Moreover, his arguments tend to be nuanced and non-dogmatic, in spite of his well-known ethical agenda: here is an ethicist not looking for arguments to support a preconceived conclusion, but sincerely pondering the implications of his utilitarian stance. A disadvantage of the book's short chapters is that the lack of scholarly detail does, occasionally, preclude the level of discussion that a topic calls for. This struck me, for instance, in Singer's defense of the late Derek Parfit's metaethical objectivism: a thousand words treatment simply does not suffice to touch upon the intricacies of the metaethical debate.A second observation about Singer's approach concerns his extensive engagement with numbers, statistics, and matters of fact. Much of our ethical behavior takes place in a face of uncertainty, and weighing the moral importance of any given issue can be a difficult task; numbers, however, often provide us with a rough indication of moral weight, or so Singer suggests. …