Product Description

Peter Singer’s remarkably clear and comprehensive Practical Ethics has become a classic introduction to applied ethics since its publication in 1979 and has been translated into many languages. For this second edition the author has revised all the existing chapters, added two new ones, and updated the bibliography. He has also added an appendix describing some of the deep misunderstanding of and consequent violent reaction to the book in Germany, Austria and Switzerland where the book has tested the limits of freedom of speech. The focus of the book is the application of ethics to difficult and controversial social questions.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #121619 in Books
• Published on: 1993-01-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 411 pages

Review
From a review of the first edition ‘Singer’s book is packed with admirably marshalled and detailed information, social, medical, and economic, and has a splendid appendix of notes and references to further reading. The utility of this utilitarian’s book to students of its subject can hardly be exaggerated.’ New York Review of Books

‘Peter Singer has provided us with a good example of the fruits of a major and by now established extension of philosophical interest. He succeeds in being straightforward, clear, and forceful without oversimplifying the technical aspects of the problems he discusses or trivialising the underlying philosophical issues.’ The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘Excellent and highly provocative.’ Choice

Customer Reviews

Possibly the world's most important book
I first read Practical Ethics twenty-five years ago, and have re-read it, including the later expanded edition, several times. It is an amazing book, because it quietly, calmly and rationally tears apart most of our conventional views about what is right and wrong, particularly in the areas of abortion, euthanasia, our treatment of animals, how we should respond to global poverty and what responsibility we have towards future generations. Singer is currently a professor at Harvard, and is probably the world's most influential writer on ethics. Certainly, Practical Ethics is the most important book that I have ever read, and I urge you to read it, too.

Singer does not pre-judge anything: he challenges us to throw away assumptions such as 'all human life is sacred' and he exposes the unjustifiability of many of the conclusions that we imagine follow from the differences between people and other animals. He uses logical argument to make us realise that if we want to be moral, we need to fundamentally change many of our attitudes.

Singer uses detailed scientific facts as well as moral argument to explore how we should behave, and comes to many controversial conclusions. He has been accused, wrongly, of being hostile to the rights of people with disabilities, but in fact he is a persuasive advocate for ending all unfair discrimination, and for valuing the comparable interests of all sentient beings equally, even when those sentient beings are not people.

I do not agree with everything in Practical Ethics (though I suspect that when we disagree, it is Singer who is right!), but reading it has still managed to change my life in many ways. Be prepared for a challenging and wonderfully stimulating read.

Valuable but still controversial
The title of this book is most apt. Singer presents his view of ethics by considering practical situations that may present moral dilemmas. He arranges the chapters so as to provide progressive examples in which he puts forward a coherent, if in places controversial, approach to ethical behaviour. Chapter headings are:

1. About Ethics
2. Equality and its Implications
3. Equality for Animals?
4. What's Wrong with Killing?
5. Taking Life: Animals
6. Taking Life: The Embryo and the Fetus
7. Taking Life: Humans
8. Rich and Poor
9. Insiders and Outsiders
10. The Environment
11. Ends and Means
12. Why Act Morally?
Appendix: On Being Silenced in Germany

For me Singer's style isn't always easy to read. Of course one expects somehwat convoluted sentences in philosophy books but it could, IMO, benefit from an effort to tidy up the worst specimens. Apart from that, given the task that the author sets himself, the overall balance of the book is IMO nicely judged.

As to Singer's ethical position, I have my doubts. His concept of ethical personhood is made to bear, IMO, more than it reasonably can. It distinguishes between sentience and self-awareness and accords a self-aware being greater ethical consideration than a purely sentient one. He could, IMO, make stronger arguments for his positions from the Bhuddist principle that ethical behaviour is that which tends to reduce the suffering of any sentient beings. To my mind this makes many of his arguments in Chapters 4 to 7 open to significant criticism.

He mentions Hare's concepts of intuititive and critical ethics but does not develop them. This, to my mind, is unfortunate, especially in chapters 8 and 9, where the ethical questions he discusses are clouded by the practical difficulty that an ethical agent has in deciding what the likely consequences of his actions will be in a complex society with a developed economy. The discussion of the economic aspects of ethics in these chapters is, IMO, too lightweight to be very helpful.

The Appendix on hostility to Singer's views in German-speaking Europe is a curious inclusion. It adds nothing to the exposition of his ethics but does provide an interesting contemporary account of how some societies are still thinking about ethical issues by reaction to the ills of Nazism.

The book's focus on well known ethical questions makes it an accessible introduction to ethics. Considered as such, I think it deserves a 5-star rating. Its omissions, notably that of any reference to existentialist ethics, make it less satisfactory as a philosophical exposition - but then that is not it's purpose.

Ethics - of a sort
In this book, Peter Singer examines core questions of ethics and expounds his own framework for ethical thought, which he describes as "preference utilitarianism". He develops his theory by considering, in turn, some of the most important questions in ethics, concentrating particularly on those dilemmas which involve questions about the moral status of human beings and other creatures. Within his wider "preference utilitarianism", Singer adopts a personhood-based approach to issues of moral status - while he acknowledges that attributes like sentience confer a certain degree of moral considerableness, Singer ultimately regards "persons" (rational, autonomous, self-conscious agents)as the exclusive bearers of "full" moral status. "Persons", for Singer, is a group which includes most adult human beings, great apes (gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans), and possibly also other "higher mammals" like dolphins. It excludes "lower" vertebrates, invertebrates, and, controversially, some human beings, including very young children (those who have not yet attained self-consciousness or rationality)and severely mentally-impaired adults (either through mental disability or through degenerative neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease). Unsurprisingly, Singer has caused great offence to many people who argue that, by proposing a category of 'human nonpersons' he disregards the moral value of many human beings whose lives should be valued and respected despite severe disabilities. Singer, for his part, argues that to value a life for no other reason that it is a human life would simply be "speciesism" - discrimination in favour of our own species and against others. He claims that when we consider the moral status of humans, apes, etc, the fact of whether a being belongs to our species is no more relevant than whether or not he or she belongs to our race. Personhood theory is, of course, open to wide-ranging attack from advocates of a more "relational" morality and critics of overly-rationalitic, abstract moral theories. Singer, in particular, has been attacked for resurrecting the spectre of Nazi-era policies like non-voluntary euthanasia for those human beings deemed subnormal, or "nonpersons". This criticism obviously hits a nerve - Singer devotes a lengthy appendix of his book to an unconvincing refutation, in which he portrays himself as a much-maligned martyr for free speech.