Peter Singer is probably the best-known and most controversial ethicist in the world today. He rigorously applies utilitarian moral theory to issues such as world poverty, the environment, abortion, euthanasia and, most famously, animal welfare. He has also written a book about his grandfather, David Oppenheim, who died in Theresienstadt concentration camp. He is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

OBJECTIVE: To describe the issues faced, and how they were addressed, by the University of Toronto Critical Care Medicine Program/Joint Centre for Bioethics Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining Treatment. The clinical problem addressed by the Task Force was dealing with requests by patients or substitute decision makers for life-sustaining treatment that their healthcare providers believe is inappropriate. DESIGN: Case study. SETTING: The University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics/Critical Care Medicine Program Task Force on Appropriate Use of Life-Sustaining (...) Treatment. PARTICIPANTS: The 24-member Task Force included physician and nursing leaders from five critical care units, bioethicists, a legal scholar, a health administration expert, a social worker, and a hospital public relations professional. INTERVENTIONS: None. MEASUREMENTS AND MAIN RESULTS: Our specific lessons learned include a) a policy focus on process; b) use of a negotiation and mediation model, rather than a hospital ethics committee model, for this process; and c) the policy development process is itself a negotiation, so we recommend equal involvement of interested groups including patients, families, and the public. CONCLUSIONS: This article describes the key issues faced by the Task Force while developing its policy. It will provide a useful starting point for other groups developing policy on appropriate use of life-sustaining treatment. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: The American Blood Supply. By Alvin W. Drake, Stan N. Finkelstein, and Harvey M. Sapolsky. Blood: Gift or Merchandise. By Piet J. Hagen. New York: Alan R. Liss.

Such has been his administration's impact on U.S. domestic and international politics that the assembly line of criticism often resembles polemical pamphleteering rather than solid academic argument. Singer examines the Bush administration on its own terms.

In his book A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush writes of his decision to "recommit my heart to Jesus Christ." He traces it to a walk along the beach in Maine with the Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Conversing with Graham, Bush was "humbled to learn that God had sent His Son to die for a sinner like me." After his decision to recommit himself to Jesus, Bush tells us, he began to read the Bible regularly and joined a Bible (...) study group. (shrink)

George W. Bush has often emphasized the importance of taking responsibility for the decisions one makes. "America, at its best," he has said, "is a place where personal responsibility is valued and expected." When he was governor of Texas, he told an audience at Texas A&M University: "Always remember: you are responsible for the decisions you make." That seems a plausible moral stance. But over the past few months, it has become difficult to understand what Bush might mean by the (...) idea that we are responsible for our decisions. (shrink)

In the presidential election that brought George W. Bush to power, the moral character of the candidates was a significant factor with some voters. Among those who rated honesty as an important factor influencing their choice of candidate, 80% said they voted for Bush. These voters were disgusted with Bill Clinton, not only for his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky but for lying about it. They wanted someone to bring sound ethical values to the White House and (...) believed that Bush was the man to do it. What have the last three years told us about Bush's ethics? (shrink)

George W. Bush is not only America’s president, but also its most prominent moralist. No other president in living memory has spoken so often about good and evil, right and wrong. His inaugural address was a call to build “a single nation of justice and opportunity.” A year later, he famously proclaimed North Korea, Iran and Iraq to be an “axis of evil,” and in contrast, he called the United States “a moral nation.” He defends his tax policy in moral (...) terms, saying that it is fair, and gives back to taxpayers what is rightfully theirs. The case he makes for free trade is “not just monetary, but moral.” Open trade is a “moral imperative.” Another “moral imperative,” he says, is alleviating hunger and poverty throughout the world. He has said that “America’s greatest economic need is higher ethical standards.” In setting out the “Bush doctrine,” which defends preemptive strikes against those who might threaten America with weapons of mass destruction, he asserted: “Moral truth is the same in every culture, in every time, and in every place.” But in what moral truths does the president believe? Considering how much the president says about ethics, it is surprising how little serious discussion there has been of the moral philosophy of George W. Bush. (shrink)

George W. Bush is not only America’s president, but also its most prominent moralist. No other president in living memory has spoken so often about good and evil, right and wrong. […] But in what moral truths does the president believe? Considering how much the president says about ethics, it is surprising how little serious discussion there has been of the moral philosophy of George W. Bush.

Since their Puritan origins in the 17th century, American politicians have tended to speak in the language of divinely given morality. George W. Bush is not unique in his frequent references to the language of good and evil, just as he is not the first US politician to mangle the language.

Pandemia Covid-19 poddała próbie poglądy bioetyków na temat alokacji ograniczonych zasobów opieki zdrowotnej. Rozważamy stanowiska zajmowane przez organizacje medyczne i krajowe rady etyki we Włoszech, Hiszpanii, Wielkiej Brytanii, Niemczech i Szwecji. W kilku wypowiedziach tych organów pojęcie godności ludzkiej odgrywa kluczową rolę. Twierdzimy, że użycie tego pojęcia nie pomaga w debacie etycznej. Bronimy poglądu, że decyzje dotyczące alokacji ograniczonych zasobów powinny być podejmowane na podstawie zasady maksymalizacji korzyści netto dla dotkniętych nimi osób. Kończymy pytaniem, czy fakt, że w niektórych regionach, (...) po szczepieniu, które stały się powszechnie dostępne, niedobór łóżek szpitalnych był w dużej mierze spowodowany przez członków społeczności, którzy zdecydowali się nie szczepić przeciwko wirusowi wywołującemu Covid-19, powinien odgrywać rolę w przydzielanie zasobów niezaszczepionym osobom, które później zachorowały na ten wirus. (shrink)

According to Peter Singer, virtually all of us would be forced by adequate reflection on our own convictions to embrace a radical conclusion about giving. The following principle, he says, is “surely undeniable” -- at least once we reflect on secure convictions concerning rescue, as in his famous case of the drowning toddler.

W artykule autor dowodzi, że argument Singera na rzecz utylitaryzmu jest chybiony i że poprawienie go wymaga wyciągnięcia nauki od Rousseau i Kanta. Autor wskazuje, że podobnie jak u Singera, argument Rousseau na rzecz umowy społecznej zawodzi, ponieważ nie udaje mu się połączyć opartego na interesie własnym punktu wyjścia z wnioskami o uspołecznieniu. Następnie autor dowodzi, że Kant rozwiązał problem Rousseau, przyjmując, że uspołecznienie było właściwe człowiekowi naturalnemu i podając w ten sposób koncepcję natury ludzkiej, w której jest miejsce dla (...) moralności. Singer musi zatem postąpić podobnie, żeby rozwiązać swój problem. Autor dowodzi dalej, że przyjęcie problematycznego punktu wyjścia w postaci założenia o egoizmie ludzi odzwierciedla wpływ ewolucyjnego naturalizmu na obu myślicieli. Błędem byłoby jednak zakładać, że ewolucyjny naturalizm wymaga takiego punktu wyjścia. Singer może więc poprawić swój argument, nie zdradzając jego ducha, ale nie ma gwarancji, że jego wniosek, który stanowi wyraz utylitaryzmu preferencji, nie ucierpi wskutek tych poprawek. (shrink)

In recent years, philosophers have begun to devote serious attention to animal rights issues. Most of the attention has focused on factory farming and animal experimentation. While many of the arguments used to justify sport hunting are shown to be spurious, the paper defends sport hunting on utilitarian grounds. The loss of sport hunting would also mean the loss of a major political pressure group working for the benefit of wildlife through the preservation of habitat. Peter Singer argues (...) that “the shooting of a duck does not lead to its replacement by another.” I argue that, on the contrary, the shooting of a duck leads to the production of other ducks and other life forms that are not shot at. (shrink)

I argue against the claim that it is trivial to state that Sidgwick used the method of wide reflective equilibrium. This claim is based on what could be called the Triviality Charge, which is pressed against the method of wide reflective equilibrium by Peter Singer. According to this charge, there is no alternative to using the method if it is interpreted as involving all relevant philosophical background arguments. The main argument against the Triviality Charge is that although the (...) method of wide reflective equilibrium is compatible with coherentism (understood as a form of weak foundationalism) as well as moderate foundationalism, it is not compatible with strong foundationalism. Hence, the claim that a philosopher uses the method of wide reflective equilibrium is informative. In particular, this is true with regard to Sidgwick. (shrink)

In this, the sixth chapter of _Kantsequentialism: A Morality of Ends_, I argue that the duty of beneficence is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end and (b) to refrain from acting in a way that would manifest one’s failure to do so. What’s more, I argue that Kantsequentialism offers us the best account of whether an act manifests a failure to have adopted helping the needy as (...) such a life-shaping end. I start by considering some alternative accounts of our duty of beneficence, examining where each goes wrong. I then conclude by showing how Kantsequentialism offers us the best approach to accommodating agent-centered options. (shrink)

We have, to some extent, a duty to help the needy—to meet their basic needs for food, water, shelter, and health care. Call this the duty of beneficence. Below, I argue that it is best understood as a duty both (a) to adopt helping the needy as “a serious, major, continually relevant, life-shaping end” (HILL 2002, 206) and (b) to never behave in a way (via act or omission) that’s factually incompatible with having such an end. (Behaving in a given (...) way is factually incompatible with having an end if and only if someone who knows all the relevant facts couldn’t behave in this way and still count as having this end—at least not if they have both all the other ends that they’re required to have and only those other ends that they’re permitted to have.) I call this the Kantian View, and I argue that it has several advantages over four of its rivals. In particular, I argue that it has the advantage of being able to account for all the following: (1) a diachronic (over-time) duty to take a sufficient number of favorable opportunities for helping the needy over the course of our lives, (2) a synchronic (at-a-time) duty to take every golden opportunity to help the needy that arises, and (3) the relationship between the two. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Peter Singer’s ChallengeEugene GoodheartThe politicizing of the Terri Shiavo case has made it difficult to think clearly and judiciously (as distinguished from judicially) about what it means to decide to end the life of a terminally ill or disabled person. Can we take seriously the rhetoric of the sanctity of human life from the mouths of exponents of the death penalty? And yet there are those who (...) consistently and in good faith hold euthanasia in whatever form morally anathema. Many of those who share this view have expressed disapproval of government intervention in the Shiavo case. They cannot be accused of having a political agenda. Over the years, philosopher Peter Singer has made the case for euthanasia most forcefully. This may be a good time to consider critically his arguments, free of the immediate tumult surrounding the Shiavo case. Such consideration may even help us in our understanding of the issues involved in that case.Singer has been variously characterized as "the most controversial," "the most influential" and "the most notorious" philosopher in the world. His books cover a wide range of ethical issues, from animal liberation to euthanasia (including infanticide), and from globalization to the workings of George W. Bush's mind. The controversy, influence and notoriety come from positions he has taken, with a candor that one rarely finds in the work of a respectable philosopher, on the most sensitive issues of life and death. Whether or not one is in agreement with his views (I am not, as will soon become evident), they are argued with a provocative clarity and consistency. A radical advocate of animal [End Page 238] rights, he wants to dissolve the species distinction between human beings and non-human animals. An advocate of euthanasia and infanticide, he substitutes the commandment that honors the sanctity of human life for one that sanctifies the quality of life. In both instances, human beings are being denied a privileged place in the world simply by virtue of being human.If, as Copernicus demonstrated, the universe is not earth-centered, and if, as Darwin has shown, human beings are not the separate creation of God, there can be no justification for providing human beings with a separate ethical system, often at the expense of non-human animals. Singer calls this speciesism and analogizes it to racism. In Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1994), he argues against speciesism that in their susceptibility to pain and pleasure, in their capacity for consciousness and even in certain instances a rudimentary self-consciousness, animals deserve to be treated with the same consideration as human beings. He does not deny the superior capacities of human beings, but he views the differences between human and non-human animals as differences in degree and not kind. He provides the following memorable account of the gorilla Koko:She communicates in sign language, using a vocabulary of over 1000 words. She also understands spoken English and often carries on 'bilingual' conversation, responding in sign to questions asked in English. She is learning the letters of the alphabet, and can read some printed words, including her own name. She has achieved scores between 85 and 95 on the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Test.talk about what happens when one dies, but she becomes fidgety and uncomfortable when asked to discuss her own death or the death of her companions. She displays a wonderful gentleness with kittens and other small animals. She has even expressed empathy for others seen only in pictures.(p. 181)Why then should animals (Koko is unusual but not alone in these capacities) not be accorded the same ethical consideration as human beings? The differences between human and non-human animals in intelligence, linguistic and symbolic capacity, consciousness and self-consciousness may be a difference in degree, but of such an order of magnitude that quantity becomes quality. To say that non-human animals have 98% of DNA in common with human beings tells us nothing of the effective intellectual superiority of human beings. No matter. Singer provides a deeper reason for his anti-speciesism. "Whether or not dogs and pigs [animals... (shrink)

Diese Festschrift für Michael Fischer ist ein Patchwork und eine wunderbare Mischung aus Wissenschaft, Persönlichem, Freundschaft und Genuss. Sie setzt sich aus unterschiedlichen und vielseitigen Texten, Zeichnungen und Bildern zusammen, von Menschen, die ihn begleitet haben, manche viele Jahre, manche nur eine kurze, aber entscheidende Zeit. Studentinnen und Studenten, die von ihm gelernt haben, Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die mit ihm Ideen entwickelt, Projekte initiiert und geforscht haben, Freunden aus Kunst und Kultur, Theater, Oper und den Bühnen des Lebens, nämlich: Eric (...) Hobsbawm, Claudio Magris, André Glucksmann, Wolf Singer, Johannes Hahn, Volker Gerhardt, Thomas Fischer, Rudolf (+) und Gundl Hradil, Helga Rabl-Stadler, Gerard Mortier, Jürgen Flimm, Brita Steinwendtner, Veit Heinichen, Peter Ruzicka, André Tubeuf, Thomas Oberender, Stefan Zweifel, Hermann Lübbe, Eduardo Chitas, Wilhelm Donner, Hans Eichhorn, Reinhard Kacianka, Tina Perisutti, Ulrich H. J. Körtner, Markus Hengstschläger, Henriette und Conrad Ulrich-Hürlimann, Michael Hagner, Thomas Macho, Johann Weyringer, Birgit Recki, Walther Ch. Zimmerli, Andreas Cesana, Kurt Seelmann. (shrink)

Ben Saunders claims that actual consent is not necessary for organ donation due to ‘normative consent’, a concept he borrows from David Estlund. Combining normative consent with Peter Singer's ‘greater moral evil principle’, Saunders argues that it is immoral for an individual to refuse consent to donate his or her organs. If a presumed consent policy were thus adopted, it would be morally legitimate to remove organs from individuals whose wishes concerning donation are not known. This paper disputes (...) Saunders' arguments. First, if death caused by the absence of organ transplant is the operational premise, then, there is nothing of comparable moral precedence under which a person is not obligated to donate. Saunders' use of Singer's principle produces a duty to donate in almost all circumstances. However, this premise is based on a flawed interpretation of cause and effect between organ availability and death. Second, given growing moral and scientific agreement that the organ donors in heart-beating and non-heart-beating procurement protocols are not dead when their organs are surgically removed, it is not at all clear that people have a duty to consent to their lives being taken for their organs. Third, Saunders' claim that there can be good reasons for refusing consent clashes with his claim that there is a moral obligation for everyone to donate their organs. Saunders' argument is more consistent with a conclusion of ‘mandatory consent’. Finally, it is argued that Saunders' policy, if put into place, would be totalitarian in scope and would therefore be inconsistent with the freedom required for a democratic society. (shrink)

In this paper I defend an account of the nature of propositional content according to which the proposition expressed by a declarative sentence is a certain type of action a speaker performs in uttering that sentence. On this view, the semantic contents of proper names turn out to be types of reference acts. By carefully individuating these types, it is possible to provide new solutions to Frege’s puzzles about names in identity- and belief-sentences.

Dynamical Grammar explores the consequences for language acquisition, language evolution, and linguistic theory of taking the underlying architecture of the language faculty to be that of a complex adaptive dynamical system. It contains the first results of a new and complex model of language acquisition which the authors have developed to measure how far language input is reflected in language output and thereby get a better idea of just how far the human language faculty is hard-wired.

In 1913 Wittgenstein raised an objection to Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment that eventually led Russell to abandon his theory. As he put it in the Tractatus, the objection was that “the correct explanation of the form of the proposition, ‘A makes the judgement p’, must show that it is impossible for a judgement to be a piece of nonsense. (Russell’s theory does not satisfy this requirement,” (5.5422). This objection has been widely interpreted to concern type restrictions on the (...) constituents of judgment. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken and that Wittgenstein’s objection is in fact a form of the problem of the unity of the proposition. (shrink)

According to color subjectivism, colors are mental properties, processes, or events of visual experiences of color. I first lay out an argument for subjectivism founded on claims from visual science and show that it also relies on a philosophical assumption. I then argue that subjectivism is untenable because this view cannot provide a plausible account of color perception. I describe three versions of subjectivism, each of which combines subjectivism with a theory of perception, namely sense datum theory, adverbialism, and the (...) virtual color proposal, and argue that each version faces serious objections. Considering these three theories of perception to be exhaustive of those available to the subjectivist, I conclude that subjectivism is untenable and that the scientifically motivated argument for this view is unsound. I then offer the diagnosis that the philosophical assumption on which this argument relies is mistaken. (shrink)

To deal with syntactic structure, one needs to go beyond a simple model based on associative structures, and to adopt a dynamical systems perspective, where each phrase and sentence of a language is represented as a trajectory in a syntactic phase space. Neural assemblies could possibly be used to produce dynamics that in principle could handle syntax along these lines.

A first-person proposition is a proposition that only a single subject can assert or believe. When I assert ‘I am on fire’ I assert a first-person proposition that only I have access to, in the sense that no one else can assert or believe this proposition. This is in contrast to third-person propositions, which can be asserted or believed by anyone.

What moral standards ought nation-states abide by when selecting immigration policies? Peter Higgins argues that immigration policies can only be judged by considering the inequalities that are produced by the institutions - such as gender, race and class - that constitute our social world.Higgins challenges conventional positions on immigration justice, including the view that states have a right to choose whatever immigration policies they like, or that all immigration restrictions ought to be eliminated and borders opened. Rather than suggesting (...) one absolute solution, he argues that a unique set of immigration policies will be just for each country. He concludes with concrete recommendations for policymaking. (shrink)

The problem of the source of necessity is the problem of explaining what makes necessary truths necessarily true. Simon Blackburn has presented a dilemma intended to show that any reductive, realist account of the source of necessity is bound to fail. Although Blackburn's dilemma faces serious problems, reflection on the form of explanations of necessities reveals that a revised dilemma succeeds in defeating any reductive account of the source of necessity. The lesson is that necessity is metaphysically primitive and irreducible.

Wood and Spekkens argue that any causal model explaining the EPRB correlations and satisfying the no-signalling constraint must also violate the assumption that the model faithfully reproduces the statistical dependences and independences—a so-called ‘fine-tuning’ of the causal parameters. This includes, in particular, retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations. I consider this analysis with a view to enumerating the possible responses an advocate of retrocausal explanations might propose. I focus on the response of Näger, who argues that the central ideas of (...) causal explanations can be saved if one accepts the possibility of a stable fine-tuning of the causal parameters. I argue that in light of this view, a violation of faithfulness does not necessarily rule out retrocausal explanations of the EPRB correlations. However, when we consider a plausible retrocausal picture in some detail, it becomes clear that the causal modelling framework is not a natural arena for representing such an account of retrocausality. _1_ Causal Models, Quantum Mechanics, and Faithfulness _2_ Fine-Tuning _2.1_ Fine-tuning in a retrocausal model _3_ Possible Responses _4_ Quantum Causal Models and Retrocausality _4.1_ A more detailed retrocausal account _4.2_ A model of the EPRB probabilities _4.3_ Mapping to a causal model _5_ Conclusion. (shrink)

Karl Marx’s acerbic observation in the opening lines of _The Eighteenth Brumaire_ that “all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” may be profitably applied to a reconsideration of literary farce sui generis, a genre represented in this article by a long-neglected work of utopian fiction, Archibald Marshall’s _Upsidonia_ (1915). Although _Upsidonia_’s current disregard is arguably undeserved, the article’s chief interest is not to reclaim the novel on aesthetic (...) grounds but to illuminate the mechanics of what Marx would call its “serious buffoonery.” In its persistent reversal of capitalist principles and relations, _Upsidonia_ naturally invites readers to revisit Marx, whose mordant gambit may serve as a key to Marshall’s own farcical plot and praxis, rooted in return and repetition, the essential maneuvers of farce itself. (shrink)

What legal rights and duties immigrants should have is among the most ferociously debated topics in the politics of liberal societies today. However, as this article will show, there is remarkably little disagreement of great magnitude among political theorists and philosophers of immigration on the rights and duties of resident immigrants (even in contrast to the closely related philosophical discussion of justice in immigrant admissions). Specifically, this article will survey philosophical positions both on what legal rights immigrants (documented permanent residents, (...) guestworkers, and undocumented immigrants) ought to have (including to citizenship and against deportation), and on what liberal societies may justly do to require immigrants to integrate. This article will reveal that there is a substantial, growing gap between contemporary politics worldwide and what the moral norms of liberalism seem to entail concerning the rights and duties of immigrants. (shrink)

Adults and infants display a robust ability to perceive the unity of a center-occluded object when the visible ends of the object undergo common motion (e.g. Kellman, P.J., Spelke, E.S., 1983. Perception of partly occluded objects in infancy. Cognitive Psychology 15, 483±524). Ecologically oriented accounts of this ability focus on the primacy of motion in the perception of segregated objects, but Gestalt theory suggests a broader possibility: observers may perceive object unity by detecting patterns of synchronous change, of which common (...) motion is a special case. We investigated this possibility with observations of adults and 4-month-old infants. Participants viewed a center-occluded object whose visible surfaces were either misaligned or aligned, stationary or moving, and unchanging or synchronously changing in color or bright- ness in various temporal patterns (e.g. ¯ashing). Both alignment and common motion con- tributed to adults' perception of object unity, but synchronous color changes did not. For infants, motion was an important determinant of object unity, but other synchronous changes and edge alignment were not. When a stationary object with aligned edges underwent syn- chronous changes in color or brightness, infants showed high levels of attention to the object, but their perception of its unity appeared to be indeterminate. An inherent preference for fast over slow ¯ash rates, and a novelty preference elicited by a change in rate, both indicated that infants detected the synchronous changes, although they failed to use them as information for object unity. These ®ndings favor ecologically oriented accounts of object perception in which surface motion plays a privileged role. Ó 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

The problem of the nature of color is typically put in terms of the following question about the intentional content of visual experiences: what’s the nature of the property we attribute to physical objects in virtue of our visual experiences of color? This problem has proven to be tenacious largely because it’s not clear what the constraints are for an answer. With no clarity about constraints, the proposed solutions range widely, the most common dividing into subjectivist views which hold that (...) attributed colors are mental properties or mental events} and a variety of realist views, which hold that colors are properties of physical objects. These realist views, in turn, divide into views that hold that attributed colors are dispositions of physical objects to produce color experiences (dispositionalism),° nondispositional relations between objects and perceivers (the relational view)," physical properties of physical objects (physicalism),‘ or sui generis properties of physical objects (primitivism and impressionism).‘ I’ll examine a proposed constraint which Mark Johnston (1992) calls Revelation. According to Revelation, the appearance of color in our ordinary visual experience provides us with unqualified access to the nature of color. While every proposal about the nature of color must take a stand on how the.. (shrink)