In this episode, Peter Singer explains why ethics and joy belong together. He offers a moral wake-up call as he shares his now-famous “drowning child” thought experiment: if we saw a child drowning right in front of us, we’d act without hesitation. So why do we so often fail to act when suffering is farther away?Peter challenges the idea that ethics is about rigid rules or self-denial. Instead, he argues that living ethically is a path to a more joyful and meaningful life. This conversation explores how generosity, purpose, and even activities done purely for pleasure—like surfing—can all be part of a good life.
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Key Takeaways:
- [00:02:31] Ethical obligations in everyday life.
- [00:06:45] Helping those in extreme poverty.
- [00:10:46] Happiness and moral responsibility.
- [00:11:45] Moral progress in civilization.
- [00:16:12] Saving children from malaria.
- [00:21:02] Measuring happiness effectively.
- [00:25:02] Happiness and money connection.
- [00:27:43] Personal identity and change.
- [00:32:00] Spiritual path and personal satisfaction.
- [00:43:05] Enjoying non-competitive activities.
Peter Singer, is an Australian moral philosopher. He is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and a Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specializes in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, utilitarian perspective. He is known in particular for his book Animal Liberation, in which he argues in favor of vegetarianism, and his essay Famine, Affluence, and Morality, in which he argues in favor of donating to help the global poor. For most of his career, he was a preference utilitarian, but he announced in The Point of View of the Universe that he had become a hedonistic utilitarian. He is the author of many books, including Ethics in the Real World: 90 Essays on Things That Matter.
Connect with Peter Singer: Website | Instagram | LinkedIn
If you enjoyed this conversation with Peter Singer, check out these other episodes:
Purposeful Living: Strategies to Align Your Values and Actions with Victor Strecher
How to Create a Life Strategy for Meaningful Change with Seth Godin
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Episode Transcript:
Have you ever walked past someone in need and wondered, should I do more? In his book, The Life You Can Save, today’s guest, philosopher Peter Singer, shares a haunting thought experiment. If we walked by a child drowning right beside us and we did nothing, we’d rightly feel like monsters. Yet every day there are children all around the world who are suffering and dying, even though we have the means to help. This story has really unsettled me in the time of preparing for this conversation, forcing me to re-examine my own morals and values. Peter Singer’s groundbreaking ideas invite all of us to reconsider our ethical obligations, not just theoretically, but in how we live every day. I also managed in this conversation to put my foot in my mouth in a truly epic way. We discussed the joys of doing something for the sheer enjoyment of it, in this case surfing. This was a really powerful and thought-provoking conversation for me, so I hope you enjoy it. I’m Eric Zimmer, and this is The One You Feed. Hi, Peter. Welcome to the show. Hi.
Peter Singer:
It’s good to be with you.
Eric Zimmer:
I appreciate you coming on. I’m excited to talk with you. You are widely considered by a lot of people to be perhaps the most famous living philosopher. And you are also somebody who seems to stir up controversy nearly everywhere you go. So I’m looking forward to not having a controversial conversation, but really exploring your views and how they lead to live in a good life.
Peter Singer:
Okay. That’s a really important question to talk about.
Eric Zimmer:
So we’ll start, though, like we usually do at the parable. There’s a grandfather who’s talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? and the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Peter Singer:
What the parable means to me is that whether you’re a good person and whether you enjoy your life and find it rewarding or whether you’re not such a good person and perhaps you’re eaten up by Jealousy or envy or even hatred depends a lot on how you cultivate your own personality and your own mind and your own acts through your life. It’s not just something that happens to you. It’s not just that somebody was born mean and nasty and twisted, but it is to a large extent the way you look at the world and the way you try to cultivate the better sentiments in yourself And when I say better, I mean not only better for others, but also typically better for you.
Eric Zimmer:
So you are known as a utilitarian philosopher. Could you explain what that means?
Peter Singer:
A utilitarian is somebody who thinks that the right thing to do is the act that will have the best possible consequences of all the options open to you. Best possible consequences in the long run. and for everyone, or indeed every sentient being, affected by your actions. And by best consequences, typically utilitarians mean best consequences for the well-being of all of those affected, which in the eyes of many utilitarians means for their happiness and the reduction of suffering. There are different views of exactly what well-being consists in among utilitarians, but broadly you could think of it as best consequences in terms of promoting happiness and reducing misery.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, you’ve said that the unifying theme of all your work is preventing unnecessary suffering.
Peter Singer:
Maybe not quite of all of my work, but of a great deal of it, and particularly the practical and applied ethics. I’ve looked at areas where there seems to be suffering going on that ought not to be too difficult to prevent. So, you know, there are some instances of suffering, maybe that it’s very hard to do things about to prevent it, but there are other cases where it just seems we could change social arrangements relatively easily and there would be a lot less suffering in the world.
Eric Zimmer:
One of the things that I was struck by in reading your work And I’ll just read what you said because it’s probably better than I would say it is. You say, too often we assume that ethics is about obeying the rules that begin with, you must not. If that were all there were to living ethically, then as long as we were not violating one of those rules, whatever we are doing would be ethical. That view of ethics, however, is incomplete. It fails to consider the good we can do to others less fortunate than ourselves. And also saying that not aiding in certain cases is the same as harming.
Peter Singer:
Yes, that’s right. And then those obviously go together. Uh, I think that in a different era, perhaps it was most important to think about not harming others because we were living in smaller societies. We had little knowledge of other societies further from us. We had little ability to help people in those other societies. And so the idea of not harming others, meaning not harming others in your society, was perhaps the most important thing that you could emphasize. And it’s still important, certainly. But given the world we live in today, where we have some people, and you and I and probably most of your listeners are among them, who are extremely fortunate to be really at a level of affluence and comfort that has not existed throughout most of human history or prehistory, that is something fairly new in the world. And on the other hand, there are also a lot of people at least 700 million people who are living in what the World Bank defines as extreme poverty. People who cannot be sure that they’re going to have enough food to eat all year round, who cannot get even minimal health care, may not be able to send their children to school, and we can make a big difference to their lives. That’s why I think for people now in our situation, Just saying, I’m not going to harm others is not enough. Um, we ought to be doing things to make the world better and to help others too.
Eric Zimmer:
And how do people draw that line? Right? Because on one hand you could say, all right, you know what? I need to help others and I’m going to give everything away except living as a, as a pauper. And then there’s the flip side. which is I’ve got a million dollars and I’m not sending any of it to someone. Those are two extremes. How for normal people do you think about finding a ground that seems moral but also reasonable?
Peter Singer:
It’s very hard to draw lines in those situations because people do have different commitments and different responsibilities. So I have varied if you look at my writings over the 40 years or so I’ve been interested in this issue. There’s variations at one stage I suggested the traditional tie that people should give 10% of their income if they are. middle class or above and living in an affluent country, 10% of your income seems a reasonable thing that most people can do. Of course, some people could give much more than that. Perhaps for other people, 10% is still pushing it a little bit. On the website that I’ve set up, the lifeyoucansave.org, there is now a sliding, a progressive scale, a bit like tax scales. It’s not a flat percentage. The more you earn, the higher the percentage. For people not earning so much, it starts off very low. It starts off around 1%. I think it’s good for people to get started even if they don’t have a lot of money because hopefully, later on, they will do better. Anyway, getting in the habit of giving something, this is maybe about the wolf you feed, getting in the habit of giving something and helping others. makes you feel good about that, and then maybe when you do have a little bit more, you realize, you know, well, look, I could actually do more than this, and I’d like to do more than this, because this is an important part of my life. This is an important part of who I am, that when I have abundance, I share some of it with others.
Eric Zimmer:
We talked about living a good life, you’ve referenced well-being, you’ve referenced happiness. What is the role of morality in our own lives? What role does morality play in us experiencing those things that we just talked about? Because we tend to think of morality as, here’s how I should act towards others, and I’m inverting that into the sort of selfish, right? Like, what’s in it for me? But I am just curious how you’d answer that question.
Peter Singer:
I don’t mind people thinking what’s in it for me if what they’re thinking about is what’s in it for me in terms of helping others and then they realize, well, maybe there is something in it for me. Maybe it actually helps me to feel more satisfied with my life, to feel more fulfilled, to feel that I have a purpose beyond just accumulating more consumer goods and generating more trash in the world. I think there is quite a lot in it for people. There are some moralists who think that unless you’re miserable and in sackcloth and ashes, then what you’re doing can’t be morally good. But I don’t think that that’s right. I think that I like people who are happy and enjoy the fact that they’re helping others. That seems to me to be quite an important thing to be doing.
Eric Zimmer:
Is there any morality to how happy we are? Is striving for our own happiness in your mind a moral thing to do?
Peter Singer:
Other things being equal, yes, it is. Because as I said, I think that what we ought to be doing is what will have the best consequences for all of those affected by our actions. And we are one of those affected by our actions. So doing what will have the best consequences for me, if it doesn’t harm anyone else, and preferably, of course, if it also helps someone else, is in itself a good thing. I can’t. I’m not the kind of person who thinks I mustn’t give any weight to my own happiness. What I do think is I shouldn’t give more weight to my own happiness if possible. This may be a little too saintly, but if possible, I should try not giving more weight to my own happiness than I give to the happiness of others.
Eric Zimmer:
One of the things that you wrote recently was that the belief that we are progressing morally has become difficult to defend. However, I think I’m one of those people that does think we’re progressing morally and as a civilization. How would you argue that point, that indeed we are?
Peter Singer:
I would invite people to look at the progress that we’ve made in a lot of important areas. I mentioned that there are 700 million people living in extreme poverty as the World Bank defines it. That figure is a significant drop over previous decades and particularly if you take as a percentage of the world’s growing population, it’s quite a remarkable drop. In fact, it means that the number of people living in extreme poverty today is fewer than 10% of the world’s population. That’s probably the first time ever since our species evolved and separated from other primates, it’s probably the first time ever that fewer than 10% of human beings are in a situation where they are not reasonably secure about having enough to eat, not just today, but over a longer future. Of course, things like health care and education and so on were not even issues for most of our evolutionary history. Certainly, if we talk about more recent centuries, again, it would be the first time that 90% of human beings are are able to have access to some education for their children or some healthcare. Rates of literacy have been increasing as well. So I think there are signs that the world is getting to be a better place. One other thing that I should perhaps mention is that the chances of any individual human being alive today meeting a violent death at the hands of other human beings, those chances are smaller than they’ve ever been. And a lot of people might question that because we read every day about terrorism, don’t we? But of course, terrorism is responsible for a tiny proportion of deaths. And even if we increase that and talk about, say, gun violence generally, which certainly in the United States is a much larger proportion of deaths or road accidents. it’s still much less than the general murder rate was if you go back a couple of hundred years. So I think there are ways in which we become a more peaceful and a better society.
Eric Zimmer:
It seems that way to me too. And when I look at things like torture or slavery or gay rights, not that there’s not still battles to be fought on those fronts, but it really does seem like by and large, most people would say, hey, torture is a bad thing. or, you know, it just seems like we were, we’re making progress on those fronts where there’s more people starting to say, wait a minute, like that isn’t, that isn’t the right way to, to behave. Do you think that is a one directional thing or it could very easily reverse?
Peter Singer:
I think it’s a longterm development, so I don’t think you would easily reverse, which is not to say that it can’t reverse in some particular times and places. And obviously, It has. So I think, for example, the movement that you’re referring to in relation to torture and cruel punishments, that goes back to the 18th century, at least that goes back to that 18th century enlightenment in Europe, which started to object to some of these things that were previous to that pretty routine, pretty standard. But if you look at the history of the world since the 18th century, you would say, oh, yes. But then, you know, what about what happened in the Nazi concentration camps or in the Gulag or other places like that? Dreadful things happen. There’s no doubt about it. But. Again, they were exposed and condemned and generally speaking, at least certainly in the German case, people involved were punished. I think that was a kind of an aberration and it may occur again in particular places, no doubt it has and will, but taking the world as a whole, I think it’s much less widespread than it used to be. My expectation is that we’ll continue to be much less widespread.
Eric Zimmer: 16:01
Certainly one of the things that you’re most known for is trying to reduce extreme poverty, trying to save lives in developing countries. And you’ve come up with a illustration that sort of shows why maybe the way we think about people on the other side of the world is wrong. And you say, if I’m walking past a shallow pond and I see a child drowning in it, I ought to wade in and pull the child out. This will mean getting my clothes muddy, but this is insignificant, while the death of the child would presumably be a very bad thing. And you equate that to the fact that today there are children dying that we could be saving. and that we are not, and that those are equivalent. Why do you think that we don’t react in the same way? Because I think most of us would pull that child out of the pond. And yet, by and large, most of us do not do very much to help people on the other side of the world.
Peter Singer:
That’s right. And the idea of the parable, if you want to call it that, of the child drowning in the pond is that most of us would pull that child out and therefore to raise the question and why wouldn’t we save a child who is drowning or perhaps more likely going to die from malaria because the child is in a malaria prone region and the child’s family does not have a bed net to protect the child from mosquitoes. Why wouldn’t we contribute to an organization that’s protecting children from malaria? That’s one of many demonstrable ways in which we can save the lives of children. So I think there are psychological explanations for why we would pull a child in front of us out in the pond. We’ve got an identifiable individual in front of us. In the case of the appeal to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, which is one of those effective organizations that is providing bed nets. We don’t know which child we’re going to save. It’s more anonymous. It’s more like a statistic. So I think that that’s a significant factor in terms of why people are not giving to those more distant cases. Some people also may have doubts about whether the money will actually do what it’s supposed to do. Every now and again, some story gets in the media about a charity that turned out to be a scam or wasn’t doing what it should. That’s why it’s really important to know the charities you’re donating to. That’s one of the things that www.thelifeyoucansave.org was set up to do, that is to be able to recommend charities that have been thoroughly researched and shown to be highly effective in terms of the work that they were doing and highly cost effective as well.
Eric Zimmer:
So those are some of the reasons why we don’t, and I think they’re good reasons, but you argue that that isn’t, maybe this isn’t the way you’d say it, but those aren’t good excuses.
Peter Singer:
Yeah, that’s right. They’re psychological factors, but when we stop and think about, is that a morally relevant, a morally important thing, a difference between the thing, then I think most of us can say, no, you know, Even if we don’t know the child, we can’t identify the child, it’s still a real child. Every child is a specific individual and it’s just as much a real child as the one in front of us. So yeah, I don’t think that’s morally relevant. As I said, the idea that charities may be scams is often an excuse because the people who say that don’t then go online and do the relatively simple amount of research that they could, which would enable them to see which charities were definitely not scams.
Eric Zimmer:
You’ve also said that some of it might be evolutionary because we evolved in small face-to-face societies. So we evolved to respond to the child that’s right in front of us, but we’re not at the place where we really understand how to think about children on the other side of the world. That’s not hardwired into us in the same way.
Peter Singer:
Yes, that’s right. You know, we have evolved as social primates living in small societies, perhaps 150-200 individuals. That’s what most evolutionary theorists think about most of human existence. So we have those reactions. We have the reactions to respond to somebody in front of us. We don’t obviously have the reaction to respond to someone we can’t see or we can only see on our TV screens because in terms of our evolutionary history, they’ve only existed for microsecond and evolution takes longer to work than that.
Eric Zimmer:
One of the things that it was in your recent book of various essays was about this movement in certain nations or across the world to measure happiness or to measure well-being. What are the things that we’re using to measure those things and do you think that they are the right way to look at it?
Peter Singer:
So I think we’re starting to get better. The science of measuring happiness is a relatively new one, and it’s more complicated than the science of measuring gross domestic product or some of those economic measures that have been used to show progress. But I do think that we’re getting better at understanding what’s going on. Most of it is done by asking people questions, and it turns out that it makes a difference how you ask the question of course, if you ask people how satisfied are you with your life, you get somewhat different set of answers than if you ask people questions relating to how happy are you right now, how are you feeling, what’s your mood, those sorts of questions. You get a different sort of answer and that’s interesting and of course needs interpretation. What should we be more concerned about, whether people are satisfied with their life or whether people are enjoying their lives, basically, on a moment-for-moment sort of basis. I think that there’s some evidence that asking people how satisfied they are with their life, though it sounds like a good question, may take into account some adjustment that they’ve already made to difficult circumstances so that people who seem to be having very tough lives may still say they’re satisfied with their life because maybe they’ve just adjusted their expectations downwards. So perhaps really asking people how much they’re enjoying their lives is giving us a better answer because it gets them to focus more on their mood and their present than some sort of evaluation of their life.
Eric Zimmer:
That raises interesting questions around some of the science that shows that maybe as people we tend to have sort of a pre-wired happiness level, like that you might be wired to be happier than I am based on, you know, just the way our brains work, the way the neurochemicals work, And that’s why I think obviously the definition of happiness gets so much scrutiny because it’s so very hard to say like, what’s, what’s the measure of a good life?
Peter Singer:
Yes, that is hard. But on the other hand, I think when people are suffering, that is much more related to their circumstances. I mean, again, people may be more depressed. There may be some sort of hardwired, um, more depressed sort of personality, but, uh, For a lot of people who are not in that category, external circumstances can cause them to suffer just something like you start getting a severe toothache. Imagine in the age before dentistry or people who still today have no access to dentistry, you can imagine how much of a negative impact that has on how happy they are. at that moment. That’s why you said early on in this discussion that I focused on reducing avoidable suffering. Although I do think it’s interesting to think about increasing happiness above the neutral level as well, I do think that it’s probably, at least at this stage of our knowledge, better to focus on reducing avoidable suffering. That’s something we can know more about and we can probably do more effectively than we can to make people who are not suffering more positively happy than they are.
Eric Zimmer:
As I was reading your article and it was talking about the ways that we measure happiness for these things, I was struck by a couple of things. One is there tends to be a thing, particularly in, you know, what I’ll call like the self-development movement or whatever that says, you know, well, happiness isn’t really tied to money. And That was very clearly in some of the things that predict happiness and well-being, not a true statement, right? And then secondly, there were things beyond the conditions of people’s lives, so beyond the economic and financial conditions of their lives that also did contribute to happiness. I’m just curious your thoughts on that.
Peter Singer:
Yeah, I think we need to be a little more specific about the link between happiness and money. It’s certainly true that when people have very little, then adding to their wealth or income does make them happier. But once you get to a certain level, which roughly say in United States income terms would be perhaps $70,000 a year, then adding more to their income makes only a modest difference to their happiness. It doesn’t make zero difference. particularly that question of how satisfied they are with their life, that does continue to go up though much more slowly. But in terms of their mood and how much they’re enjoying their life, it actually seems to make no difference or a negligible difference. So you need to be able to have a level of comfort. But once you get to that level, and a lot of Americans are beyond that level, then putting all your effort and energy into acquiring more money, at least for its own sake, you know, not to give away, but just to just have for yourself is probably not going to really be the most effective strategy for making you feel happier.
Eric Zimmer:
And then what are some of the other things when they’re measuring happiness that show up as important beyond your economic condition?
Peter Singer:
So having a good circle of family or friends or both is really important. That shows up all the time, that feeling that you have close family and friends that you can talk to and spend time with is a really major contributor to happiness for most people. Another thing that’s really important, and it gets back to what we’ve been talking about, is having values that you feel you’re living in accordance with and feeling that your life is in some way meaningful or purposeful. I think that makes a difference, and it’s interesting that it makes a difference to people’s health, that when people feel that they have some purpose in life, tend to live longer and have better health into old age, which is one of the reasons when people who work very hard for a company and then suddenly retire are at high risk of having heart attacks and keeling over. I think that the values are relevant here to how happy and satisfied you’re going to feel with your life.
Eric Zimmer:
Excellent. Recently, you wrote an article or perhaps it was a eulogy for a philosopher, Derek Parfit. Did I say that correctly?
Peter Singer:
Correct. Yes, absolutely.
Eric Zimmer:
And you talked about him writing about a lot of different things, but the one I’m interested in talking about is personal identity. In this article, you said, whereas we commonly take the distinction between ourself and others as an all or nothing matter, Parfit argued that our identity changes over time as the psychological connections between our earlier and later selves alter. Can you talk with me a little bit about this personal identity or the idea of the self?
Peter Singer:
Yes, and it is sort of philosophically controversial and I greatly admire Parfit as a great philosopher, I think a very clear thinker and somebody who thought more deeply about some of these philosophical problems than most people do. I’m not sure whether I totally agree with his view on personal identity. So if I think about myself, now I’ve just turned 70, and I can think back some of my really early childhood memories, I can identify with that boy, and I can think, yes, that was me in some sense. So there is this sort of psychological continuity just because of the fact that I have preserved these memories all of my life. But at the same time, that boy was a very different person. had different values and could have ended up quite differently. It was in no way preordained that I was going to end up as a philosopher. I originally planned to become a lawyer. My interest in ethics has certainly developed and grown a great deal. There’s a sense in which I have evolved and that child is not exactly me. You could also think about this in a forward-looking way, particularly if you’re a younger person than I was, right? You can say, okay, so now I’m, let’s say I’m 20 and I have lots of ideas about how I want to change the world and live differently and do things differently to the way my parents did. But suppose somebody says, well, yes, but probably you’re going to get more conservative as you grow older. Many people do. And by the time you’re 50 or 60, you’re not going to have those values anymore. Well, um, the 20 year old might then say, okay, but then I don’t really identify with that person. Even if, you know, biologically that is the same me. And even if I have some memories of my radical self at 20, I don’t really identify with that person. And in a way, perhaps I don’t care that much whether that person gets what he or she wants another 30 or 40 years down the track. Um, or at least I care just as much about other people’s wellbeing as I care about me in thirty or forty years so is this idea of the constantly changing and developing self that has argued that it’s over something that’s relative to the extent to which i have the same views and i have the same thoughts i have the same personality I did. And some people have seen parallels between what Parfitt says about the self and the Buddhist doctrine of the impermanence of the self, which also talks about change and the idea that the self is not really a single constant I. And Buddhism also can use that in a way of encouraging people to be more concerned about others, to extend their compassion to others, because the difference between I and you or I and they becomes less sharp if there’s also a difference between I today and I in 20 years.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, it’s a topic I’m fairly fascinated with and a topic that We have had Buddhist teachers on and other non-dual teachers where we’ve explored it from that perspective, but I also like exploring it from, you know, all different angles. And it’s one of those things that on one hand is very obvious, like, there is a self, here I am, and yet it’s not as solid maybe as we think. And there does seem to be some benefit to being less attached. I guess maybe that just is in general. the less I’m attached to my own wants and have those running the show, the better off I am in general.
Peter Singer:
Yes, I think that’s right. And I think that’s consistent both with Parfit’s views and with Buddha’s teachings about thinking, trying to get your mind into a different place where you’re not so fully attached to yourself and you can think about others. And many people do say that it makes them happier. There’s an interesting book by Mathieu Ricard, the Buddhist monk of French origin, called Altruism. He’s also written about happiness, in which he talks about the way in which being less attached to yourself and meditating and training your mind to think about others and to really feel what others are feeling has made his life both more rewarding and more fulfilling and happier.
Eric Zimmer:
And I think that’s how most people end up on, we’ll just call it a spiritual path, is some sense of dissatisfaction. and this desire to feel differently. And then, ideally, lots of other good things can kind of tie along with that, but it seems to come from that very basic, like, I don’t like how I feel.
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I wanted to explore the idea with you of the public good as a value and then individual liberty as another value and how you see those things interacting and how your thought process comes to balancing those things out.
Peter Singer:
Obviously as a utilitarian, I’m very concerned about the public good. I think it’s important that we should try to maximize good generally, and therefore social policies that will improve the good of the public as a whole are important. And that’s one of the reasons I support, for example, social policies about universal healthcare. And I think it’s deplorable what is happening right now to healthcare in the United States, which, you know, even with Obamacare, was lagging behind every other developed industrialized country in the world in terms of the universality of its provision of that public good of health for everyone. But at the same time, I think that there are other ways in which sometimes legislatures and governments overreach and deny individual liberty where there is no public good resulting from that. Often they do it on, what you might say, moral grounds that are not based on consequences or well-being. The classic example of this is I think prohibition on physician assistance in dying or voluntary euthanasia, if you want to call it that. which seems to me pretty clear that if somebody is terminally ill or incurably ill and they judge themselves that their condition is so bad that they don’t want to go on living, however much longer they could go on living, then provided we’ve taken various safeguards to ensure that they’ve thought about this carefully and that is a firm decision that they’ve reached, not just a temporary whim, I don’t think that there’s any loss in allowing them to act on that decision. And of course, if they’re capable of killing themselves, then it’s not an offense for them to do so. But if they’re not capable of killing themselves, they’re not capable of killing themselves in a way that they consider acceptable, then in some jurisdictions, the law prohibits that. No longer in California or Oregon or the state of Washington in the United States or Vermont, but it still does in most of the United States. I see that as simply imposing harms on people who in those circumstances would prefer not to live out that last period of their life. I can’t see any public good in that. In fact, there’s a public negative in terms of probably the public is going to pay more whether it’s through higher insurance premiums or through Medicare is going to pay more for their medical treatment. I don’t think it’s true that other people who don’t want to die are going to be pressured into dying. No evidence of that in many jurisdictions that have not done this for many years. So it seems to me to be a both pure individual liberty that ought to be recognized and a public good as well.
Eric Zimmer:
Is the US an outlier in that? Where’s Europe, Australia, different places? I’m not really aware of those policies worldwide at all, like where we sit in comparison.
Peter Singer:
This is a movement that is still developing, I think. The countries that have had legal volunteers in Asia for the longest are the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg. They’ve had it for quite a long time. Switzerland as well has had physician assistance in dying. And then as I said, that Northwest corner of the United States and now extending all the way down the West Coast of the United States and across to Vermont. And very recently, I think Washington DC also legislated for this. Australia does not have it at present. It had it briefly in one territory, but it got overruled. There’s likely to be a move where I’m speaking to you from now in the state of Victoria, where Melbourne is the major city. The government has said that it will introduce legislation by the end of the year. I think this is something that is moving forward and is probably moving forward in many jurisdictions as well, certainly being talked about elsewhere in the world. It could, of course, if Trump appoints Gorsuch to the Supreme Court and perhaps other justices as well, it may start to move backwards in the United States because Gorsuch has said, has written that he doesn’t think that it ought to be permitted. He thinks it’s actually not just that further states should not legislate for it or that it’s not a constitutional right, but actually that the constitution, he thinks, prohibits states legislating for physician assistance in dying, which is a pretty extreme view. You know, very few other legal minds have defended that doctrine.
Eric Zimmer:
You are one of the leaders of the animal rights movement early on. And I think you’ve said that we’ve made some progress on factory farming. I’ve been a vegetarian for three years now. And You know, I try to be a vegan, but I fail more often than I succeed. Where do you think the animal liberation movement is today? And what are the steps forward, do you think?
Peter Singer:
I think the movement is obviously a lot stronger today than when I first started thinking about this when it didn’t really exist. I mean, there was a kind of an anti-cruelty movement focused mostly on dogs and cats and perhaps horses, but there was really almost nothing talking about factory farming, which is where the vast majority of the suffering of non-human that we inflict on non-human animals occurs, I believe. So that movement has built up strongly over the last 40 years. It’s achieved significant Changes in some jurisdictions. This is an area where Europe is definitely ahead of the rest of the world. The entire European Union has banned those small wire cages for egg-laying hens. It’s banned individual crates for breeding sows and for veal calves as well. Those things seem to be on the way out in the United States. They’ve been banned in California as a result of a referendum they had in 2008. and also in Massachusetts as a result of a voter’s initiative that they had just in last November. So I think they seem to be on the way out, but they still exist on a large scale. The most exciting development for animals at the moment though is the idea of more plant-based foods that will be closer to meat in texture and taste, and that hopefully will persuade more people who currently eat meat to move to the plant-based foods, it would be so much better in terms of reducing animal suffering, but also so much better in terms of reduced environmental impact, reduced fewer greenhouse gases, less pollution, and so on.
Eric Zimmer:
By not eating animals, that seems to be sort of a, you get to kill two birds with one stone, right?
Peter Singer:
That’s the wrong metaphor to use.
Eric Zimmer:
You’re right, it’s absolutely the wrong metaphor.
Peter Singer:
We do get to do a couple of good things at once.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, you avoid the climate change and the suffering of animals, but yes, you’re right. That was a poor metaphor choice. One of your other essays recently talked about surfing, and I’m curious, there just seemed to be something a little lighter, a little out of character, but I’m just interested in what it means to you, what surfing gave to you that you thought was important enough to write about.
Peter Singer:
Yeah, well, in terms of being out of character, I don’t sort of sit and think or think and sit and write all the time. I don’t think that that is a healthy existence, and I don’t think it would be a good one for me. When I am not doing that, I do like to do things that are physically active. I enjoy that. It makes me feel better. It makes my body a little bit fitter, I suppose. I suppose the two major things I do are hiking and surfing. I think that is part of me. Surfing is something that I didn’t take up early enough in life, unfortunately to get really good at, but, um, uh, I’m been doing it for, uh, about, I don’t know, the last dozen years or so. Um, and, uh, I really like it. I mean, it’s sport where you don’t need any kinds of motors or anything like that to, um, to get you going very much. You just, carry your board down to the water and paddle it out in the water, and then you use the power of the wave to get you moving forward. So I like that. I like the beauty of the sea and the waves and being out there. It’s very peaceful. And yet it can be quite physically demanding. Paddling the board against a heavy set of waves is not easy. Paddling it fast enough to pick up some of the waves takes some effort. So it’s good physical exercise and you’re developing a skill. You’re developing a skill in getting up, controlling the board, staying on the wave, tackling different waves. Every wave is a little bit different. So yeah, it’s something I really enjoy as a complete break from what I might be doing otherwise.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, I didn’t mean that surfing was out of character, I more meant it from your writing, it seemed to be a little bit, it stood out from some of the other things in the book.
Peter Singer:
Okay, sure, it’s not trying to argue for something, it’s trying to describe something that I find important in my life, but obviously won’t be for everyone.
Eric Zimmer:
Yeah, and one of the things I think that you drew out in the book was how, it’s okay to do things later in life, and it’s okay to do things that we’re not gonna be great at. And to do things just for the pleasure of it. And I think so many of us get hung up on that.
Peter Singer:
Yes, that’s true. You don’t have to be really good at everything to enjoy it. You don’t have to get the best wave that’s out there. Sometimes there’s a surfing etiquette about, well, if somebody is already on a wave, you leave that wave to that person. But that’s okay, I don’t mind. And the other thing I mentioned in that piece I write is that at least the way I do surfing, it’s completely non-competitive. I mean, maybe I’m trying to improve myself, but there are some sports where there isn’t much point unless they’re competitive. You can’t really play tennis against yourself. I guess you can hit a ball against the wall or something like that, but yeah, it gets a bit dull. But this is something that is non-competitive and yet is great. clearly a sport, it’s clearly a physical recreation you’re at there. So I like that aspect of it as well.
Eric Zimmer:
Excellent. Well, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. I’ve really enjoyed the conversation and I really enjoyed getting to spend some time with you.
Peter Singer:
Okay, it was good to talk to you, Eric.
Eric Zimmer:
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