Singer’s influence in the public domain has undoubtedly been considerable and in some ways beneficial. The current healthy level of public interest in the maltreatment of animals, euthanasia, and other bioethical dilemmas owes much to his work. Writings on an Ethical Life reprints a selection of Singer’s academic papers, substantial representative portions from several of his earlier books dealing with animal liberation, bioethics, world poverty, the obligations of the rich, and the good life, as well as interviews and reflections on his disturbing silencing in Germany and the public reception of his views. It is not new work. Singer explains in the introduction that the aim of the book is to present what is essential in his thinking with enough context and argument to make it easily understood. In this, the book succeeds admirably. It hangs together well, there is little repetition, and it exposes clearly many of the arguments and views that people have found liberating, as well as those that are pernicious.

The comparison with Russell has its limits. Russell was an original who transformed not only doctrine but also the methods by which philosophy in nearly all its branches, including ethics, was conducted. Singer’s originality is of a quite different order. He takes his philosophical materials and methods from others – from Bentham, Sidgwick, Hare – and applies them, with persistence and transparency, to a relatively new set of problems that exercise a branch of philosophy called practical ethics. Deliberation about the morality of abortion, euthanasia, genetic engineering, environmental degradation, the treatment of animals, the ethics of business and similar things, constitutes its subject matter. Its practitioners say that practical ethics is a revival of an antique tradition in which philosophy provided practical guidance on the conduct of life, and that it has propelled philosophers back into relevance or, as Singer once put it, ‘back on the job’. But that is not entirely true. Some of the practices that give rise to ethical concern in this department are obviously creatures of our time, engendered by developments in medicine and bio-technology, untrammelled avarice and consumption. Others have been around since antiquity, though hardly as occasioning philosophical problems: on such matters as abortion and euthanasia, for example, our ancestors had varying, but undithering, opinions. In any case, philosophers have found a new niche in the guise of ethical experts, and are increasingly to be found on the ethics committees of hospitals, large businesses, and government departments. Singer has contributed as much as anyone to that development.

It was one of Singer’s earliest ideas that philosophers could be ethical experts. He had that idea when most philosophers were convinced that they could not, though I would wager that few would now disagree with him. The philosopher understands the importance of clarity and is trained to reason logically. Moral reasoning requires attendance to relevant empirical facts, and the professional philosopher has time to examine them. The philosopher is therefore better placed than others to make sound moral decisions. ‘Moral expertise,’ said Singer, ‘would seem to be possible. The problem is not so much to know “the difference between right and wrong” as to decide what is right and wrong.’

To decide what is right and wrong requires, according to Singer, a sound ethical theory. This idea is in some ways peculiar. It was once thought that sound moral judgement or reasoning required something like wisdom or the exercise of moral sensibility. On this newer conception, moral reasoning is closer to reasoning in the hard sciences, where theoretical constructions underwrite or undermine observations and common sense beliefs. Singer seems to believe that without an ethical theory constructed by philosophers, one could neither justify our moral beliefs or displace or reform them.

No conclusions about what we ought to do can validly be drawn from a description of what most people in our society think we ought to do. If we have a soundly based moral theory we ought to be prepared to accept its implications even if they force us to change our moral views on major issues. Once this point is forgotten, moral philosophy loses its capacity to generate radical criticism of prevailing moral standards, and serves only to preserve the status quo.

The theory Singer adopts is a two-tiered preference Utilitarianism, a refinement of an approach to ethics that will be partly familiar to most people in the phrase ‘seeking the greatest happiness for the greatest number’. On the first, ‘intuitive’, tier, the question ‘What is the (morally) right thing to do?’ is answered in every instance by appraising the consequences of actions for their agents, and all those affected by them, in terms of the satisfaction of the relevant set of individual preferences or interests, and the right action is that which maximises the satisfaction of preferences or minimises their frustration. To get this calculus going, however, requires the addition of a kind of axiom of impartiality: in Bentham’s words, ‘each (person) counts for one and none for more than one’. Singer states that the recognition that my own interests cannot count for more than anybody else’s, the assumption of a ‘point of view that is somehow universal’, is the fundamental constitutive condition of ethical thinking. In fact, this turns out to be the kind of axiom that sank Euclid, though that is not Singer’s view.

At first blush, this view is appealing, but if it is true we are all in deep trouble. As critics have pointed out, it demands of us at once too little and too much. On one hand, it undermines intimate relations and the virtues that sustain them: friendship, loyalty, honesty. If we act impartially to all, none are special. On the other hand, it demands obligations to others, of charity and self-sacrifice, impossible to discharge. To allay these sorts of difficulties, Singer follows Hare in introducing a second, ‘critical’, tier of moral consideration. The idea is that some forms of partiality may themselves be impartially justifiable. Some of the virtues that sustain intimate relations, but are partial on the intuitive level, may turn out to have an instrumental value at the critical level, in the longer run, and from the point of view of the universe. For example, it is possible that the benefits of character traits such as love or loyalty that lead to the partial treatment of friends or family may, at the critical level, outweigh their costs. But this strategy would seem to be lethal to itself. A moral perspective that ultimately assigns to the traits sustaining intimate relations only instrumental value, that recognises only their usefulness, has lost its grip on value. Its problem is not just that it is false to life, but that it is false to anything we can envisage as recognisably human life.

That, in any case, is the core of the theory. The serious business starts when Singer applies it to the kinds of practical problems listed above. For the theory to apply, the preconditions for having interests or preferences have to be determined, as have the relations between preference satisfaction and other goods, such as happiness or, in the favoured idiom, quality of life. Most animals can be presumed to experience pleasure and pain and to possess rudimentary interests; but only creatures that are rational and self-conscious can have substantial preferences — for example, to go on living or fear their demise — and these Singer, following an unfortunate tradition, calls persons. Persons have the most secure claim to life, but that claim is contingent on the continued possession of the capacities necessary for sustaining interests and diminishes with those capacities. It is convenient for Singer to make this point by comparing people with animals.

(T)here will surely be some nonhuman animals whose lives, by any standards, are more valuable than the lives of some humans. A chimpanzee, a dog, a pig, for instance, will have a higher degree of self-awareness and a greater capacity for meaningful relations with others than a severely retarded infant or someone in a state of advanced senility. So if we base the right to life on these characteristics, we must grant these animals a right to life as good, or better than, such retarded or senile humans.

Comparisons like these abound in the book and are crucial to Singer’s argument. He uses them to cut two ways. People who are not experts in bioethics, who may find this sort of comparison a bit macabre, are left squirming on the horns of a dilemma: if severely retarded humans have a right to life then so should animals; but if animals don’t, neither should some humans. Singer is interested in raising the status of animals, but he is more interested in lowering that of humans. Either way the argument is not persuasive. It begins by enumerating the intrinsic capacities of creatures that could be candidates for basing moral distinctions, and then proceeds to suppose that there is nothing else on which moral distinctions could be based. So, for example, self-awareness, communication, and the capacity for experiencing pain are identified as morally significant and, based on them and only on them, a dumb cat, a foetus, and a very young infant will be pretty well on a moral par.

But this just seems wrong. Suppose we were interested in the cultural significance of various paintings. Before us we have a genuine article, a Monet say, and a perfect replica. Having examined all their intrinsic properties and judged them to be identical, should we then conclude that the two objects have the same cultural value? Hardly! It matters to us immensely that the original was painted by Monet, was the first of its kind, marked a change in visual sensibility, and so on. Similarly, the moral significance of what a human baby is, contrasted with a kitten, is not revealed by an enumeration of their intrinsic, biological features. As Cora Diamond wrote, ‘A difference … that may indeed start out as a biological difference … becomes something for human thought through being taken up and made something of by generations of human beings, in their practices, their art, their literature, their religion, their ethics.’ The wonder, joy, and tenderness, the marvelling at intricacy and innocence that human births create are not contingent features of human life which radical criticism by a clear-sighted ethical theory should strive to dispel or transpose in entirety to kittens.

Singer thinks that it is time for a Copernican revolution to displace the traditional Christian ethic that has at its heart the doctrine of the sanctity of life. The key tactic is to break the doctrine on the rack of hard cases. Singer tends to exult where others will sorrow, and it is not an endearing trait.

The traditional ethic is still defended by bishops and conservative bioethicists who speak in reverent tones about the intrinsic value of all human life, irrespective of its nature or quality. But, like the new clothes worn by the emperor, these solemn phrases seem true and substantial only while we are intimidated into uncritically accepting that all human life has some special dignity or worth. Once challenged, the traditional ethic crumples. Weakened by the decline in religious authority and the rise of a better understanding of the origins and nature of our species, that ethic is now being undone by changes in medical technology with which its inflexible strictures cannot cope.

The way Singer characterises this confrontation between the old and the new is misleading. He oversimplifies the structure and resources of the traditional ethic, which has roots in Ancient, Renaissance, and Enlightenment humanism as well as Judaic and Christian sources, and, to an extent surprising in an academic, he ignores competing, contemporary ethical theories. Even if the doctrines he condemns were swept away it is far from evident that their demise would lead by default to the victory of the ethic he enjoins. Singer does not understand the resilience of the traditional ethic because he does not understand its depth. The conviction that life is sacred, for example, can survive its infringement in extraordinary cases. As another Australian, Raimond Gaita, has repeatedly emphasised, an understanding of the preciousness of life is not best enunciated as an exceptionless principle. Our sense of life’s preciousness, the horror at its termination, has immensely deep sources. Gaita has focused on the sense of life as a gift and the gratitude it evokes. Others have drawn the image of the human being as the highest product of natural creation, a mortal object of awe and pity. Tenderness, the wish to privilege others with the merest glimpse of the world’s beauty, every loss ever experienced, and untold other things, are woven into that sense of life’s preciousness, and tell also of what it means to deprive another of life.

It is evident that no moral perspective that makes rational claims upon us can be immune to evolution and reform. But then the question arises whether the spare ethical theory Singer advocates can make a stronger claim than the traditional ethic, that intricate composition of ethical principle, apercu, and sensibility accumulated over centuries. I am pretty sure that it cannot. The main reason is that Singer’s ethical theory is not more basic than, but supervenes on, many of those moral categories of the traditional ethic that it seeks to underwrite or supplant. Virtues such as honesty and friendship, or values such as the sanctity of life, which Utilitarian theory threatens to render expendable or instrumental, are not fungibles to be assessed against an ethical theory; they are instead the metric against which any theory claiming to be true to the richness of human life must be assessed.

An ethical theory that promises answers by providing a kind of decision procedure or cost-benefit analysis using the popular currencies of preference (choice), happiness, and quality of life is bound to appeal to hospital managers and bureaucrats, and to those who prefer solutions to uncertainty at any cost. It is moral technology and well-suits the temper of the times. But why should we favour an ethic providing an easy answer to the manager’s questions, though it is shallow and threatens to desiccate humanity’s best and deepest resources? Practical ethics conducted within the parched sensibility represented in Singer’s work is likely to distort or even to absorb a much larger endeavour of moral understanding. Russell once said that to do metaphysics one needs a robust sense of reality. Something like that is also true of ethics.