Stealing Darwin.(Review)

 
A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, 
and Cooperation, by Peter Singer (Yale, 70 pp., $9.95) 
Writings on an Ethical Life, by Peter Singer (Ecco, 361 pp., $27.50) 

Why are conservatives afraid of Darwinian biology? When I recently asked some conservative friends, I was surprised when our discussion turned quickly not to Darwin himself but to Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton who identifies himself as a Darwinian leftist. Best known for his advocacy of animal liberation, infanticide, and euthanasia, Singer is an atheist who rejects the sanctity of human life as a religious prejudice refuted by modern biological science. He has also gained notoriety by arguing that Americans should give away all their yearly income over $30,000 to help needy strangers around the world.

This is what happens, my friends insisted, when you adopt a Darwinian view of human nature-you become a loony leftist. But I disagreed. Singer's moral and political arguments are not really Darwinian at all. Moreover, despite Singer's confused (and confusing) intellectual efforts, the truth is that Darwinism actually supports a conservative view of morality as rooted in human nature.

In two recent books-A Darwinian Left and Writings on an Ethical Life- Singer lays out his ethical philosophy and draws what he believes are its political implications. The thought behind all of his arguments is that the logic of ethical reasoning leads to one fundamental principle- the impartial consideration of the similar interests of all sentient creatures. This principle runs throughout Singer's Writings on an Ethical Life, the starting point of which is Darwin's idea that ethics evolved out of our human nature as shaped by our social instincts and our capacity for reasoning. As social animals, we need the cooperation of our fellow human beings. As intellectual animals, we win their cooperation by defending our conduct in terms of its contribution to the common good. Originally, such ethical impartiality would have been limited to the good of one's racial or tribal group. But as the circle of social interaction expanded, people were eventually led to see that the interests of all human beings deserve equal consideration.

Now, Singer argues, we should expand the circle of ethical concern to include all sentient animals. "Speciesism" is just as unethical as racism, because it is just as arbitrary to deny the moral claims of different species as it is those of different races. Insofar as sentient animals feel pleasure and pain and are capable of enjoyment and suffering, they have legitimate interests that must be given equal weight with those of human beings. (Nonsentient organisms do not deserve such consideration, because they cannot feel pleasure and pain. If a tree feels nothing, then chopping it down just doesn't matter to it.) Singer concedes that special treatment for human beings is sometimes justified, but only in cases where human beings have special interests-such as in education, aesthetic pleasure, and planning for the future-that other sentient creatures lack.

Singer believes that logical reasoning from the principle of ethical impartiality supports his most controversial conclusions. Many people are disturbed, for example, by his claim that the lives of some animals are more valuable than the lives of some human beings. In his Writings on an Ethical Life, Singer asserts that "a chimpanzee, dog, or pig . . . 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." Killing a normal human being is more serious than killing another sentient animal only to the extent that human beings normally can plan for the future, while nonhuman creatures cannot. But the lives of human infants with irreversible brain damage are no more valuable than the lives of nonhuman animals that lack the ability to plan for the future. So if we think it morally permissible to kill a nonhuman animal for some good purpose-perhaps to harvest its organs for transplantation in a normal human being-then it should be equally permissible to kill a severely brain-damaged infant.

Moreover, even normal human newborns lack the rational capacities for self-awareness found in some animals; therefore the life of a newborn is not necessarily more valuable than that of an animal with greater intellectual capacities. During the first month of life, a human baby has less self-conscious awareness than many nonhuman animals; and therefore the baby is not a "person" with the full legal right to life until it is at least a month old. To insist that the baby deserves better treatment than nonhuman animals with similar or superior capacities would violate Singer's principle of ethical impartiality.