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Peter Singer on Why Persons are Irreplaceable

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Ingmar Persson
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Extract

In the preface to the second edition of his deservedly popular Practical Ethics, Peter Singer notes that one of the ‘two significant changes” of his ‘underlying ethical views” consists in dropping the tentative suggestion that ‘one might try to combine both the “total” and the “prior existence” versions of utilitarianism, applying the former to sentient beings who are not self-conscious and the latter to those who are” (pp. x–xi). On the total view our aim is ‘to increase the total amount of pleasure (and reduce the total amount of pain)” regardless of ‘whether this is done by increasing the pleasure of existing beings, or increasing the number of beings who exist”, whereas on the prior existence view we ‘count only beings who already exist, prior to the decision we are taking, or at least will exist independently of that decision” (p. 103). Instead he proposes ‘that preference utilitarianism draws a sufficiently sharp distinction between these two categories of being to enable us to apply one version of utilitarianism to all sentient beings” (p. xi).

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 55 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Singer, Peter, Practical Ethics, Cambridge, 1993Google Scholar. Unprefixed page references in the text are to this book.

2 In the foregoing paragraph, the distinction between the total and the prior existence view was formulated in the terminology of classical utilitarianism, but it is easily translatable into the vocabulary of preference utilitarianism.

3 I assume that ‘possible people” is a synonym for ‘possible persons”.

4 If this is doubted and my identity is held to be preserved, we may imagine that the particles originally making me up come together to form a being macroscopically indistinguishable from me on a distant planet, so that there are now two persons similar to me. Surely, I cannot be identical to both of these persons, and if I am identical to any one of them, it is rather to the one being composed of the original particles.

5 Hare, R. M., Moral Thinking, Oxford, 1981, e.g. pp. 41–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 In private communication, Singer seemed inclined to take this way out.

7 Some think that it may even be ontically uncertain, that the world is such that it is not determined in advance what will happen.

8 Although when he writes that the value of the creation and satisfaction of a desire depends on whether ‘the experience as a whole will be desirable or undesirable” (p. 128; my italics), it sounds as though he has classical utilitarianism in mind. Also, I find this remark hard to square with the moral ledger model.

9 Note that this holds irrespective of whether one is a classical or preference utilitarian. Singer's claim that the classical utilitarian has to rely on the effects on others to explain why it is especially wrong to kill persons may suggest otherwise (pp. 91f).

10 I wish to thank Roger Crisp, Derek Parfit, and Peter Singer for helpful comments.