The practical ethicist

"The Way We Eat" author Peter Singer explains the advantage of wingless chickens, how humans discriminate against animals, and the downside of buying locally grown food.

By Oliver Broudy

Read more: Books, Animal Rights, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews

May 8, 2006 | Peter Singer is a professional ethicist. Best known for his 1975 book "Animal Liberation" -- a canonical text of the animal rights movement and the inspiration for untold thousands to take up vegetarianism -- Singer, in the last quarter-plus century, has published a string of books on everything from test tube babies to the ethics of George W. Bush. Considered fearless by some, and dangerous by others, virtually all agree that he is among the most influential philosophers alive today.

Singer's ethics are strictly utilitarian. In his view, all actions are judged by the objective measure of suffering they cause; there's little place here for subjectivity. In his essay "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," for instance, he argues against the injustice of some people living in comfort while others starve. We have a moral obligation, he says, to do all we can to alleviate the suffering of others up to that point where the suffering of our sacrifice is equal to the suffering of those we are trying to help. (Singer himself donates 20 percent of his salary to Oxfam and UNICEF.) When confronted with the question of whether it's justifiable to save the life of one's daughter at the expense of the lives of two strangers, Singer's response is even more matter of fact. The choice, he would say, is a foregone conclusion: Two lives are better than one.

One expects such uncompromising arguments from college freshmen, but not the Ira W. DeCamp professor of bioethics at Princeton University. The difference is that in the course of 36 books, dozens of articles and countless lectures, Singer has thoughtfully backed up each of his arguments, and stuck to his guns for over 30 years. From a distance, his career seems a long, uphill, at times quixotic battle against humanity's latent selfishness. The emphasis on real-world application is the key to his appeal; his 1979 book, "Practical Ethics," widely regarded as a classic, reads like a handbook for how to live ethically in a morally complex age, taking on, in turn, abortion, capital punishment and income disparity, among many other common ethical conundrums. At the same time, Singer's unwavering focus on an ethical ideal often comes at the expense of real-world complexity, and can sometimes lend his arguments an air of absurdity, such as his remarks in 2001 in defense of bestiality, or his campaign to persuade the United Nations to award personhood to great apes.

Singer's new book, "The Way We Eat," co-written with Jim Mason, looks at the eating habits of three different American families: vegans, "conscientious omnivores" and a family eating the "standard American diet." The elements of each diet and the production chain that brought it to the table are then carefully considered in light of environmental impact, fair trade, the organic movement, the grow-local movement, genetically modified foods, animal rights and the depredations of agribusiness.

Salon recently caught up with Singer at the State of the Planet conference at Columbia University, where Singer was speaking on "Changing Values for a Sustainable World." Australian born, Singer is now 60 years old. His utilitarianism extends to his conversational style, which is measured and direct. He is not a hand-waver, and after enduring decades of attacks from one outraged group or another, he is not easily flappable. He is willing to entertain, for the sake of argument, virtually any suggestion. It's this very equanimity that can sometimes make conversation with him a bit maddening.

One of the things that distinguishes your new book is all the field research that went into it. What most shocked you, over the course of doing this research?

Probably this video I saw of this kosher slaughterhouse, AgriProcessors. I guess I had this idea that kosher slaughter is more strictly controlled than normal slaughter, and when you see that video and you see these cattle staggering around with their throats cut, and blood pouring out -- by no stretch of the imagination is this just a reflex movement. It goes on and on. And this happens repeatedly, with many different animals.

How are kosher animals supposed to be slaughtered?

They are supposed to be slaughtered with a single blow of a sharp knife across the throat. There's a virtually instant loss of consciousness, because the brain loses blood so quickly. That's the idea, anyway. But when you see this video, it's so far from that, I really did find it quite shocking.

You mention in your book that cows today produce three times as much milk as they did 50 years ago. That's a great advance, isn't it?

It is an advance, but you have to consider how this has been achieved. Fifty years ago, cows were basically fed on grass. They walked around and selected their food themselves, food that we can't eat, chewing it up and producing milk that we can eat. Now cows are confined indoors, and a lot of their food supply is grown specifically for them, on land that we could have used to grow food for ourselves. So it's actually less efficient, in that we could have gotten more food from the land if we didn't pass it through the cow.

Most of us have an idealized notion of what an organic farm is like. You visited an organic chicken farm in New Hampshire. Did it meet your expectations?

I have to say that it didn't. I guess I was expecting some access to pasture for the hens. When I got to this place, although it was in a beautiful green valley in New Hampshire, and it was a fine, sunny fall day, there were no hens outside at all. The hens were all in these huge sheds, about 20,000 hens in a single shed, and they were pretty crowded. The floor of the shed was basically a sea of brown hens, and when we asked about access to outdoors, we were shown a small dirt run which at the best of times I don't think the hens would be very interested in. In any case the doors were closed, and when we asked why, we were told that the producer was worried about bird flu. So, yes, it was not really what I expected. It was still a kind of a factory farm production -- although undoubtedly it was much better than a caged operation.

How much space are birds allotted in caged operations?

In the U.S., birds have as little as 48 square inches, a six- by eight-inch space. The United Egg Producers standards are gradually increasing over the next five years. We'll get up to 67 square inches. But that's still not the industry average, and even 67 square inches is just [the size of] a sheet of standard letter paper. In a cage, the birds are unable to stretch their wings. The wingspan of the bird is about 31 inches, so even if you lined one bird up on the diagonal, she wouldn't be able to spread her wings. And there's not just one bird in these cages, there are four or five. The weaker birds are unable to escape from the more aggressive birds. They end up rubbing against the wire and getting pecked, so they lose a lot of feathers, and they can't lay their eggs in the nesting box.

One good thing about this organic farm in New Hampshire is that there was this row of nesting boxes. It's been shown that hens have a strong instinct to lay in this kind of sheltered area. Conrad Lawrence, the science fiction writer and author of "The Council to Save the Planet," once compared requiring a hen to lay in an open space to asking a human to shit in public. They don't like it.

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