Applied Ethics

Citation

Singer, P. (Ed.). (1986). Applied Ethics (Oxford Readings in Philosophy). Oxford University Press.

Chapter Summary

Context and Argument

This is an anthology of fourteen essays preceded by an editor's introduction. The Oxford Readings series gathers important recent writing, mostly from periodicals, that students and general readers might not easily find, and each volume opens with an introductory essay by its editor and closes with a selective bibliography. Here the topics are euthanasia, abortion, organ transplants, capital punishment, the consequences of human actions, slavery, overpopulation, the separate spheres of men and women, animal rights, and game theory and the nuclear arms race. The collection has no single thesis; what it demonstrates is that philosophical argument can be brought to bear on practical questions. The contributors are Thomas Nagel, David Hume, James Rachels, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Michael Tooley, John Harris, John Stuart Mill, Louis Pascal, Jonathan Glover, Derek Parfit, R. M. Hare, Janet Radcliffe Richards, Peter Singer and Nicholas Measor.

Introduction

Singer's introductory essay on the items chosen and the questions they address.

Chapter 1: Death (Thomas Nagel)

Nagel asks whether death is an evil. He argues that it is, because it deprives the person who dies of the goods that continued life would have brought, not because of any experience of being dead.

Chapter 2: Of Suicide (David Hume)

Hume's eighteenth-century essay argues against the claim that suicide is a violation of duty, to God, to society or to oneself. Together with Mill's speech, it is one of the two pieces in the volume from before the twentieth century.

Chapter 3: Active and Passive Euthanasia (James Rachels)

Rachels challenges the standard medical and legal view that letting a patient die is morally different from killing, arguing that the distinction does not by itself carry moral weight and that the choice between them should turn on the consequences for the patient.

Chapter 4: A Defence of Abortion (Judith Jarvis Thomson)

Thomson grants for argument's sake that the fetus is a person and still argues that abortion is not always wrong, using the illustration of a person connected to a famous violinist to examine what the right to life does and does not require of others.

Chapter 5: Abortion and Infanticide (Michael Tooley)

Tooley develops an account of what it takes to have a right to life, linking it to a concept of oneself as a continuing subject of experiences, and applies it to fetuses and newborn infants. The conclusion is deliberately provocative and has been much disputed.

Chapter 6: The Survival Lottery (John Harris)

Harris proposes, as a thought experiment, a lottery in which people are selected to be killed so that their organs can save several others. The aim is to test whether the distinction between killing and letting die can justify our reluctance.

Chapter 7: Speech in Favour of Capital Punishment (1868) (John Stuart Mill)

A parliamentary speech rather than a journal article. Mill defends execution for murder, presenting it as the penalty best suited to the gravity of the crime.

Chapter 8: Judgement Day (Louis Pascal)

This is Louis Pascal's essay "Judgement Day", which sits between the piece on capital punishment and the essay on individual responsibility.

Chapter 9: 'It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do It' (Jonathan Glover)

Glover examines the reasoning by which individuals excuse themselves when their own contribution to a collective harm seems too small to matter.

Chapter 10: Overpopulation and the Quality of Life (Derek Parfit)

Parfit considers how the number of people and the quality of their lives are to be weighed together, a discussion associated with what he calls the Repugnant Conclusion.

Chapter 11: What Is Wrong with Slavery? (R. M. Hare)

Hare asks what makes slavery wrong and answers from within his own moral theory.

Chapter 12: Separate Spheres (Janet Radcliffe Richards)

Richards examines arguments for confining men and women to different social roles.

Chapter 13: All Animals Are Equal (Peter Singer)

The animal-rights contribution, in which Singer extends the principle of equal consideration of interests to nonhuman animals and criticises speciesism. It is the argument that the first chapter of his Animal Liberation develops at length.

Chapter 14: Games Theory and the Nuclear Arms Race (Nicholas Measor)

Measor uses game theory to analyse the nuclear arms race. It is the only contribution on war and peace.

Key Concepts

Chapters 1–3

• Deprivation account of the badness of death: death harms by removing the goods of continued life.
• Killing and letting die: the distinction on which the euthanasia debate turns.

Chapters 4–6

• Right to life and personhood: whether having a right to life depends on being a person, and on what personhood requires.
• Bodily autonomy: Thomson's question of what one person may be required to give to sustain another.

Chapters 7–12

• Deterrence and proportionality: considerations behind Mill's defence of capital punishment.
• Collective harm and individual responsibility: Glover's problem of the single contribution that seems not to matter.
• Repugnant Conclusion: Parfit's name for the implication that a vast population with lives barely worth living could count as better.
• Wrongness of slavery: Hare's test case for moral reasoning.

Chapters 13–14

• Equal consideration of interests and speciesism: the principle and the prejudice Singer opposes.
• Game-theoretic analysis: the tool Measor applies to the arms race.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Range with a common method. Moving from euthanasia to slavery to nuclear weapons, the essays share the habit of testing a moral view by argument and example, so readers can see one method applied across very different subjects.
• A mixture of classics and then-recent work. Hume and Mill sit beside essays from the seventies and eighties, which shows that the questions are older than the field's modern revival.
• Self-contained essays. Each can be read on its own. A reviewer quoted by the publisher, Manuel M. Davenport, found the selection apt in scope and suitable as a foundation text in any applied ethics course.
• A good set of reference points. Nagel, Rachels, Thomson, Tooley, Harris, Parfit and Hare are widely discussed names, so a reader who has been through the volume will recognise many later references.

Limitations

• Dated selection. The volume was published in 1986 and reflects the debates of the seventies and early eighties; it does not cover later work, and genetic technology, climate change and global poverty do not appear in its contents.
• Little on the replies. The essays are mostly single contributions, not exchanges, so readers do not see responses to Tooley, Harris or Parfit unless they look elsewhere.
• A strongly analytic orientation. Contributors work largely in the analytic and consequentialist tradition, which gives coherence but narrows the range of approaches to practical ethics.
• Uneven difficulty. Hume and Thomson read easily; Parfit's essay and Tooley's argument ask more of the reader.

Where It Fits in the Course

This is the broadest and most general title in the course's applied ethics reading, and a sensible place to begin. Only one of its essays, "All Animals Are Equal," concerns animals directly, and it leads to the animal-ethics books in the list: Singer's Animal Liberation expands that essay into a book, Tom Regan's Empty Cages and Alasdair Cochrane's Animal Rights Without Liberation offer rights-based alternatives, and Cora Diamond's article criticises the style of reasoning that Singer and Regan share. Peter Singer's Ethics in the Real World is a later collection of short, newspaper-length essays by one author, and his The Life You Can Save develops the argument about obligations to the global poor, a subject not covered here.

How to Use This Book

Use it as a first reader in applied ethics, for undergraduates with no philosophy background. You do not have to read it in order. Start with the introduction, then choose by topic: Chapters 1 to 3 for death and euthanasia, 4 and 5 for abortion, 6 for the ethics of killing and transplants, 7 for punishment, 10 for population, 11 and 12 for equality and social roles, 13 for animals.

Read each essay actively: identify the conclusion, the key premise and the example it relies on, then ask what an opponent would say. Reading Rachels with Harris, and Thomson with Tooley, works well because they push on the same distinctions. For further reading, use the selective bibliography at the end of the volume, and then turn to the animal-ethics books in the course.