Twenty years ago the youth of Britain was rallying against the Nazis This decade opened with the fireworks of the poll tax riot. And with that final outburst, the political fire of young Britain was spent Passion was replaced by Ecstasy; causes by special effects With one exception. The injustices suffered by other people might no longer awake moral indignation, but the exploitation of animals did. That this spark of righteousness persists is due in large part to one man, Peter Singer. The Australian philosopher's 1975 book Animal Liberation is the Das Kapital of the movement which took its name. For a certain sort of activist, animals are the ultimate proletariat, since they will never object to actions taken on their behalf, buy their council houses or cross picket lines, although some of them are willing to work for peanuts. At a more general level, animal sympathisers are open to the charge that they want to believe that animals are people. Peter Singer has in fact argued that great apes should be considered "persons", with legal and moral rights equal to those of humans He is anything but sentimental, though.
His philosophy is a variety of utilitarianism, the doctrine which judges actions by their results, and identifies morality as the pursuit of the greatest good for the greatest number. Its appeal, to borrow the title of one of Singer's books, is as a system of "practical ethics". It stands opposed to systems of ethics which take their cue from conscience or from God. Darwin, on the other hand, has been seen as a useful partner of utilitarianism by a number of thinkers, including Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism. In some quarters, Singer is regarded as a descendant of Spencer or worse.
A few years ago, protesters in Germany attacked Singer - physically, on one occasion, smashing his glasses - because he favours euthanasia in certain circumstances, such as those of very severely handicapped babies. They were apparently unaware of his writings about animals, and the fact that three of his grandparents perished in the Nazi camps with which they associated him. The issue caught up with him in this country during the past fortnight, with the media taking up the German protesters' cries.Although it's facile to judge a person's thought by the range of people it annoys, the controversy aroused does illustrate that Singer is an independent thinker. Despite his advocacy of animal rights, he does not mistake animals for people He recognises that people are animals.
Darwinism therefore applies to us as well.Nor is he a single-issue animal - although you might have thought so from the recent media furore. He actually came here to speak at two events organised by the Darwin Centre at the London School of Economics. One was a seminar on "Ethics and Nature"; the other a lecture entitled "A Darwinian Left?". This talk was a brief version of an essay which will be published next year by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, in its forthcoming Darwinism Today series. Even if you think the Left is history, and you're feeling Darwinned out, his rhetorical skills are seductive. Although "philosopher" is his job title (his base is the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University in Victoria), Singer's success arises in large part from his skill as a publicist, in the Continental sense of a journalist who writes as an advocate of a cause.