Peter Singer

Precautionary Principle in Relation to Climate Change

The precautionary principle suggests that even in the absence of complete information, we should be prepared to incur reasonable costs to avoid a significant chance of a disastrous outcome.

From a collective standpoint that takes everyone’s interests into account, it would be best if all countries with high levels of emissions made significant reductions in the amount of greenhouse gases the produce. But from the standpoint of an individual nation, this is not necessarily the best possible outcome, for the national costs associated with reducing greenhouse gas emissions could outweigh the national benefits.

The Myth of Ownership

Ownership is not a natural relationship between a person and a thing. It is a social convention, and in societies with a legal system, it is defined by the law.

The seventeenth century philosopher John Locke argued that we gain a right to property by ‘mixing our labour’ with natural objects, as long as we leave ‘enough and as good’ for others.

The best justification of a right to private property is that we will all be better off if we recognise such a right. But if it is the common good that justifies the recognition of a right to private property, then the common good can set limits to that right.

Social Capital

Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has estimated the proportion of income in wealthy countries that is the result of social capital – including technology and organisational and government skills – rather than individual effort. Given the enormous differences between the average incomes in rich and poor countries which cannot be explained by the differences in effort he suggests that social capital is responsible for at least 90 per cent of income in wealthy societies.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is the view that the right action is that which is expected to have the best consequences for all those affected by our actions, now and in the future. Typically, utilitarians focus on consequences like pleasure and pain, happiness and misery, or the satisfaction and frustration of preferences. They seek to maximise the net surplus of the good consequences, after subtracting the bad ones. Individual rights have, at most, a derivative role to play in utilitarian thinking.

Offence

From the standpoint of public reason, the fact of offence is the issue, not how well grounded the offence might be. Although John Stuart Mill and other defenders of freedom have argued that mere offence should not, in the absence of more specific harm, be a ground for infringing individual liberty. Once we grant that a risk of offence to some justifies restricting the liberty of others, we have introduced a sweeping argument for prohibiting any kind of behaviour, public or private. What offends people is not fixed. People can learn to be more tolerant, and that is a better solution than restricting the liberty of others.

Public Reason

Some will think that public reason is a quant relic of enlightenment ideas about reason and progress, properly rejected in the post-modern world in which we now live. They will say it is naïve to believe than anyone decides anything on the basis of reason, and will deny that there is any basis for privileging reason and argument above religious faith, or belief in which doctors, or oracles, or any other way in which people might reach decisions about what we do. But those who say this do not fully think out the alternatives. There are methods of reaching decisions that we use every day, and would not want to do without. We do not want police to go before courts saying that they need no evidence that the accused committed the crimes of which he is accused, because they have faith that he did, and faith needs no evidence to support it. We want physicians who have studied what does or does not help sick people – and if we consult alternative healers, we look for evidence that their therapies work. If we abandon the assumption that reason, evidence and argument can lead to better decisions, more innocent people will be jailed and more sick people will die. So those who want public justification to fit within the same broad framework are not imposing some narrow, sectional set of standards on the debate. They are seeking standards of argument that everyone uses all the time.

Ethical Thinking

When we think ethically, we should do so from an impartial perspective, from which we recognise that our own wants and desires are no more significant that the wants and desire of anyone else. To base judgments about the rights and wrongs of an action on the impact it will have on the welfare of those affected by it is to base ethics on something that is real and tangible.

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty, the finest defence of individual liberty against government interference in the English language, was written by the liberal utilitarian John Stuart Mill. In opposition to conservatives who wanted to use the power of the state to stamp out prostitution, sodomy and suicide, Mill urged that the state should restrain individual liberty only to prevent harm to others. It was, in his view, wrong for the state to interfere with an individual ‘for the good of the individual’, whether physical or moral. For a century after the publication of On Liberty, conservatives in both Britain and the United States resisted Mill’s view, defending laws that restricted individual liberty in circumstances that could not be show to cause harm to others – for instance, laws that intruded into the bedrooms of consenting homosexuals, that made prostitution illegal, or that restricted the access of adults to sexually explicit films, books and magazines.

Hobbesian World

In Hobbesian world in which a dominant nation is liable to attack and overthrow weak governments that are not to its liking, the most sensible response for a government that fears it may be attacked is to obtain nuclear weapons as rapidly as possible. Only then can it deter an attack by threatening to inflict intolerable losses on the dominant nation or its allies. Overwhelming military superiority is less significant when the militarily inferior nation possesses and is prepared to use nuclear weapons.

Bush’s Use of Good and Evil

Bush’s tendency to see the world in terms of good and evil is especially striking. He has spoken about evil in 319 separate speeches, or about 30 percent of all the speeches he gave between the time he took office and 16 June 2003. In these speeches he uses the word ‘evil’ as a noun fare more than he uses it as an adjective – 914 noun uses as against 182 adjective uses. Only twenty-four times, in all of these occasions on which Bush talks of evil, does he use it as an adjective to describe what people do, that is, to judge acts or deeds. This suggests that Bush is not thinking about evil deeds, nearly as often as he is thinking about evil as a thing, or a force, something that has a real existence apart from the cruel, callous, brutal and selfish acts of which human beings are capable. His readiness to talk about evil in this manner raises the question of what meaning evil can have in a secular modern world.

Immanuel Kant

Kant advocated a system in which the states would give u, to a world federation, a monopoly on the use of force. The world federation would possess the moral authority of a body that established by mutual agreement, and reached its decision in an impartial manner.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

Through free competition in the marketplace, the self interested strivings of individuals contribute to the common good.