Expanding the Circle: Peter Singer's "Practical Ethics"

Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics is one of the most influential, and most challenging, works of applied moral philosophy of recent times. Singer, a utilitarian, does not deal in abstract theory for its own sake; instead he applies clear, rigorous ethical reasoning to the hardest real-world questions, our treatment of animals, global poverty, abortion and euthanasia, our obligations to future generations, and follows the arguments wherever they lead, however uncomfortable the conclusions. Reading Singer is a bracing and sometimes deeply unsettling experience. He has a way of taking principles most of us claim to accept and showing, with relentless logic, that they commit us to conclusions far more demanding than we are comfortable with. Whether or not one agrees, he forces genuine thought.

Here is what Practical Ethics taught me about the expanding circle, about our obligations to the distant poor, and about the demanding consistency of taking ethics seriously.

Key takeaways

• Equal consideration of interests: the suffering of any being that can suffer counts.
• The “expanding circle”: moral concern should widen beyond our own group and species.
• “Speciesism” is an unjustified bias toward our own species, akin to racism.
• We have strong obligations to relieve distant suffering and global poverty.
• Ethics demands consistency, even when the conclusions are uncomfortable.

The expanding circle

Central to Singer’s ethics is the principle of “equal consideration of interests”: that in our moral reasoning, the similar interests of all affected beings should count equally, regardless of who they are. From this follows his powerful image of the “expanding circle” of moral concern. Historically, Singer notes, humans have steadily widened the circle of beings they regard as morally considerable, from the family or tribe, to the nation, to all of humanity regardless of race or sex. Singer argues that the logic of this expansion should carry us further still, beyond our own group, our own nation, and even our own species, to include all beings capable of suffering. This is the basis of his famous argument against “speciesism”: the unjustified privileging of the interests of our own species simply because they are ours, which Singer compares to racism or sexism. If the capacity to suffer is what matters morally, then the suffering of animals counts too, and our treatment of them, in factory farms and laboratories, becomes a grave ethical issue. The Earth seen whole from space, with no borders, captures this widening of concern to all sentient life.

Our obligations to the distant poor

Among Singer’s most challenging arguments concerns our obligations to the global poor, and it is genuinely hard to escape. He offers a famous thought experiment: if you walked past a shallow pond and saw a child drowning, you would have a clear duty to wade in and save the child, even at the cost of ruining your expensive clothes. The trivial cost is obviously outweighed by the child’s life. But, Singer argues, if we accept this, then we face an uncomfortable question: are we not in a morally similar position with respect to the millions of distant children dying of preventable poverty, whom we could help, at relatively small cost to ourselves, through aid? Distance and unfamiliarity, he argues, do not change the underlying moral logic. If we can prevent great suffering at small cost to ourselves, we ought to do so, whether the suffering is in front of us or across the world. This argument is hard to refute and even harder to live up to, and Singer means it to be both. It indicts the comfortable lives most of us lead while others die for want of help we could give.

The demand for consistency

What makes Singer so bracing, and so controversial, is his insistence on consistency, on following ethical principles all the way to their conclusions, even when those conclusions are deeply uncomfortable or clash with conventional morality and our intuitions. He takes the principles most of us profess, that suffering matters, that like cases should be treated alike, that we should help when we easily can, and shows, relentlessly, that they commit us to far more than we usually admit: to radically changing how we treat animals, to giving away much of our wealth to relieve global poverty, to rethinking our intuitions about the beginning and end of life. Some of his conclusions, particularly on questions of abortion, disability, and euthanasia, are genuinely disturbing and have been fiercely contested, and I do not accept all of them. But the underlying demand, that we be consistent, that we not exempt ourselves from the principles we claim to hold simply because applying them is inconvenient, is a powerful and necessary challenge. Singer refuses to let us off the hook.

What I’m taking with me

Practical Ethics is one of the most challenging books I have read, precisely because it refuses the comfortable inconsistency most of us live by. What I am taking from Singer is the principle of equal consideration of interests and the image of the expanding circle of moral concern, reaching beyond our group and our species to all who can suffer; his hard, hard-to-escape argument about our obligations to the distant poor; and above all his insistence on consistency, following our own professed principles wherever they lead. I do not accept all his conclusions, some I find genuinely troubling, but he has permanently sharpened my conscience, and left me unable to ignore the gap between the ethics I profess and the way I actually live.

Frequently asked questions

What is Practical Ethics about?

It is Peter Singer’s application of rigorous ethical reasoning to real-world issues, our treatment of animals, global poverty, life-and-death questions, arguing from the principle of equal consideration of interests and following the logic to demanding conclusions.

What is “speciesism”?

Singer’s term for the unjustified bias toward the interests of our own species simply because they are ours, which he argues is morally akin to racism or sexism, since the capacity to suffer, not species membership, is what matters.

What does Singer say about helping the global poor?

Using the analogy of saving a drowning child at trivial cost, he argues that if we can prevent great suffering at small cost to ourselves, we ought to do so, and that this obligates us to give substantially to relieve distant poverty.

References & further reading

1. Singer, Peter. Practical Ethics. Cambridge University Press, 1979.
2. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. HarperCollins, 1975.
3. Singer, Peter. The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981.