I believe that most of us, in our own humble ways, try to make the world better. Maybe that means giving what we can to charity or helping out in our community. Maybe it means eating less meat or driving less often. It’s enough for each of us to do our own little part.
Not so, says Peter Singer. Singer, who is 78 and recently retired from a long teaching career at Princeton, is perhaps the world’s most influential living philosopher. His unstinting work grows out of utilitarianism, which is the view that we should do as much as possible to bring about the greatest circumstance for every individual being — and “being” does not necessarily mean “human.” His 1975 book, “Animal Liberation,” a broadside against factory farming and a defense of animal rights, helped galvanize a movement toward vegan and vegetarian eating. (Singer’s new book, “Consider the Turkey,” is a polemic against the enormous animal suffering that goes into the traditional Thanksgiving turkey feast.) And his writing on what the relatively affluent owe to the poor — short version: a lot more — was an important building block for the data-driven philanthropic movement known as effective altruism, which became popular with high-profile Silicon Valley figures including the disgraced cryptocurrency magnate Sam Bankman-Fried. (As well as plenty of regular people looking to do more good, more efficiently.)
Listen to the Conversation With Peter SingerThe controversial philosopher discusses societal taboos, Thanksgiving turkeys and whether anyone is doing enough to make the world a better place.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio App
But Singer is as controversial as he is influential. Not so much for his attempts to disrupt complacent common-sense ethical beliefs — that, for example, we’re justified in prioritizing the welfare of those close to us over that of strangers far away — but more for his arguments in support of things like allowing parents to pursue euthanasia for severely disabled infants. It’s those ideas that have led Singer to being called dangerous, a eugenicist and worse. None of which seems to matter much to Singer, who, as always, is determined to follow his ethical ideas wherever they may lead.
I promise I don’t mean this in a facetious way: Why did you write “Consider the Turkey”? It’s a small book. There aren’t really new arguments in it. Could that time have been better spent doing something else? This is an important issue. We’re talking about over 200 million turkeys who are reared in a way that comes close to being described as torture. It hurts them to stand up because their immature leg bones don’t bear the immense weight that they’ve been bred to put on in a short time. They suffer at slaughter and, as I describe in the book, if they get bird flu, the entire shed is killed by heatstroke quite commonly. It’s not the only method used in the United States, but it’s used on millions of birds. The ventilation is stopped in the shed, heaters are brought in, and they are deliberately heated to death over a period of hours. That’s something that Americans don’t know, and it’s important they should know, because it should stop. I think that’s definitely worth the time it took to write this book.
It feels hard to deny the unacceptable level of suffering that goes into our Thanksgiving turkey dinners. But millions of people are still going to have them. Do you ever feel as if you’re banging your head against the wall with this stuff? No. I feel like I’m banging my head against something which is pretty hard but not completely unyielding. In some parts of the world, we’ve made progress in the laws and regulations concerning animals. On the whole, yes, things are still bad, but it’s possible to make progress, and we have to keep bringing these facts in front of the public and getting them to think about what they’re eating. The Thanksgiving meal seems like a good place to start.
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