One problem with ethics is that we have already decided ahead of time – before applying ethical analysis – who is worthy of being protected by ethical rules and who is not. Utilitarians like Peter Singer only include people who are self-conscious into their ethical protections. This excludes both the unborn and newborn babies, who are too young to be self-conscious. Christian ethics and rights-based ethics protect human beings but exclude animals.
Ethicists are aware of this problem, so including more and more creatures into your circle of ethical protection is a virtue. For example, Peter Singer defends utilitarianism as being more expansive than other ethical systems in this article called The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle of Consciousness.
Here I will raise the bar on Peter Singer. Let’s take an infinite circle of consciousness: protect every human, every animal, and every plant. Heck, let’s even protect the rocks. Careful reasoning will then show that the traditional view of ethics is substantially correct, and the utilitarian view of Peter Singer is flawed.
Gazelles and Cheetahs
Let’s start with a very simple world that consists only of cheetahs and gazelles. If I were a cheetah I would want to be able to kill and eat gazelles. But if I were a gazelle I would not want to be killed and eaten. Our first thought is to rule in favor of the gazelles. But what would happen if cheetahs couldn’t kill and eat gazelles? The population of gazelles would grow exponentially until they exhaust the available food supply and mass starvations take place. Mass starvations seem even worse than being hunted.
You might hope that evolution will adapt the gazelles to reproduce less in a world without cheetahs. But that is not how evolution works. The unit of selection is not the species, but the individual. Each individual wants to maximize its reproductive success, which drives them to have more offspring than the land will support. The rest will die, either to cheetahs or starvation.
More Animals
Now expand our thought experiment to include all the animals of the African plains. Suppose we choose to rule against predators. Now we have an additional problem – many biological niches are defined by how herbivores avoid predators. Gazelles may rely on speed, some herbivores burrow into holes, some have quills or smelly musk, some are nocturnal, some may be so big that no predator would bother them; others are so small that larger predators also wouldn’t bother.
One animal will be the best at eating plains grass while avoiding starvation. All the other species of herbivores that try to survive on the grass will go extinct. By ruling against predators, you are also ruling against the survival of most of their prey. The loss of biodiversity would be enormous.
Given these two facts – that (1) herbivores are really competing within their own species for maximum reproductive success, and (2) that predators provide many of the niches that defines species, we have to rule that predators should be allowed to eat animals. Some might agree in theory, but object because eating animals is cruel in practice. There is perhaps merit to this argument but it is a two way street. As the evolutionary philosopher Daniel Dennett points out, the smartest thing sheep ever did was outsource their protection and food production to humans. At best this is an argument against some of the excesses of factory farming.
Plants and Inanimate Objects
The same reasoning applies to plants, but now the gazelles are the hunter and the plants are the hunted.
As long as we are expanding our circle, we might as well as make it as large as possible and include inanimate objects. If I thought I might be a rock, I don’t think I would care if I got shattered, shaped or otherwise used or abused by humans or animals. Living things can do whatever they like to inanimate objects.
Abortion
It follows directly from including the unborn in our ethical circle that abortion should be illegal, because killing a fetus would then be just as wrong as killing an adult human. Once you grant the same ethical status to a fetus as you do for an adult human, it becomes extremely difficult to find a rational for defending abortion. The best attempt is by Judith Jarvis Thompson’s violinist argument, see a rebuttal here).
Conclusion
The traditional view of ethics is upheld: abortion is wrong whereas eating meat is right. It is only by making a decision ahead of time to include those who are not self-conscious that Peter Singer can defend abortion and infanticide. Thus, Peter Singer has run into the limits of his circle of consciousness.
