The Pursuit of Happiness, Peter Singer interviewed by Ronald Bailey

Ronald Bailey from the December 2000 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

Singer: It tells the left that some of them have failed because their goals were really unrealistic. For example, if their goals were to achieve equality and to combine that with a high degree of liberty-to have the state withering away, as Marx said-it's very difficult to see how you're going to be able to achieve that. If you let the state wither away, then humans' natural tendencies to form hierarchies and rank and so on are going to assert themselves. What happened specifically with the form of communism that was attempted in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was that people went into it with some vague idea that they could have this sort of society. But they kept needing to strengthen the power of the state rather than allow it to wither away. In that sense, the original idea would just collapse. You simply couldn't achieve it. Human beings are not such that you could expect them to work for the common good in the way that the theory assumed. The failure to understand that human nature is not as plastic as socialists often assume is a substantial part of why some of these schemes have failed.

Reason: Would you agree that the pursuit of equality as the primary social goal is the source of most of the human suffering in the 20th century?

Singer: That's a bit of an overstatement. I don't see the suffering generated by the Nazis as in pur-suit of equality. But it has undoubtedly been the source of significant amounts of suffering, perhaps because of its failures and also because of the regimes that it allowed to become established. I mean, I don't really see the existence of Stalin as the most direct thing related to the pursuit of equality, but you could say his regime grew out of the pursuit of equality. So that's true, and I think that's why I'm saying that the left has to moderate those aims. It already has to a good extent, but it has to consider what aims it really values enough to stick to, given various costs that would need to be paid.

Reason: Some welfare policies eliminate tit for tat, so that even if beneficiaries don't cooperate, they still get rewarded. What are the policy implications of that insight? One of the things often said by proponents of market forces is that poverty is like anything else-the more money you pay for it, the more of it you can get.

Singer: Yes. This is a good case where there are two values at stake that you need to try to sort out. On the one hand, I think those on the left will want to say we don't want to see anyone starving in a society that's as wealthy as the United States. We don't want to see anyone without shelter. Maybe most people would also say we don't want to see anyone without basic levels of health care.

[But] if you give those things to people and there's no reciprocity, then, human nature being what it is, aren't they simply going to take advantage of the fact that you're giving it to them and cease to be productive in any way? You really have to be more careful than some of these schemes were, when initially promoted, in trying to distinguish people who can reciprocate and those who can't for [a good] reason.

Reason: Well, do you cut off those who can but just won't cooperate?

Singer: You keep them to a really bare minimum at that point. It doesn't take much to feed someone so that they're getting enough calories and so that they're not seriously hungry or undernourished. It doesn't take much to provide someone with the opportunity to have a warm, dry bed if they're willing to use it. You keep them at that very bare minimum.

Reason: So would you approve of what we've been doing in this country with workfare programs?

Singer: Yeah, as long as they're sufficiently attuned to allow for people who can't take part in that. I think requiring people to work for a reasonable kind of social security benefit is a good thing to do.

Reason: Is it possible that we are being misled by our reasoning into thinking that there is something more to ethics than evolved behavior-that all this talk is simply beside the point?

Singer: That's certainly possible. I don't really have a yes or no answer to that question. At some ultimate, deep level that may be the case, that the most fundamental moral commitments are not matters of knowledge and therefore are not things which we can say are true or false.

But there's nevertheless a lot of reasoning that can go on in ethics. Think about why you might think that abortion is wrong or why you might think it's justified: How does that fit with your general view about the sanctity of human life? Within these frameworks, you can say that's a statement that's inconsistent with something you said before, or that's an arbitrary way of drawing a line that you can't really defend, or that's not a well-grounded statement.

Reason: Could it be that our behaviors are constrained so that we really aren't able to choose? Are we deluding ourselves into thinking that we can actually choose to do one thing or another?

Singer: Darwinian theory suggests that choices are constrained in a sense that statistically you can predict what most people will do under some circumstances. But that's different from the sort of first-person sense of freedom that we have, where we're facing a question and we have this strong sense that we are free to choose what to do. Really, we are free to choose in the sense that if I decide that this is what I'm going to do, I can get up and do it, even if statistically it's going to be rare for people to do that. The sense of freedom there is genuine. I'm what has been called a "compatibilist" or a "soft determinist"-I think determinism is true, but it doesn't eliminate the claim that we have a choice and that we are responsible for our choices.

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