[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] And a very, very warm welcome to the 2015 Tanner Lecture on Human Values at Oxford University.
Hosted by Linacre College, the Tanner lectures, now in their 37th year, were established by the American scholar,
industrialist and philanthropist Obasi Tanner in creating the lectureship.
Professor Tanner said I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind.
I see them simply as a search for better understanding of human behaviour and human values.
Appointment as a Tanner lecturer is a recognition of exceptional,
distinguished and important scholarship in the field of human values, and that description is is fully justified.
In the case of tonight's lecturer, Professor Peter Singer.
Professor singer has been variously described as the world's most influential living
philosopher and the best known and most widely read of all contemporary ethicists.
He is currently the IRA DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Centre for Human Values at Princeton University,
and simultaneously a Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne.
In his long career, he's held positions at Oxford, New York, La Trobe and Monash Monash University's.
But he started his vocation as a utilitarian philosopher here in Oxford with a B fill.
He is without doubt a man who does not shy away from voicing challenging ideas and stirring up controversy.
His books on animal liberation, Practical Ethics and the Life that you can Save have provoked both plaudits and outrage.
I hope that his lecture tonight will do just that.
It is entitled From Moral Neutrality to Effective Altruism The Challenging Scope and Significance of Moral Philosophy, Professor singer.
Thank you very much. Uh, it is indeed an honour to be invited to give a lecture and especially attend a lecture at Oxford.
So I'm very happy to be here. And I've chosen a topic that I think is particularly appropriate for Oxford.
And the topic that relates to the time that I spent here when I was a graduate student at Oxford in the early 1970s.
I want to look at the dramatic change that has occurred in moral philosophy, uh, over that time.
So this is a rather broad topic. I'm not going to examine one particular question in detail.
Those who wanted that sort of argument, I apologise,
but I think it's interesting to occasionally take the opportunity to reflect and look back at where we've come from and why and where we're going.
Uh, so that's the type of, uh, talk that you're going to get tonight.
In 1972, I was a Radcliffe lecturer at University College, Oxford.
My first academic appointment. And I published a brief article in analysis under the title Moral Experts, in which, um, I challenge the view that,
uh, to quote one of the philosophers, I'm going to discuss a challenge view that KD broad put it.
It's no part of the professional business of moral philosophers to tell people what they ought or ought not to do.
So today, I want to revisit that little article, um, and ask why it was that people thought that that was the case when we,
those of you who are involved in moral philosophy today, um, will obviously see things quite differently.
A lot of moral philosophy has done by many people in this university, as elsewhere, is indeed, um, could be described as telling people what to do.
That's maybe a little too crude, but at least as putting arguments about what one ought to do or ought not to do in particular situations.
So why did people think something differently?
And, uh, where have we come since that, with that change in practice that has led us to where we are now?
In the original article I quoted from two philosophers, one of them just mentioned KD broad,
perhaps best known for his book Five Types of Ethical Theory.
Um, and the other, uh, ager who certainly at that time was a one of the leading philosophers, uh, who, um, was then, uh,
we can professor of logic here at Oxford, um, but had been a leading philosopher since the publication of language,
Truth and Logic in 1936, when he was only 26.
That book was a kind of manifesto for logical positivism, um, which may have had something to do with the views that he held about ethics.
And they clearly did have something to do with the views he held about ethics and perhaps about, uh, what the proper role of philosophers is.
Um, and today I'm going to add a third, um, uh, philosopher who takes, in some respects, a similar view.
Uh, that might surprise you. The third philosopher is Bertrand Russell.
Okay, so in 1949, I published an article called On the Analysis of Moral Judgements.
Uh, it was later reprinted in his, uh, Philosophical Essays.
It was probably most widely read then, because that was a book that was very widely used in teaching undergraduates philosophy at the time.
Uh, in On the Analysis of Moral Judgements, uh,
restates in a somewhat more sophisticated form the view of ethics that he had already put forward in one chapter of language, truth and logic.
Um, that view was that ethical judgements don't state propositions that can be true or false.
Uh, crudely put, the theory could be described as the boo hooray theory of moral judgements.
So if you say something is good, you're saying hooray for X, whatever it is.
If you say something is bad, you're saying boo to X.
Uh, and that's, uh, roughly what it is to make a moral judgement.
The, um, view that he put forward in, uh,
on the analysis of moral judgements was somewhat more sophisticated than that, but it was clearly in the same family,
recognisably in that family, which came to be known as, uh, emotive ism was more developed,
uh, more by C.L. Stevenson, uh, with a number of articles about that time.
But in explaining the implications of his theory, that is the theory of moral judgements in, uh,
on the analysis of moral judgements, uh, makes some firm statements about the role of moral philosophy.
So here's a longish sort of quote from that article.
I am not saying that morals are trivial or unimportant, or that people ought not to bother with them,
for this would itself be a judgement of value which I have not made and do not wish to make.
And even if I did wish to make it, it would have no logical connection with my theory, for the theory is entirely on the level of analysis.
It is an attempt to show what people are doing when they make moral judgements.
It is not a set of suggestions as to what moral judgements they are to make.
And this is true of all moral philosophy, as I understand it.
All moral theories intuitionist, naturalistic, Objectivist, emotive and the rest.
Insofar as they are philosophical, theories are neutral as regards actual conduct.
To speak technically, they belong to the field of ethics, not ethics proper.
That is why it is silly as well as presumptuous for any one type of philosopher to pose as the champion of virtue.
And it is also one reason why many people find moral philosophy and unsatisfying subject,
for they mistakenly look to the moral philosopher for guidance.
And then he adds, it is indeed to be expected that a moral philosopher, even in my sense of the term,
will have his moral standards, and then he will sometimes make moral judgements.
But these moral judgements cannot be a logical consequence of his philosophy.
To analyse moral judgements is not itself to moralise.
Clearly and saying this air is dismissing a long tradition of moral philosophy, which I'm sorry,
I shouldn't have turned the page there a long tradition of moral philosophy that goes back to Socrates, at least to Socrates,
as portrayed in Plato's dialogues, where he goes around Athens questioning Athenians about their views about, uh,
justice or piety or something of that sort, and showing that they don't really have coherent views about these things.
Uh, and that presumably would influence their thinking.
And they conduct to show, at least to unsettle them in some way.
It's not that Socrates was perhaps himself specifically propounding of you,
although certainly in the later platonic dialogues he's portrayed as propounding views.
Um, but still that he is clearly doing things that relate to showing up particular normative views, as we would now call them.
And that tradition then clearly goes on through Plato, through the, um, medieval, uh, well,
through the Epicureans and the Stoics, I guess, um, through the medieval scholastics.
Uh, well, certainly telling people what they think is is right or wrong, uh, goes on through, uh, later philosophers.
Hume, uh, clearly, although he did some things today would say, uh, meta ethics.
He also wrote, for example, on suicide. And then he would have suggested that he was not doing that as a philosopher.
Uh, Kant, um, lectured on, uh, normative ethics, clearly, and uh, wrote on it,
gave the examples of right and wrong behaviour, uh, as he saw it, um, the utilitarians,
Bentham, Mill and Sidgwick, uh, certainly all did normative ethics, in which, uh,
you can find their opinions on various things that we should or should not do.
And right up to time, just before er wrote language use of logic, um, or overlapping with it, uh, you would get Ross the uh, intuitionist,
who also clearly thought that in doing normative ethics, um, suggesting views about what's right and what's wrong,
he was doing what was part of the part of moral philosophy.
What was the role of the moral philosopher?
But, um, for er the fact that he was turning his back on that tradition probably wasn't in itself something that would trouble him because,
uh, that was the logical positivist view that he had been, uh, one was to some extent still a part of,
um, that idea that a lot of a lot of things that have been done before in philosophy, a lot of metaphysics,
a lot of talk about God, for example, um, is really meaningless because, uh, it's unverifiable.
The statements made are unverifiable. Um, and therefore we ought to reject this, and we ought to do philosophy in a very different sort of way.
So I think it's it's not too difficult to see where er is coming from and why he holds that restricted view of moral philosophy.
Um, the other philosopher that I quoted in Moral Experts, KD broad, uh, turns out to be a little more puzzling.
Here's the quote that I used in the original article.
It's no part of the professional business of moral philosophers to tell people what they ought or ought not to do.
Moral philosophers, as such, have no special information not available to the general public about what is right and what is wrong.
Nor have they any call to undertake those functions which are so adequately performed by clergymen, politicians and leader writers.
Now here's a confession. When I use this quote in 1972, I didn't know very much about broad.
But here was a handy quote that I could use to make the point in the article that I wanted to criticise.
So I didn't go very much further into it, and I took that quote at face value.
Now that I know a bit more about broad, um, I think that at least that last part of it, about the,
uh, function so adequately performed by clergymen, etc., must have been meant ironically.
Um, I've learned, for example,
that broad was a homosexual who in 1958 signed a letter to the times asking for the repeal of the law criminalising homosexual conduct.
Um, clergymen at the time were certainly not supportive of the view that broad must have held to write that letter.
So, um, you can't really, I think, have have meant that very seriously.
A second puzzling aspect about the quote is that it's from an essay entitled Conscience and Conscientious Action,
which was first published in wartime in 1940.
And the opening sentence indicates the topic of the essay.
At the present time, tribunals appointed under an Act of Parliament are engaged all over England in dealing with claims
to exemption from military service based on the grounds of conscientious objection to taking part,
directly or indirectly, in warlike activities.
And the article then goes on to examine this and indeed argue against the possibility of these tribunals adequately performing that role.
So this, in fact, we would not consider it to be an article in practical or applied ethics.
Um, so how is that compatible with the statement that is not the business of the philosopher to, um, tell people what they ought or not to do.
Um. What broad is in fact, goes on to argue is, um,
that an analysis of the notions of conscience and conscientious action suggests that the tribunals have been given a task which,
from its nature is impossible, of being satisfactorily performed.
And from this he draws the conclusion that this is a strong ground against exemption
for military service on grounds of conscience and against setting up tribunals at all.
Um he doesn't. He acknowledges that there could be other reasons going in the opposite direction.
So he doesn't think that he's finally resolve the issue, but he's clearly putting up a an argument on one side of that issue, which, uh,
would have to be rebutted, or else one would have to conclude that we ought not to have set up,
or the government ought not to have set up those tribunals.
How can you resolve the apparent contradiction between the article itself and the claim
that philosophers have no business in telling people what they ought or ought not to do?
But broad. If you if we look a little bit further on from the passage I quoted, broad goes on to say,
but it is the function of a moral philosopher to reflect on the moral concepts and beliefs which he or others have,
to try to analyse them and draw distinctions and clear up confusions in connection with them,
and to see how they're interrelated and whether they can be arranged in a coherent system.
Now, there can be no doubt that the popular notions of conscience and conscientious action are extremely vague and confused.
So I think that by devoting this paper to an attempt to elucidate them, I may succeed in being topical without being impertinent.
What brought here describes is, in fact, the basis for a lot of what we now think of as practical or applied ethics.
Um, in fact, what I was arguing in that, uh, early article is, uh, part of that, that clearing up confusions in people's ideas,
their moral concepts can be an important role for a moral philosopher and can affect discussions about what we ought to do.
Um, clarity, I said, is not an end in itself, but it is an important aid to sound argument.
And if philosophers are clearer about concepts than popular usages,
then philosophers may have a valuable role in aiding sound argument by clearing up those confusions about concepts.
Um, just what broad was doing. But bro,
it also says something that's actually more far reaching when he recognises that it's the
function of a moral philosopher to see how moral concepts and beliefs are interrelated,
and whether they can be arranged in a coherent system.
And I think broad could hardly deny that this was properly the function of the moral philosopher,
because, um, broad himself had earlier written that he thought the best book on ethics,
the best moral treatise that had been written by a philosopher was Henry Sedgwick's The Methods of Ethics,
a judgement that I would be in agreement with.
But, um, a lot of what Sidgwick does, particularly in book three of the Methods of Ethics, where he's considering, uh,
what he calls common sense, the morality of common sense or, uh, uh, form of intuition ism, where we intuit certain moral principles.
A lot of what Sidgwick does there is to examine particular concepts of things that are regarded as desirable by common sense,
morality, like benevolence or, uh, veracity, uh, gratitude and so on,
and show that they're not really fully coherent concepts or they're not, uh, employed in, uh,
straightforward way on the basis of those concepts, and that they need to be supplemented by some other principle.
And then later, Sidgwick suggests that utilitarian, the utilitarian principle is the appropriate supplement for them.
So broad would have known, of course, that this, uh, seeing whether a set of moral concepts is coherent and,
uh, self-sustaining is a part of moral philosophy, and it's clearly not normatively neutral.
It wasn't normatively neutral in Sedgwick's hands, uh, and in fact,
a good deal of my own work in practical ethics can be seen as arguing that views that we hold,
uh, not coherent, and therefore we need to rethink the beliefs, the moral beliefs that we hold.
So. Let me give you three examples.
Um, where I've, I've used that, uh, to argue for the need for change.
The traditional doctrine of the sanctity of human life,
as upheld to some extent by popular morality and certainly most strongly by the Roman Catholic Church,
insists that all human life is of equal worth, and we should not make decisions to choose between,
uh, to to choose to end a life because of its, uh, poor quality.
Yet. This doctrine also permits the withdrawal of life support in certain circumstances.
For example, the withdrawal of a respirator from somebody who is in a, uh, irreversible coma, uh,
or has had other damage that suggests that they will have, um, a extremely poor quality of life.
Now, there are various justifications for this permission that are given by the doctrine,
including the idea that we don't have an obligation to provide extraordinary means of life support or that,
uh, some treatment is disproportionate to the, uh, uh, benefit that it creates for the patient.
But, um, I've argued in various works that those justifications themselves rely on judgements that, uh, quality of life judgements.
So they're really disguised quality of life judgements. And if I'm right about that then the doctrine is not really coherent.
Second, uh, example. It'll be familiar to many of you.
Um, many of us believe that if we were passing by a shallow pond and saw a small child drowning in it, uh,
and, um, realise that unless we rush into the pond and rescue the child, the child would probably drown.
Also realise that there was some cost to us in doing so that we would ruin,
uh, an expensive pair of shoes that we were wearing by jumping into the pond.
Um, but nevertheless, it would be seriously wrong for us not to rescue that child.
This would not just be something that, uh, you know, it would be good to rescue the child, but not wrong not to rescue the child.
Virtually everybody thinks that it would be wrong to rescue the child, that you would have that obligation to do so in this case.
But then of course, we can broaden the picture and we can recognise that there are children dying from preventable causes all over the world.
Uh, that very often we can quite cheaply save those lives.
Maybe not exactly for the cost of an expensive pair of shoes.
I admit that the, uh, estimates that we now have probably rather higher than they were when I originally wrote about this case.
But still, for things that are not enormous sacrifices for us, um, we can save a child's life.
So, uh, if we think that that's not wrong, not to do that.
It's not wrong. In other words, that you can be an ethical person without giving anything to help people who are much
less well-off than you are and whom you could help without making a huge sacrifice.
Um, there then that needs to be explained.
And simply, the fact that the child is further away than the child in the pond doesn't seem to be a sufficient explanation.
So something else needs to be said about that.
Um, so that's that's the second challenge that I think depends on showing incoherence in moral concepts or the set of moral views that people hold.
Um, and thirdly, my work about, uh, animal liberation has relied on a parallel between our objections to racism and our, uh, objections to sexism.
Uh, and between that and speciesism.
And I want to welcome, uh, Richard Ryder to the room, by the way, from whom I first saw the concept of the term speciesism.
Richard was, uh, at Oxford many years ago when I was in, uh, that time in the beginning of the 70s and, uh,
produced a leaflet, uh, with a picture of a chimpanzee who'd been infected with syphilis looking very miserable.
And the heading speciesism. And I thought, hmm, that's a very interesting way of putting the idea that, um.
There's something similar going on in terms of a dominant,
powerful group which defines moral status in its own interests in a way that enables it to make use of another class of beings,
um, who are denied moral status and where it's very convenient or helpful for it to have higher status, uh, over those beings.
And that's exactly the phenomenon we see in even the most blatant form of racism, in the racism of the slave trade.
Um, and we can see, uh, in the idea that males, uh, males have a moral status that, uh, that females don't have.
So, um, again, there there's a question of can you consistently be, uh, against racism, against sexism, but, uh, accept speciesism?
And, uh, what would have to be done to justify drawing a distinction?
Not this is not on the basis of human's higher cognitive capacities, which would not be speciesism, but on the basis of species itself.
And, of course, the views we standardly hold don't make draw the line on the basis of cognitive capacities,
because if they did, then some humans would not have a higher moral status than some animals.
But since we we don't draw the line in that way, we do draw it on the basis of are you a member of the species Homo sapiens?
Therefore, there's this difficulty in showing how that can be defensible when, uh, racism and sexism are not.
Now, these arguments are only arguments about coherence of a set of beliefs.
So it is possible to um. Restore coherence, not by going in the direction that I've suggested in my writings about these questions.
Uh, not by saying that it's okay to take into account quality of life in making life or death decisions,
not by saying we do have an obligation to help people, uh, in great need in developing countries,
not by saying, uh, we ought to reject speciesism, um, but by saying, well, in the first case,
yes, it it is wrong to withdraw a respirator no matter what the quality of life of someone.
We've we've got to keep valuing human life.
And so we've got to keep ventilating patients, even if they will, we can know for sure that they will never recover consciousness.
Or in the shallow pond case, you could say, oh, well, I guess when I think about it more,
I realise it wouldn't be wrong to just walk past the pond and let the child drown,
because you didn't want to be at the expense of replacing your expensive shoes.
It's a possible position, and equally, you could possibly, though I think people would probably be even more reluctant to buy this one.
You could possibly say, well, now I realise that racism and sexism are not wrong because clearly speciesism is not wrong.
Um, so so the argument from coherence does require people not to want to retreat from positions that they generally hold.
Um. So, uh, I think that, uh, a more careful reading of, uh,
broad that I gave in my 1972 article would suggest that what he's doing is enough to allow a lot of argument in practical or applied ethics.
Um, and it's interesting, therefore, that he didn't himself want to draw that conclusion,
but, um, he was so concerned to say that he wasn't really doing this.
He seems to have felt, um, he uses the word uh. What he's doing in analysing the concepts, he says he hopes it won't be considered impertinent.
So it's as if he thinks that for a moral philosopher to tell people what they ought or what not to do would be seen as impertinence.
Um, and they certainly seems to be some kind of modesty, uh, reluctance, perhaps, uh, of academics of that time, philosophers of that time,
at least, to get out of the university, the academy environment, and to actually engage fully with the public about moral questions.
But there was one philosopher of the time who was certainly not modest or reluctant to engage with the public about moral questions.
And, uh, that's my third example, Bertrand Russell, because, uh, Russell was, um,
both the most, probably the best known British philosopher of the 20th century.
Uh, and he also wrote a series of, uh, books, popular books on issues ranging from social justice to sexual morality and from, uh,
the nature of happiness or the conquest of happiness, to use the title of one of his books to,
uh, campaigning against, uh, nuclear weapons for nuclear disarmament.
So if Russell was both both the best known philosopher of the in Britain of the 20th century and wrote all those works,
how can he be somebody who thinks that it's not the professional business of the philosopher to, uh, engage with the public?
And the answer is that although Russell was certainly doing. What we would now think of as, uh, as practical ethics.
He, too, didn't regard what he was doing as philosophy.
Um. Russell's work in ethics is well discussed by Charles Picton in his um contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell,
edited by Nicholas Griffin. And in what follows, I'm drawing on Pynchon's work.
So he points out that Russell himself contributed to a narrow view of what philosophy is, Russell wrote, and particularly what moral philosophy is.
Russell wrote, the only matter concerned with ethics that I can regard as properly belonging to philosophy
is the argument that ethical propositions should be expressed in the optative mood,
not the indicative, that is, the mood suited for wishes expressing wishes and desires, not the indicative.
So this is clearly an issue of matter ethics how we understand moral judgements.
Again, um, as er was doing and roughly in the same general family of theories that uh, it was talking about.
So Russell held that normative ethical judgements can't be true or false.
And Picton suggests that because Russell thought that philosophy is the pursuit of truth when talking about normative matters,
ethical judgements could not be part of philosophy.
And this appears to have affected, I think, not only the way Russell regarded his own writings in philosophy on ethical issues,
but also the way he went about those that writing. Uh, consider this passage.
Persuasion in ethical matters is necessarily different from persuasion in scientific matters.
According to me, the person who judges that I is good is wishing other persons to feel certain desires.
He will therefore try to rouse those desires in other people.
This is the purpose of preaching, and it was my purpose in the books in which I have expressed ethical opinions.
Elsewhere in defending himself against a lack of precision in his writing.
Russell refers to his Principles of Social Reconstruction, one of his early popular writings, and so to some extent this, this,
and to some extent my other popular books is not intended as a contribution to learning, but rather as having an entirely practical purpose.
So Russell is distinguishing preaching from philosophy and putting practical ethics, or indeed all normative ethics, into the former category.
The exception he makes is where you're just drawing implications from a principle.
So he says, for example, suppose you accept the principle that we ought to maximise pleasure and minimise pain.
You might then discuss whether capital punishment does or does not do this.
Um, and that can be a scientific question.
Looking at the empirical facts of whether capital punishment does or doesn't do that, but it's not really then a normative activity either,
because you're just taking the values for granted and, uh, exploring their implications.
I think we see some of the effects of this view of practical ethics in Russell's own writing, where, um, he's very he can be very dogmatic.
He's not very careful about, uh, the arguments he puts forward, um, particularly when he got on to the nuclear disarmament issue.
Um, he just says things like, um, uh, it's the plain duty of everyone, uh,
he says to make known two key facts that nuclear war is not improbable and that it would cause the death of all or almost all human beings.
Given this, Russell says, a philosopher or any other uh,
put or a person of any academic capacity must devote himself by whatever means are open to him,
to persuading other people to agree with him as to these effects, and to joining him in whatever protest shows the most chance of success.
So, um, I think you could say, you know, when Russell uses the term preaching,
that does apply to some of his writings in this case, uh, and you could say, well,
maybe that was justified if you believe the fact he claimed that nuclear war was not improbable and given the devastation that would cause,
then maybe that is what you ought to do, at least if you're a utilitarian.
Um, but that's then not really practical, I think, because you're simply trying to persuade people by whatever means you can.
And, uh, doing practical ethics is not persuasion by whatever means you can, but by, uh,
standards of reasoning and argument that are consistent, I would say, with philosophical thinking.
Um, so, uh, both Broad and Russell then could have said that they were doing practical ethics.
And Picton argues that some of Russell's work should count as philosophical work because it uses philosophical arguments,
but some of it is clearly not. And, uh, perhaps the idea is to avoid preaching when you're doing philosophy.
For Russell was part of this. But as I said, I think, uh, as academics, we are familiar with assessing arguments.
We're familiar with assessing arguments as well put, well constructed or not,
um, and independently from whether we agree or disagree with their conclusions.
Certainly, now that we've had many years experience of, uh, practical ethics being a part of philosophy, uh, curricula, um,
a lot of us have spent a lot of time grading papers, and I think we know reasonably well how to assess a well argued paper.
And often a well argued paper will not be a paper, uh, with which we agree with the conclusions, might be, uh,
might get a higher grade than a paper where we do agree with the conclusions, but where we think the argument is rather sloppy.
Uh, and the same standards at a higher level, of course, are applied by reviewers.
When we submit papers to peer reviewed journals, they're not supposed to recommend papers, uh,
because they agree with their conclusions, but rather because they think they meet the journal's standards of argument.
So, um, I think it's on that basis that we can actually resist the idea that, uh,
normative ethics, practical or applied ethics even is, uh, some form of preaching.
Now what changed and how did we get to to where we are today?
I think the change occurred during the period when I was here at Oxford.
And, uh, you know, in that sense, I guess that early article of mine was sensing the, uh, winds of change that were already beginning to blow.
Um, and a lot of I'm not a historian, it seems obvious to me that, um, the student movement that had arisen at that time that had been motivated, uh,
particularly by the war in Vietnam and opposition to that war,
but also by social justice causes by the movement for civil rights in the United States and against racial discrimination.
Um, the rise of the, uh, feminist movement, uh, around that time as well, that, um,
that led to a demand from students that the courses they were taking should be relevant to the big issues of the day.
And some philosophers began to realise that, uh, they were part of a tradition that had discussed those issues,
a tradition that had discussed, for example, when is it right to go to war?
When is when is a war just, uh, a tradition that is discussed?
When do we have an obligation to obey the law, given that there was a lot of civil disobedience, uh, going on at the time?
Um, so, uh, I think they began to go back to this, uh, in response to that student demand and,
um, to think about ways in making philosophy more relevant.
There was, uh, at the time, at this time also, um, a group known as Radical Philosophy, an organisation,
it was called Radical Philosophy that was trying to make philosophy, uh, more radical in some way.
Uh, and I, I went to a conference at which this organisation was founded in London at that time, uh, and was involved with it for a while.
But, um, I became disenchanted with it because the idea of radical philosophy that began to
be propounded and that you can see reflected if you go to the library and dig at,
uh, early issues of the journal cold radical Philosophy that they put out, uh, was that what was really radical was,
uh, partly the philosophy that was being done on the continent and partly Marxist philosophy.
And if you combine the two of them and you got something like Louis Alto says, uh,
rather obscure analysis of Marx, um, then you had the epitome of, uh, what radical philosophy might be.
Um, and in contrast, Oxford philosophy was seen as something, uh, inherently conservative, done in, uh,
stuffy academic drawing rooms by um, uh, elderly philosophers who were just analysing language and not interested in change.
But, um. I thought that it was actually important to do philosophy, that if we wanted to be radical and wanted to do philosophy in a radical way,
it was important to do it in a way that people outside the universities could understand, um,
and that we could talk about issues that were important to them and mattered to them, uh, in ways that were comprehensible.
And that would, I hope, raise the level of discussion of some of these major issues that were being talked about at the time.
And, uh,
going into continental or Marxist philosophy was certainly not going to make you more easily understandable in taking philosophy outside the academy.
So, um, that's why I wrote that article, and I was interested in trying to put across the idea that philosophers do have something to say.
You do have some kind of expertise, uh, on issues that they could contribute to these debates.
And in fact, um, despite the image that Oxford had among radicals at the time, uh,
I think I was pushing on a door that was already half open because there were
people here in Oxford who were doing what we would now call practical ethics.
There were seminars, uh, given, for example, by, uh, Derek Parfit, Jonathan Glover and Jim Griffin that,
uh, where Parfit was doing his well-known material on on population ethics.
Um, which, uh, although fairly abstract, does have implications for a lot of practical issues.
Jonathan Glover was doing early work that developed into his book, Causing Death and Saving Lives,
which was raising questions about the sanctity of life and very relevant for medical decision making.
Um, so there was, uh, this sort of thing was going it was actually going on.
And, um, when I suggested to my, uh, supervisor Aram here that, uh, I'd like to write my be full thesis on, uh, civil disobedience in a democracy.
Uh, he was perfectly happy to accept that. And, um,
said that he had actually always thought that the point of doing moral philosophy
was to make a difference to our views about what we ought or what not to do.
Um. Although his best known works, Language and Morals at the Time and Freedom and Reason didn't totally do that,
but freedom and reason, you can see looking at it now, lots of examples he gives of how moral argument can be used.
And those examples do suggest that you can get to certain normative conclusions.
So, um, I think it wasn't, uh, that difficult, uh, to start doing moral philosophy in that way.
And another important source of encouragement at the time was the founding of the journal Philosophy in Public Affairs,
which was founded in the United States. Um, which provided uh academically uh, first right forum for discussion of practical issues.
And you only have to look at the first couple of volumes of that to see that they immediately elicited,
I think, articles that did challenged people's thinking in important ways.
Um, a couple of them on abortion, Michael Tully's abortion and infanticide, Judith Jarvis Thompson's famous, um, Defence of Abortion,
in which she uses the violinist example, uh, and my own Family Affluence and morality, was published in that journal as well.
So, um.
I think that, uh, this turn to, uh, practical ethics pretty rapidly began to make a real difference, uh, in philosophy and in the real world as well.
And let me just mention some of those differences in the areas that I'm most interested in, in, uh, if we look at the question of animals and ethics.
Uh, there's a bibliography that was published by Charles McGill in 1989, uh, listing works that deal with animals and ethics.
Um, and up to 1970, up to this time, I'm talking about, um.
Uh, well, beginning putting aside a couple of works in antiquity.
Uh, in the first 1970 years of the Christian era, Michael found only 94 works that discuss animals and ethics.
Um, in the next 18 years before the bibliography was completed. There were 240.
And I'm sure if you tried to do a bibliography now, it would run well into the thousands.
And that debate has spread around the world.
And, uh, it's being discussed in a lot of non-English speaking countries as well, including, uh, Japan, uh, Korea, and even to some extent, China.
And I think philosophers played an important role here. It's not that there wasn't an emerging animal movement as well.
There was. But, uh, the work of philosophers helped to grow that and to make it, I think, something that was seen differently,
transformed it from a movement that was widely seen by the public as something based on sentiment,
something for animal lovers, people who cared about animals.
So they were the ones who were going to be concerned about cruelty to animals. And if you were not an animal lover, well, this was not really for you.
But I think the involvement of philosophers helped to make it just a moral issue in the same way that racism and sexism,
for instance, uh, moral issues and uh,
therefore enable other people who may not have thought that they were animal lovers,
may not have been particularly concerned about living with cats and dogs or other
animals to see that this was an issue that they should also be involved in.
Um, so, uh, I think that, uh, clearly philosophers have played a role in that.
And that has in turn led to various legislative changes, not, uh, not in my view,
nearly enough in the way of change, but has led to significant changes.
Um, and of course, has also led to many people changing their own diet, which is a pretty personal kind of transformation in terms of the way we live.
Now is that a form of preaching rather than a form of philosophy?
I think if I look back on my own work, if I look back on animal liberation, the first chapter is,
um, setting out a philosophical argument, roughly the argument that I summarised for you.
Um, and the fifth chapter talks about the history of other views, uh, of species as views of animals in a critical way.
And the sixth chapter looks at some objections. Uh, the, uh, second, third and fourth chapters are really factual, descriptive materials.
Um, so yes, the book as a whole is clearly a work of advocacy, but I would say that, uh, at least parts of it are, um, proper.
What is probably the work of, uh, philosopher, uh,
putting forward arguments that are subject to criticism and discussion and, uh, people have tried to rebut them.
Obviously, I don't think they have done so successfully. Um, but, uh, that's a debate that, um, can continue.
So let me move from that to, um, the other issue that I've been, uh, most involved with here, uh,
the I've also already mentioned the question of our obligations or the obligations of the affluent to the global poor.
Um, and the story is slightly different with animal liberation.
Once the book was published, it started to get taken up by, uh, a number of organisations, new organisations that were founded, um,
and started to have an influence reasonably rapidly in the direction that I wanted to have with famine,
affluence and morality, which, as I said, was published in 1972.
Um, it did get widely discussed by philosophers, uh, and it got reprinted in a lot of anthologies.
And so it got its way into philosophy courses.
But it didn't for quite a long time. Get rid outside philosophy courses and philosophy itself.
And um, even when it was used in philosophy courses, it wasn't always used in the way that, um, I think now more people see it.
Um, this was brought home to me just a couple of months ago.
I was giving a talk at Harvard University to, um.
It was organised by, uh, a group of effective altruists there.
I'll talk about that in just a moment. And, uh, Josh green, who's a professor of psychology at Harvard, introduced me.
Um, Josh had been an undergraduate philosophy student at Harvard.
Uh, and he said that, uh, when he was an undergraduate family, affluence and morality was part of the curriculum,
and, of course, that he was taught, but it was put by the professor teaching the course more or less like this.
Um, here's an article that seems to make a strong argument for a conclusion that is clearly impossible.
Just too demanding can't be true, that we are all doing something wrong because we're not helping people in poverty elsewhere in the world.
So what's tell me what's wrong with the argument that was?
That was the attitude with which it was taught.
Um, and I think, you know, that that resonated with me in things that I'd certainly heard people say, um, but, uh, things have started to change.
Uh, did start to change a few years ago in that area in an interesting way.
And, uh, I think a number of people going say around something like eight years ago now started to think about this rather differently.
And I'm not quite sure why this happened, but, uh, some of it, a significant part of it happened here at Oxford.
Um, I remember the, one of the first intimations that I had that something different was going on was when Toby Ord,
who was then a graduate student in philosophy here and is now a, uh,
in the Future of Humanity, uh, institute, um, told me that he was interested in starting up a group,
uh, which would promote the idea that we can quite inexpensively do a lot of good in the world.
Uh, and indicate to people some of the charities that were most effective in doing good, uh, and Toby himself, um, took a public pledge to live, um,
on an amount that was not much above his graduate student ship, adjusted for inflation,
um, for the rest of his life, and to donate the rest to effective causes.
Um, and was, you know, telling other people about this and suggesting that they might be doing might think about,
if not doing quite as much as then at least pledging 10% of their income for the rest of their life to help the most,
uh, to the most organisations that were most effectively improving the world.
So Toby was doing that and giving what we can was launched, uh, here in Oxford in 2009.
Um, and, uh, Toby was assisted in this by another Oxford graduate, William MacAskill, um,
who also then set up another organisation called 80,000 hours, which, um is involved in helping people to choose ethical careers.
Um, as a website, you can look at 80,000 hours.org.
There's also giving what we can.org um and 80,000 was Will's calculation of the number of hours that people spend in their career.
And we all thought people don't spend enough time, given that you're going to spend 80,000 hours doing something,
wouldn't it makes sense to spend maybe 1% of that time in deciding what it is you're going to do with the other 99%, but 1% of 80,800 hours.
Very few people spend 800 hours thinking about their career choice or thinking systematically about it, so Will wanted to help them doing it.
And, um, came up with some interesting ideas which, uh, I won't go into now about, uh,
what might be ethical career choices that you might not really have thought about.
So, um, uh, this has led, uh, has been part of I wouldn't say it's the whole thing to the growth of this, uh, effective altruism movement.
And if you're not familiar with it, effective altruism is a philosophy and a social movement.
It's a philosophy that says, uh, we want to make the world a better place.
We want to do the most good we can, uh, use the title of, uh, recent book on this that I've got for sale out there, if you want to have a look at it.
Um, and, uh, but we want to do this in a way that uses evidence and reason to work out how we can actually do the most good.
Uh, and I think it's been really interesting to see how this movement has grown.
I was talking to Toby, in fact, earlier this afternoon, and he told me that, uh,
giving what we can now has over a thousand people who have pledged to do that 10%.
And if you, uh, estimate their likely income over their future and how much that will mean?
Uh, we're talking about £400 million that will be donated to effective charities, uh, if they fulfil that pledge.
So this is not a small thing, but it's this is this is one organisation.
It's only a part of other organisations that are encouraging people to be effective altruists.
And, uh, there is a centre for Effective Altruism that, um, is based here in Oxford, connected,
uh, with the The Future of Humanity Institute and, uh, the Hero Centre for Practical Ethics.
And we have a lot of people, um, in Oxford who are working in this in a wide variety of ways, a lot of different philosophies.
And some of you will know and some of you, uh, may not, uh, who are involved in in this activity,
but what I think is really most interesting about this whole change that we've had and about practical ethics,
is how it shows the power of philosophy to change people's lives.
I've already mentioned changing people's lives in the direction of changing their diet.
Uh, changing people's lives. You've seen in the direction of what they do with their income in pledging to give a certain part of that to,
um, effective charities to live on less than they otherwise would.
Changing people's lives in terms of the direction of the career they take.
And I know, uh, a number of people who've been influenced by 80,000 hours to change their career.
In fact, um, you might be sorry to learn that Oxford lost a very promising graduate student,
a Princeton student who had been accepted to do graduate work at Oxford,
but decided that, uh, a career in philosophy was not the most effective thing that he could do with his life.
Um, and I talk about him, uh, in the book, if you if you want to know more.
But, um. Indeed. Uh, I've got an even more dramatic example of that.
Um, and I want to close with that example and a couple of remarks about philosophy.
So, um, a couple of years ago, I received an email out of the blue from someone I'd never heard of that began as follows in The Life You Can Save,
my previous, uh, book on this issue, you remarked that as far as you know, no student of yours has ever actually donated a kidney.
Last Tuesday, I bit the utilitarian bullet. I anonymously donated my right kidney to whoever could use it the most.
By doing so, I started a kidney chain that I had a total of four people to receive kidneys.
This came from Chris Croy, who was a student, um, at Saint Louis Community College and not a particularly elite university.
But, uh, he came to this decision after a philosophy class that read, um, not just my family, affluence and morality,
but a critical article by John Arthur that tried to refute my views by saying, well,
if this is true, then one obvious means by which you could aid others is with your body.
For example, you could donate a kidney to a stranger. Um, and someone in the class said, no, that isn't right because you die if you donate a kidney.
But Chris realised that that wasn't true, that actually you can do quite well with one kidney.
In fact, the chances that you will shorten your life by donating a kidney, according to one estimate, are only 1 in 4000.
Um, so, uh, he did this, talked about it to various people, um, and eventually called up a hospital and offered to do it.
And he's not the only person, in fact, who has been influenced by taking a class in philosophy to donate a kidney.
Now, this is interesting in that it relates back to some things that philosophers have
said in the past about the nature of ethics and the nature of human beings.
I think, um, I'm thinking particularly here, for instance, of Bernard Williams,
uh, criticisms of Henry Sedgwick's idea of taking a universal point of view.
That is, we should act ethically by taking the point of view of the universe and recognising that the welfare of others counts as much as our own,
our own welfare. And Williams says that's impossible.
Humans just aren't that kind of being. You can't really detach yourself from your own projects and take the point of view of the universe,
but I think effective altruists come close to doing that.
I'm not going to say that they're purely doing that.
Maybe nobody is is purely doing that, but they're certainly thinking much more from that perspective.
And they're doing things that, um, other people, I think would have said it's quite unrealistic to expect people to do.
And I think it's evidence of the importance of philosophy and the power of practical ethics that, um, it can lead people to do this.
People often talk nowadays of.
A crisis in the humanities that, uh, enrolments in the humanities are falling, that the humanities seem less relevant in a world that is,
uh, much more digital and people find, uh, other, more attractive and exciting things that they want to do.
Well, I don't have a brief to defend the humanities as a whole, but I certainly think that, uh, philosophy is a key part of the humanities.
Uh, and, uh, I don't think that philosophy is less relevant than it was.
I think it's more relevant. And I think that, uh, when I said, uh,
one of the reasons people find philosophy is disappointing or moral philosophy is
disappointing is because they mistakenly look to the moral philosophy of guidance.
I think I had it exactly wrong, exactly in reverse.
I think that, um, although certainly there's a lot of interest and importance in that discussion as to whether moral judgements can be true or false.
And it's good to see that discussion revived, uh, again with, uh, Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit,
I think playing an important role in, uh, on what matters in that discussion.
It's good to see that discussion revised. That is an important discussion.
But, um, I think the the cutting edge of this, if you like, where the rubber hits the road, um, is really when we start discussing normative ethics,
and I don't think any of us should have any doubt about the importance of doing that and about the fact that,
uh, here philosophy undoubtedly changes lives.
Thank you very much.