Peter Singer's New Manifesto

Peter Singer is back with a new cause. For those of you who don't know Singer, he is considered one of the founders of the animal rights movement. His pivotal book, Animal Liberation, is nothing short of a manifesto on how we should treat animals.

His new cause is poverty and he has written a new book about it, The Life You Can Save. In typical Singer style, he manages to make us feel uncomfortable for not eradicating poverty no matter where it exists in the world. Forget the recession/depression. The fact that somewhere, some child is starving is of more relevance to Singer than the ups and downs of the stock market.

We all hold the key to ending that starvation, according to Singer, and we all have the responsibility to turn that key.

Singer has a gift for making very complicated situations simple and the logic of the fact that poverty is bad, followed by the premise that if we have the power to do something about it, we too are bad, is pretty irrefutable. He has even established a website for those who want to change the situation.

I remember reading one of Singer's arguments in a bioethics class and it runs into the problem, at least for me, of bordering on the extreme, if taken to its logical conclusion. It was his argument for the basic "elimination" of those with severe disabilities. When confronted with a living and breathing warrior for the disabled, in the personna of a college professor who is herself severely disabled and living a noble, if yet difficult life, Singer's argument, to me, falls flat on his face.

Likewise I have some disagreement with his premise that "philanthropy for the arts or for cultural activities is, in a world like this one, morally dubious." Truthfully, if you have the wherewithal to make a significant contribution to the world and you want to build a museum to do it, who is to say that that is not your perrogative? I do believe in the redemptive power of art (I have seen it happen in the form of the Philadelphia Mural Arts program) so I am not willing to throw away all that Singer might find culturally dubious.

However, I do agree that there are priorities and if the eradication of poverty is one of yours, I encourage you to join his crusade. If you'd rather write a symphony, who am I to tell you otherwise?

What I'd really like to know, however, is where do animals fit into this grand scheme of his?