This Christmas, give the gift of a blameless life to someone you love

Do you want to be a good person but find yourself always falling short?

It may not be your fault. These days it is difficult to feel like a good person. In fact the harder you try, the more you may feel like a failure.

The calls on our moral attention are multiplying at an extraordinary rate. We are living through a perfect storm of social justice movements, activist NGOs, an unusually plausible pope, and a flood of academic moral philosophers trying to write for the public. Globalisation means that we have to take account of the furthest implications of our actions. The internet and social media spread the news of our ever increasing obligations and strike down those who sin without mercy.

Does Peter Singer's 'Utilitarian' Argument for Vegetarianism Add Up?

The contemporary animal rights movement owes a great intellectual debt to Peter Singer's pathbreaking book Animal Liberation (1975), also known as ‘the Bible of the Animal Liberation Movement’. In that book Singer made a break with the dominant but limited Kantian argument that mistreating animals is a bad – inhumane – thing for humans to do. In its place, Singer advanced a case against harming animals, such as by using them for food or experiments, based on their equal moral status, their right to have their suffering counted equally with that of humans.

Singer's book has influenced many people, including myself. Yet, reading and rereading it, I have come to wonder whether it is really a work of good philosophy rather than merely effective rhetoric. Its success relies on pathos - an appeal to the sentiments of the audience. Despite multiple revised editions, Singer's official argument, his logos, is far from clear or compelling.

It is disappointing that the revered urtext of the animal rights movement lacks the intellectual rigorousness it claims. Worse, the flawed utilitarian case pressed by Singer is intended to foreclose the consideration of more relevant ethical accounts, most obviously those that directly engage with sentimentalism rather than being embarrassed by it.

The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Animal Products

Like cigarettes, meat and dairy packaging should include no nonsense factual warnings about the negative consequences of one's consumption choices. Just as with cigarettes, exercising our sovereign right to free choice requires that we be adequately informed about the significant negative implications of our choices by someone other than the manufacturer that wants us to buy their product. In this case the significant consequences relate to living up to one's ethical values rather than safe-guarding one's prudential interests in long-term health. But the principle is the same.

Does moral theory create extremism?

Moral theory is what most moral philosophers spend our time doing. We try to clarify our moral intuitions about things like fairness, freedom, and responsibility and how they relate to each other. We do that by working them out as specific concepts which operate according to consistent and coherent rules (theory). When done well in an academic context this exercise produces not only a private aesthetic pleasure to the philosopher, but also an incremental contribution to the public good of human understanding. But when the same approach is directly applied to our political debates about complex moral issues - like abortion and vivisection - it can easily give rise to extremism.