In his first paragraph, Easterbrook reveals he hasn't read Singer, but rather the people who write about Singer. Given his rather loose standards of intellectual accountability (also revealed in his past writings on environmental issues), his endorsement of this latest book is of little interest.
Singer is not my favorite philosopher, but he's not bad for a utilitarian.
Peter
Louis Proyect wrote:
(Sooner or later it had to happen. Peter Singer, an "animal rights leftist," who also argues that handicapped children should be killed for their own good, has written a new book promoting globalization in the Thomas Friedman "Lexus and the Olive Tree" mold. What's next? A proposal to turn famine victims in Africa into cattle feed? The reviewer Gregg Easterbrook is a knucklehead of long standing who has made a career out of debunking such hysterical fears that nuclear power, DDT, GM crops, etc. might be bad for you.)
Washington Monthly Online
Greatest Good for the Greatest Number
Philosopher Peter Singer will anger his traditional lefty fans with a clear-eyed account of the benefits of globalization.
By Gregg Easterbrook
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Yes, it's that Peter Singer. The one who has suggested that animals sometimes have the same rights as people, that the old should be euthanized to divert resources to the young (though he would spare his own infirm mother), that Americans should give away almost everything they possess to the developing world and live themselves like the developing world's poor (Singer donates to charity but he hasn't given almost everything away, as he advised others to do, and won't give to bums on the street). The Peter Singer who has said that utilitarian arguments can justify killing the innocent if benefits to others are large (a chilling thought, but also U.S. policy, as it is on utilitarian grounds that U.S. forces have killed some innocent people during the campaign against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan; presumably, Singer supports this). The Peter Singer who has suggested that severely handicapped infants should be killed for their own good (strangely, only people who were not born severely handicapped take this view), whom The New Yorker has called the world's "most influential living philosopher" (which mainly tells us how little anyone cares about living philosophers, a state of affairs which the profession has largely brought on itself), and whose appointment to a chair at Princeton University aroused considerable alumni protests and the cancellation of some pledges. People have even protested the name of the chair he holds--Singer is now the Ira DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values of Princeton. How can Singer have a chair at the University Center for Human Values, the line goes, when he is inhuman?
Yes, that Peter Singer. Since his views are much hashed over, it may be best to skip beyond his prior statements here, other than to make two points. First, as I wrote in the previous paragraph, Singer has "suggested" most of his notorious positions. There is, in fact, an awful lot of high-class weasel-wording in his work, indicating either that he can't make up his mind or that he wants to have it both ways, grabbing attention by saying stark things, then indignantly claiming misquotation and pointing to some buried caveat when attacked. Second, when The New Yorker called him out on how he can say that other people's aging mothers should be put down like old horses but that his own should receive only the very best care in an expensive nursing home, Singer replied, "Perhaps it's more difficult than I thought before, because it is different when it is your mother." So my grand pronouncements apply to everyone else but not me! There's a word for this. And, as Peter Berkowitz has written, someone who presents himself to the world as an ethicist is supposed to have thought through the practical consequences of his ethics.
These points aside, One World is a pretty good book; if it did not come with Peter Singer baggage, I might say a darn good book. Singer, generally a hero to the loony left, struggles with the issues of globalization in a rigorously hard-headed manner rarely seen on this topic. Singer discards, or even shreds, much anti-globalization cant, focusing on which international economic policies will have the utilitarian outcome of raising living standards for the developing world's poor. (Singer does not much care for the term utilitarianism, but it is the best shorthand for his value system, whose fine points cannot be fit into this space; broadly, he wants to raise the standards at which the human race lives as a whole to the highest aggregate level, which entails focusing upon the disadvantages of the developing world, and thinks our obligations to all members of genus Homo have about the same standing as obligations to our nation, to our ethnic group, and even our own children.) He proposes that formation of a "global ethical community" roughly along U. N. lines should be a sustained, long-term historic objective, but is realistic about the need to work within the existing framework of nations and borders pretty much indefinitely. And, crucially, he is not opposed to economic globalization. He asks the big question that anti-globalizers always dodge, namely: If we did away with globalization, would the poor of the developing world be better off? No, he answers, to do so would leave them worse off. This is the big point missing from the whole debate, and it's impressive that Singer has locked on to it.
full: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0211.easterbrook.html
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