Peter Singer View On Moral Progress

Peter Singer defines a “moral creature” as first being an“intelligent social mammal”, which is then “likely to evolve” to become a moral creature. He says that a moral creature has responses and inhibitions to their actions towards others, has the capacity to reason, and is able to reflect more deliberately and consciously on their choices. Some of the moral issues presented to Singer by the interview were: torturing people, utilitarianism vs. deontology, the origin of morals, normative judgements, racism, sexism, climate change, global poverty, and caring for ourselves and not others.

Peter Singer’s view on moral progress is that we have expanded our “circle” more and more as time goes on. He feels this way, because at first, we were only concerned about those we knew during the tribal times, then as time went on and the number of people around us grew, we expanded our moral circle to our nation and to those sharing the same religious faith as us, then in the twentieth century, we officially accepted that we owed the same amount of moral equality to all of those around us.

He later goes on to talk about how the issues we still deal with today, like racism and sexism, are not on the same scale as they were hundreds of years ago in a large part of the world. The twentieth century was much less violent than preceding centuries. Singer expresses that he is generally optimistic about human progress, but that issues such as climate change, global poverty, or animal rights are big moral challenges that are not being properly addressed. Singer also said that in his view, it made sense to only expand the moral circle to conscious beings, unless anything unconscious, develops to be