Ethical Smethical

I was listening to an interview with Peter Singer, a Professor of Bioethics at Princeton. He is best known for his book Animal Liberation, which helped start the animal liberation movement. From my understanding, his philosophy is to apply ethics as fully as possible. This got me thinking about the ultimate value and motivation for ethics.

What are ethics? How are they different from values or morals or cultural preferences? How much do ethics really affect our daily lives in comparison with biological needs, impulses, culture, etc? Are ethics essentially a set of rules for optimizing something we value?

Singer believe in utilitarianism - optimizing the greatest happiness, least suffering state of sentient beings. This might work if we all had the same values, but we are humans - we strive for different values. We strive to differentiate ourselves from different groups - especially when young and trying to establish ourselves socially. This is the fundamental flaw in following ethics too far: ethics are based on sets of values which are not universal.

Singer puts a high value on sentient life - life that is conscious and aware. This includes non-human animals, which leads to the conclusion that it is wrong to harm or to kill animals. If animals are somewhat aware, then it is somewhat wrong to kill them. I have to admit that it strikes me as somewhat wrong that ten billion animals are processed (killed) each year in the meat industry, but I am sure that many people less moved by this statistic. In fact, I currently place more value on the athletic benefits of eating meat than on the suffering and death the meat industry creates. Others place more value on the taste of chicken or steak.

Why should we care about ethics? One reason is that how we live affects our self-image and our self-esteem. Living in accordance with our ethics makes us feel good about ourselves, but if we are just trying to feel good, then ethical living may compete with whatever we are compelled to sacrifice. Another reason to care about ethics is that it gives us something to talk and debate about. It provides a venue to differentiate ourselves from less-ethical, "weaker" thinkers, etc. But I think the real reason is that it gives people justification for imposing their values on others. It leads to many of the same evils as fundamentalist religiosity - exclusionary, us-versus-them, smug thinking.

So, are ethics, at best, misguided and, at worst, evil?