Peter Singer 彼得・辛格 · Peter Albert David Singer

🔊He studied law, history, and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and went to Oxford in 1969. His teacher there was R. M. Hare, who held that moral judgments must be universal: if I say that an act is right for me, I must accept that it is right for anyone in the same position, including when I am on the receiving end. Singer took from Hare the habit of asking, of any moral view, whether its holder would accept it from the other side.

他在墨爾本大學讀法律、歷史與哲學，1969 年到了牛津。他在那裡的老師是黑爾。黑爾主張道德判斷必須是可普遍化的：如果我說某個行為對我而言是對的，我就得接受它對任何處在同樣位置的人都是對的；包括當我是承受的那一方的時候。辛格從黑爾那裡學到一個習慣：對任何一個道德觀點都問一問，持有它的人，站到另一邊去的時候還接不接受它。

🔊In 1970 he had lunch at Balliol College with a Canadian graduate student, Richard Keshen, who asked whether the sauce on the spaghetti contained meat and, on hearing that it did, took a salad. Singer asked why. He said later that he had never met a vegetarian who gave an answer he could understand and relate to. Within a few weeks he and his wife Renata had stopped eating meat. In 1973 he reviewed a collection of essays on animals for The New York Review of Books under the title “Animal Liberation,” and in 1975 he published the book of that name.

1970 年，他在貝里歐學院與一位加拿大研究生理查・凱申吃午飯。凱申問義大利麵的醬裡有沒有肉；聽說有，就拿了沙拉。辛格問他為什麼。他後來說，他從來沒有遇過一個素食者，給出的答案是他聽得懂、也能產生共鳴的。幾個星期之內，他與妻子蕾娜塔就不再吃肉了。1973 年，他為《紐約書評》評論了一本談動物的文集，標題是〈動物解放〉；1975 年，他出版了以此為名的書。

🔊The book made no appeal to a love of animals, and Singer said that he had no particular fondness for them. It offered an argument and a great deal of evidence about laboratories and factory farms, and it ended with recipes. It has been continuously in print and has been translated into dozens of languages. Many of the people who founded animal organizations in the following decades have said that reading it was what set them going. Singer has said that its effects were smaller than he had hoped, since far more animals are farmed industrially now than in 1975.

這本書並不訴諸對動物的喜愛；辛格說過，他對動物並沒有特別的感情。它提出的是一個論證，以及大量關於實驗室與工廠化農場的證據；書的最後還附了食譜。它一直在印行，被譯成了幾十種語言。在後來的幾十年裡創辦動物保護組織的人，有許多都說，是讀了這本書才開始行動的。辛格說過，它的效果比他期望的小；因為現在被工業化飼養的動物，比 1975 年多得多。

🔊He returned to Australia in 1977 and taught at Monash University for two decades, where he founded a center for bioethics. His textbook Practical Ethics applied the same reasoning to abortion, euthanasia, and the treatment of newborn infants with severe conditions. These chapters made him more enemies than the ones on animals. In Germany and Austria in 1989 and after, his lectures were canceled or shouted down by protesters who heard in them an echo of the Nazi killing of the disabled. He replied that his family’s history gave him every reason to take that charge seriously, and that he was arguing for the choices of parents and patients. He rejected any policy of the state. When Princeton appointed him to a chair in 1999, disability groups blocked the entrance to the building.

1977 年他回到澳洲，在蒙納許大學教了二十年書，並且在那裡創辦了一個生命倫理學中心。他的教科書《實踐倫理學》，把同樣的推理用在墮胎、安樂死，以及如何對待有嚴重病況的新生兒上。這幾章為他樹立的敵人，比談動物的那幾章更多。1989 年及其後，在德國與奧地利，他的演講被取消，或者被抗議者的吼聲壓過；抗議者在其中聽到了納粹殺害身心障礙者的回聲。他回答：他的家族史使他完全有理由認真看待這項指控；而他所主張的，是父母與病人的選擇。任何由國家推行的政策，他都反對。1999 年普林斯頓聘他擔任講座教授的時候，身心障礙者團體堵住了那棟建築的入口。

🔊The other half of his public work began with an article written in 1971, during a famine in East Bengal, which argued that people in rich countries are doing wrong when they spend on luxuries money that could save lives. The lesson on strangers set out the argument. Forty years later it became the basis of a movement called effective altruism, which tries to find out where a donation does the most good. Singer has given a substantial part of his income away for most of his life. He gave his last lecture at Princeton in 2023.

他的公共工作的另一半，始於 1971 年東孟加拉饑荒期間寫的一篇文章。文章主張：富裕國家的人把能夠救命的錢花在奢侈品上，是在做錯事。講陌生人的那一課陳述過這個論證。四十年後，它成了一場叫作「有效利他主義」的運動的基礎；這場運動試著查明，一筆捐款捐到哪裡能做最多的好事。辛格大半輩子都把收入的相當一部分捐出去。2023 年，他在普林斯頓上了最後一堂課。