The utilitarian tradition

A utilitarian ethic is sometimes presented as an alternative to historically situated religious traditions such as Christianity.⁶ If we compare an entire tradition with one philosopher considered in isolation (Christian ethics vs Peter Singer), this contrast may seem plausible. But once we note the variety of divergent views held by philosophers who self-identify as utilitarian, the stark contrast becomes less compelling.

Textbook discussions of utilitarianism fall into two camps. Some discuss the classical utilitarians from a purely historical perspective, without reference to subsequent developments in moral philosophy. At the other extreme, problem-based ethics courses are often entirely ahistorical, so that utilitarianism is presented as an abstract moral principle miraculously emerging from the philosophical ether. I find it more fruitful to think of utilitarianism as a living tradition, as opposed to either an outdated view of merely historical interest or an ahistorical set of abstract principles.⁷

The denial of tradition is a perennial philosophical trope. Each generation seeks to sweep aside the errors and prejudices of the past, and re-found philosophy on pure reason. Often some comparatively recent event – the Reformation, the advent of ‘modernity’, the rise of science, the discovery of evolution, the death of God, the invention of Twitter – is said to have ushered in a brave new world where previous thought has no place or relevance. Within contemporary analytic philosophy, this perennial tendency is reinforced by a sense of inferiority that drives academics in the humanities to ape the methods of the natural sciences. If philosophy really delivers knowledge – just as physics does – then a philosophy graduate student has no more need to read dead philosophers than a physics graduate student has to read Newton. In either case, the truths discovered by earlier thinkers will be found – distilled and digestible – in the opening pages of some textbook. This can lead to presentism where undergraduates are given nothing to read that was written before they themselves were born.

However, many moral philosophers reject this extreme presentism. Like many other founders of distinct philosophical movements, the classical utilitarians did present their philosophy as a clean break with the past. But presentism is not essential to utilitarianism. Quite the reverse – to identify as a utilitarian is explicitly to lay claim to one particular philosophical legacy.

Utilitarianism is not an isolated tradition. Many utilitarians also identify with other historical streams. We think of ourselves as analytic moral philosophers, as analytic philosophers, as Western philosophers, or simply as philosophers. We look for inspiration to Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant, or Frege as well as earlier utilitarians. Institutionally, some utilitarians think of themselves more as political theorists, or political scientists, than as philosophers.

Utilitarians thus engage in many of the same debates as Christian ethicists. We too must decide which historical figures belong to our tradition. Jeremy Bentham, J.S. Mill, and Henry Sidgwick are clearly in – as are some later figures such as R.M. Hare, Derek Parfit, and Singer himself. Aristotle, Kant, and Elizabeth Anscombe are clearly out.⁸ But some figures are less clear. Were David Hume, Adam Smith, or G.E. Moore utilitarians? Is John Rawls’s justice as fairness a rival to utilitarianism or merely a new variant of it? Similar disputes arise for contemporary figures, and for specific philosophical positions. To focus only on other utilitarian speakers at the conference, do Toby Ord’s global consequentialism, Brad Hooker’s rule-consequentialism, or my own ‘messy’ consequentialism all count as utilitarian moral theories?⁹

Every attempt to define the essence of utilitarianism either leaves out some clear exemplars or includes some paradigm non-utilitarians. Utilitarians disagree among themselves about, inter alia, the meaning of life, the aggregation of value, the existence of other values besides happiness, the metaphysical foundations of morality, the existence of God, the connection between utilitarianism and religion, the demands of morality, and the primary focus of moral theorizing. Utilitarians have been hedonists, preference theorists, or objective list theorists; total utilitarians, average utilitarians, or lexical theorists; defenders of justice, fairness, beauty, or environmental value; moral realists, error theorists, cognitivists, non-cognitivists, emotivists, expressivists, fictionalists, ethical naturalists, ethical non-naturalists, or ethical supernaturalists; theists, atheists, or agnostics; extreme ascetics or complacent bourgeois liberals. And utilitarians have prioritized acts, rules, institutions, character traits, motives, possible worlds, possible futures, possible histories, or none of these. On the question most pertinent to this volume, utilitarians have thought that Christianity implies, contradicts, supports, opposes, or is irrelevant to utilitarianism.

For this reason, the discovery that Peter Singer may be moving away from preference utilitarianism and prescriptivism, and towards more objective accounts of both well-being and the nature of morality, is perhaps more significant to Christian ethicists than to his fellow utilitarians. For us, this merely represents a shift from one standard utilitarian package to another. (To put it very crudely: it is the shift from R.M. Hare to Derek Parfit.¹⁰)

As in Christian ethics, the utilitarian tradition also contains distinct vocations. Some of us are theorists who aim to understand morality, while others are polemicists who strive to improve the world. In the standard tale, Bentham is the arch-polemicist, Sidgwick the esoteric theorist, and Mill some unhappy (in every sense) mix of the two. Today, Peter Singer is our leading polemicist, and Derek Parfit our leading theorist.¹¹

Another relevant vocational difference is between philosophers and bioethicists. Bioethics is a new tradition with its own exemplars, preoccupations, and fashions. Some of these are common ground with other utilitarians, but many are not. Utilitarian moral philosophers are more likely to focus on the demands of morality, the rights of animals, or our obligations to the future, than on medical ethics. More generally, each utilitarian philosopher – like any academic – focuses on some questions to the virtual exclusion of others. Those who focus on applied ethics often gloss over imaginary or unlikely scenarios where the different versions of utilitarianism come apart. Those who concentrate on future people are typically more attuned to the limitations of simple accounts of well-being or aggregation – and to the fact that all moral theory is built on the shifting sands of intuition. And so on.

Given this diversity, it would be unwise to single out any individual as ‘representative’ of the utilitarian tradition. And Peter Singer is, in many ways, very unrepresentative of contemporary utilitarianism. This is often to his credit. At a time when most academics write only for one another, Singer makes a significant contribution to public debate. But, partly because of this difference in focus, Singer often defends philosophical positions that are now minority views within utilitarian moral philosophy.

Of course, Christian ethicists have a different relation to their tradition than utilitarians. My list of utilitarian forebears does not include a person we identify as God. And, however often we pore over the works of Mill or Sidgwick, we don’t actually think they were divinely inspired. But it is important not to overestimate the differences – to fall into the cartoon picture where the Christian slavishly and literally interprets his sacred text, while the utilitarian applies her impartial reason unfettered by prejudice or historical contingency. In reality, the two approaches, while distinct, are not that far apart.

The illusion of neutrality

Preference utilitarianism is sometimes presented as a neutral framework for practical ethics in a pluralist society. Some of Singer’s comments suggest this reading.¹² Everyone agrees that preferences matter, he says, while other foundational moral claims are controversial. Preferences thus provide a neutral basis for ethical debate. Another advantage is that, because the value of giving people what they want is obvious, we can avoid controversial questions about the foundations or justifications of our value claims.

To see why this argument fails, I first distinguish a range of neutrality claims. We can claim neutrality either for a certain vocabulary or for a set of substantive claims. And we can defend neutrality either on the basis of common ground or by appeal to the neutrality of reason. The least ambitious position offers a neutral vocabulary as common ground. We all understand talk of preferences or the natural world, while many preference theorists and atheists find themselves unable to comprehend talk of objective goods or supernatural entities. Therefore, preference utilitarians speak a neutral language, formulating their claims and arguments in terms that all rational people can understand, whereas objectivists and Christian ethicists speak a private language.

The search for a neutral language of public reason has been fraught with disappointment. Many proposals simply represent a refusal to understand one’s opponent’s substantive claims. Why should those with the least imagination set the terms of debate? Furthermore, a neutral vocabulary actually presupposes substantive neutrality, as we need a set of uncontroversial common claims to fix the meaning of our neutral terms. Unfortunately, as we will now see, there is no substantive common ground.¹³

In contemporary moral theory – even among utilitarians – not everyone agrees that preferences matter at all. To borrow Derek Parfit’s terminology: objectivists agree that your life goes well if you desire a good thing and get it.¹⁴ But the source of value here is nothing to do with your preferences; it lies in the nature of the thing you prefer. Satisfying a worthless desire does nothing to improve someone’s life. Even when objectivists do agree that preferences matter, they don’t agree that moral significance tracks strength of preference. Finally, preference utilitarianism is clearly not neutral if it presents preferences as the exclusive objects of moral concern.

If there is no neutral common ground, can preference utilitarians appeal to the neutrality of reason? This appeal too can be presented in terms of either vocabulary or substance. The vocabulary claim is that one’s opponent’s terms are unintelligible, while the substantive claim is that one’s opponent’s claims are merely false. I focus here on the substantive position, as it is the less extreme. (Also, rejection of the substantive claim entails rejection of the vocabulary claim. If one’s opponent’s claims are true, then her vocabulary cannot be meaningless.)

Many utilitarians have offered ‘proofs’ of the utility principle. Most famous here, of course, is Mill’s proof in chapter 3 of Utilitarianism. The example that was most influential for Singer himself is R.M. Hare’s attempt to derive a utilitarian ethic from the analysis of moral language.¹⁵ Hare’s first step is to defend a prescriptivist analysis of moral terms. Moral terms are like commands or prescriptions. If I say ‘People ought not to murder’, I am not expressing my emotions. Rather, I am issuing a command. It is as if I said, ‘Don’t murder!’ What distinguishes moral terms from other prescriptions is their universal character. While an ordinary command implies nothing about what others should or shouldn’t do, a moral term implies a universal prescription. If I am using the word in a moral sense, I cannot say that you ought not to murder without committing myself to the claim that, in the same circumstances, no one else should murder either. A moral statement, by definition, must be universalizable. On Hare’s view, moral terms have a unique grammatical role, as they alone express universal prescriptions.

Hare then derives utilitarianism from universal prescriptivism. The key step is the move from universalizability to impartiality – the idea that the logic of morals must take equal account of everyone’s preferences. In his Methods of Ethics, Sidgwick famously noted the logical gap between universalizability and impartiality. A rational egoist might easily prescribe her own attitude universally: ‘Everyone should pursue (only) his or her own self-interest.’ Hare tries to bridge this gap as follows. If I issue an ordinary command, then I do so on the basis of my own preferences. Of course, I could make a universal prescription based on my own preferences (‘Everyone should do x because that is what I want’). But no one would take any notice, because no one would regard such a prescription as moral. If I want you to take my universal prescription seriously, then I must base it, not only on my own current preferences, but also on the preferences I would have if I were you. I must fully represent to myself what it would be like to be in each person’s situation. To make a moral claim, I must seek to reflect everyone’s preferences impartially. And, Hare argues, the best way to do this is to ask myself what I would prefer if I (somehow) took on everyone else’s preferences in addition to my own. I can only say ‘Everyone should do x’ if x is what I would want if I had internalized all the preferences of everyone involved. What ought to be done is whatever maximizes total preferences. Impartiality thus leads directly to a form of utilitarianism based on a preference theory of well-being.

Hare’s proof, like Mill’s, aims to remove reasonable philosophical disagreement; to reach a point where, if your opponent fails to concede, he can be dismissed as irrational. Hare’s ambitious argument unites a general approach to philosophy (linguistic analysis), a specific meta-ethic (prescriptivism), a specific form of utilitarianism (Hare’s two-level view), and a specific account of well-being (preference utilitarianism). The problem, of course, is that at every point many seemingly rational philosophers disagree. Indeed, as we have seen, such disagreement is rife even within utilitarianism. All the disagreements listed above involve people familiar with Hare’s arguments. If the test is to actually get all rational people to agree, then no one passes it. And induction from the history of philosophy suggests that, at least in this world as it is, no one ever will.

To illustrate these disagreements, I now examine one concrete example of how utilitarian philosophers actually settle their disputes among themselves: the problem of evil or sadistic preferences.¹⁶

A common objection is that, in the stock example where Christians are fed to lions, utilitarianism weighs the pleasure of the spectators against the pain of the victims. (Singer, of course, would add the pleasure of the lions into the mix.) Or consider the specific example discussed at the conference. According to the preference utilitarian, the Holocaust was wrong because it frustrated the preferences of those who were slaughtered. But the Holocaust wasn’t all bad – at least the Nazis enjoyed it. (Their satisfaction is massively outweighed by the suffering of their victims. But it still counts for something.)

This strikes many people as absurd. A person’s satisfaction in gassing innocent people has no value at all. The fact that some Nazis enjoyed the Holocaust makes the world worse, and it makes their own lives go worse. Even many self-described preference utilitarians would agree that not all preferences make your life go better.

How do utilitarians settle a dispute like this? Some begin by setting up one answer as the default. A preference utilitarian might argue that the natural default is that all preferences count equally. But why is that the default? Why give equal weight to preferences rather than pleasures, or objective goods, or persons? Why only preferences? And why all preferences? Finally, even if there is a presumption in favour of counting all preferences equally, we can surely ask whether that presumption is rebutted. If preference utilitarianism obliges us to say that the Holocaust would have been worse if no one had enjoyed it, then isn’t that a sufficient reason to reject it? If not, then what would be sufficient?

As there is no agreed default, actual utilitarian practice always comes down to conflicting appeals to intuition. At some point, reason gives way to revelation. Singer himself concedes this when he speaks of basic intuitions telling us that pain is bad, or that preference-satisfaction is good.¹⁷ But there are no interesting universally accepted intuitions; and many widely accepted intuitions are abstract or vague. Perhaps we agree that it is usually good to satisfy preferences. But how compelling is the intuition that it is always intrinsically good to satisfy someone’s preferences?

Utilitarian moral philosophers lack a convincing story about when and why these appeals to intuition are rational. This is linked to a deeper meta-ethical unease. Utilitarians cannot decide whether we are stipulating, legislating, persuading, prescribing, constructing, working out the implication of our own preconceptions, or exploring a realm of independently existing moral truths.

These are familiar theoretical disputes that often seem to lack practical application. This is where climate change enters the picture. Climate change brings to the fore places where controversial objective elements become crucial. This is because it focuses attention on our obligations to future people, on their relative weight compared to other obligations, and on the deeper question of why (and under what conditions) human life is valuable. I return to the impact of climate change in my final section, following a brief digression about the connection between morality and religion.

Neutrality about religion

I would suggest that an analogous appeal to neutrality underlies the sidelining of religion found in much practical ethics, including Singer’s. Singer does include brief discussions of the Euthyphro dilemma, of Old Testament morality, and of the epistemic troubles of theism. While these discussions gesture towards the difficulty of basing ethics on religion, I take it that another driving thought is something like this: ‘We can’t agree whether or not there is a God. But we all agree there is a natural world. So let’s proceed as if there were only a natural world and no God.’¹⁸

But do theists and atheists actually agree about the natural world? Do they really agree that natural properties have a moral significance that is independent of whether the world or the creatures within it (a) just happen to exist for no reason; or (b) were created by a perfect being for some very specific purpose?

Consider a case that brings together well-being and religion. Objectivists, both religious and non-religious, often accord intrinsic value to (in ascending order of ‘religiousness’) knowledge, understanding of the world and one’s place in it, religion, or an appropriate relationship with the divine. By contrast, for the preference utilitarian, if you don’t care about these things, then that’s fine. What matters is how people’s beliefs feed into their preferences and not whether those beliefs are true. What would it mean to be neutral between these two views or the metaphysical positions that lie behind them? Once they allow some objective element, utilitarians must examine the truth of competing metaphysical claims, and not merely their subjective role in people’s lives.

Over the centuries, many theist philosophers have turned to reason to find a neutral view about God by beginning their discussions of other philosophical problems (from the existence of the external world to the nature of justice) with proofs of the existence of God designed to convince any rational person.¹⁹ Even among theists, such confidence in reason is uncommon today. But the opposite view is quite widespread. It is often presumed that the non-existence of God can be demonstrated to (and is therefore accepted by) all rational people; that atheism is thus ‘neutral’ ground among rational people; and that anyone who believes in God is simply irrational.

If Singer believes this, then he is certainly in good (or, at least, clever and successful) philosophical company. Atheism was the default position in late twentieth-century analytic philosophy. I argue elsewhere that the presumption of atheism is much more common than it might appear.²⁰ Many ostensibly agnostic philosophical arguments only work if one presumes the non-existence of God. This tendency is especially pronounced in meta-ethics, where contemporary discussions of anti-realism and ethical naturalism (in particular) only make sense if one has already excluded the possibility that there might be a God. (And not because that possibility has been considered, discussed, and then set aside; but rather because it has never been mentioned.²¹)

If the utilitarian claim to neutrality takes this form, then the conversation begun at the Oxford conference is over before it begins. If every rational person accepts the non-existence of God, then Christian ethicists must be irrational and the ‘engagement’ between utilitarians and Christian ethicists reduces to a debate over the existence of God.

On the other hand, if we find the dismissal of Christians as irrational no more compelling than the parallel dismissal of atheists, then we must seek a different account of neutrality: one where a ‘rationally compelling proof’ convinces both believers and unbelievers alike without first transforming them into (as the case may be) unbelievers or believers. This difficult philosophical task remains in its infancy. For centuries, Western philosophy has been governed by either theist or atheist presumptions. The search for genuinely neutral modes of philosophical argument, and even for a genuinely neutral philosophical vocabulary, is only beginning.²²

A utilitarian ethic of belief

The diversity within utilitarianism highlights a problem for Christian ethics that was raised several times at the Oxford conference. What is distinctively Christian about Christian ethics? If Christian ethicists want to make a distinctive or novel criticism of Singer’s utilitarianism, then they must do more than simply object to his exclusive focus on preferences, his demanding act-utilitarianism, or his anti-realist meta-ethic. To offer an alternative, they cannot merely offer an objective account of well-being or a realist view of morality – because both of those are already available within utilitarianism.

The diversity of the utilitarian tradition also raises a question for utilitarians. What is distinctive about utilitarianism? Any account will be controversial, especially in light of my earlier remarks. However, over the next two sections, I explore the distinctive elements of utilitarianism in the course of developing a utilitarian account of our response to climate change. I will then use that account to illustrate the themes of earlier sections. For our purposes, three distinctive features of any utilitarian ethic of belief are especially significant.

The first is a commitment to impartiality, and especially temporal impartiality. As Bentham said: ‘Each is to count for one, and none for more than one.’²³ Human well-being is equally valuable, no matter whose it is or when they live. Utilitarians place intergenerational justice centre-stage.

Second, utilitarians follow Bentham’s instruction to avoid caprice. We must guard against our natural tendency to give undue weight to our interests, views, values, traditions, or perspectives. This admonition is cognitive, as well as practical. We must be wary of our natural human tendency to believe what suits our interests, aligns our duties with our inclinations, confirms our prejudices, or otherwise enables us to think well of ourselves.

Finally, utilitarianism tells us not only what to do, but also how to think and what to think about. Our cognitive powers and our time are limited. We cannot explore all moral or empirical questions. Impartiality, especially temporal impartiality, directs our attention to issues where most is at stake, and away from parochial affluent obsessions.²⁴

These features are all exemplified by the work of Peter Singer in relation to animals, the distant starving, and (more recently) the distant future. (It would be interesting to ask to what extent Christian ethics shares these three features.²⁵) But these features may push utilitarianism in a very un-Singer direction.

Given the utilitarian commitment to temporal impartiality, climate change is the most important moral issue we face (if what most climate scientists say is true). The utilitarian’s primary epistemic goal, therefore, is to decide what to think about climate change. On the empirical side, she will begin with the consensus of expert opinion, and then ask whether dissenting voices cast doubt on that consensus, taking special note of the human tendency to wish-fulfilment and self-interest in herself and others.

The conscientious utilitarian will largely follow Singer’s own discussion of climate change in Practical Ethics. I won’t retrace Singer’s steps here. Instead I note that the commitment to impartiality and the admonition to avoid caprice both extend to moral theory. Our utilitarian citizen will be suspicious of both moral theories and accounts of well-being that favour her own interests or those of other present people. Notoriously, many moral theories – especially those that base morality or justice on bargains, contracts, or agreements – have great difficulty making any sense of obligations to future people.²⁶ When they do accommodate such obligations, these theories typically treat them as an ad hoc afterthought. Every moral theory copes better with some questions than others. If a theory offers a compelling account of relations between contemporaries, then it is tempting to conclude that its intergenerational incoherence doesn’t matter. If there were no conflict between present and future people, then this failing would not matter in practice. But, thanks to climate change, it does.

Climate change (1) creates conflict between present and future people, (2) introduces the possibility that future people will be worse off than present people, and (3) threatens the possible loss of natural background conditions that we take for granted, including the very existence of a future human civilization continuous with our own. Given utilitarian temporal impartiality, the failure to make good sense of intergenerational justice is no longer a minor flaw; it is an indication that one’s moral theory fails to respond to what really matters. This failure of impartiality is also a case of caprice, because the flaw in these theories is that they privilege the interests of present people: ourselves.

Faced with the urgent threat of climate change, the utilitarian judges moral theories by their ability to make sense of our relations with future people. The utilitarian should also be wary of caprice when thinking about well-being. She knows that, if she privileges preferences, it will be much easier to justify focusing on herself. She knows her own preferences, she doesn’t know what other people want, preference-based theories often discount the future, it’s not clear how the preferences of future people enter the equation, the task of discovering what really matters is so hard, life is so much easier if we can bypass controversial foundational questions, and so on. A utilitarian atheist might also worry that preference theory attracts her in part because it avoids the long slide through objective goods to theism. A utilitarian who realizes all this should suspect her own attraction to preference theory.

Obligations to the distant future

To explore what we owe to distant future people, I focus on a single abstract thought experiment. Like every other human endeavour, our current civilization will eventually collapse, disintegrate, or fade away. Suppose there will be people living in this place long after we are gone. What do we owe to them?

This question is a useful corrective to our tendency to think of our own society as exceptional or eternal (a tendency political philosophers reinforce when they talk of society as a scheme of social cooperation extending forward in perpetuity). My question presupposes no timescale, and no particular causation. It does not attribute the collapse to climate change. My tale mirrors, not the paranoid hypochondriac, but rather the sober person who realizes that, as a matter of fact, at some point in the future, he will die.

The distant future people living here may be our distant descendants. Or they may be entirely unrelated to us. Their identity may depend on us, but then again it may not. My question thus sidesteps theoretical puzzles such as Parfit’s non-identity problem.²⁷

An intuitive way into my question is to ask: What are we grateful that the people who were here, in this place, a thousand years ago left behind for us? And what else do we wish they had left us in addition?²⁸

As with any thought experiment, this one tests our moral intuitions, considered moral judgements, call them what you will. A thought experiment is not itself an argument; nor are our reactions any kind of evidence or data. (As we saw in the section ‘The illusion of neutrality’, utilitarians disagree about their own thought experiments.) Its purpose is illustrative, suggestive, and pedagogical. But a good thought experiment can serve that purpose well. There’s a reason why many of us start our lectures on the demands of morality with Singer’s example of the child drowning in a shallow pond.

To save time, I will simply answer my own question, and then seek to explain that answer. We do owe something to distant future people, despite our lack of other connections to them. Utilitarianism easily accommodates this answer. It isn’t the only moral theory that does so. (Christian ethics presumably says the same.) But nor is this an empty victory. Our obligations to distant future people cannot be based on reciprocity, genetic relatedness, common projects, national ties, and so on. They are simply pure duties of common humanity.

Many people are drawn to utilitarianism precisely because it offers a much more satisfying account of our obligations to future people and distant strangers than other approaches in contemporary secular ethics. If you come to moral philosophy with a commitment to these obligations, then the idea that morality is some kind of contract or bargain simply makes no sense.

Duties to distant future people are central to utilitarian thinking about climate change. But even some utilitarians have difficulty truly understanding those duties. And we might wonder whether Singer’s own partial move to objectivism is enough to enable him to make sense of them. Can we make do with only ungrounded objective values, or do we need to explore their ontological foundations?

My goal in what follows is focused chiefly on the difficulties faced by preference utilitarianism. Yet it also includes two other features of Singer’s position: his subjectivist meta-ethic and his aspiration towards neutrality. Singer himself raises some of the same worries in the latest edition of Practical Ethics. My aim is to push him and other preference utilitarians further in the same direction. I focus on three questions: What should we care about? How should we balance the interests of distant future people against our own? Why should we care at all?

Suppose we agree that we should care for distant future people. How should we care for them? Preference utilitarianism says we should give distant future people what they want, or at least we should not deprive them of things they want. But we have no idea what they will want. Distant future people may be very different from us. They might want anything. (Think of all the crazy things people have wanted in the past.)

You may think this is an exaggeration. Surely, whatever else they want, distant future people will want clean air, stable climate, drinkable water, a beautiful natural environment. Well, they might. Then again, they might not. Not everyone wants all those things, especially the last. Consider an example from Singer’s Practical Ethics: What if future people prefer virtual reality to encounters with the real natural world?²⁹ What if they don’t thank us for preserving virgin rainforest rather than pouring all our energies into developing ever-more-intricate computer games? If distant future people have no experience of diverse ecosystems or a stable climate – if they cannot even imagine such things – how can they prefer them?

Objectivists offer a very different account. We ought to ensure that distant future people have access to desirable things like drinkable water, breathable air, stable climate, and ecological diversity. If the natural world is intrinsically valuable, then human lives go better (and perhaps can only go well) when they are appropriately related to that value. This is not a value that the preference utilitarian can easily acknowledge.

The further we look into the future, and the more different that future might be, the harder it is to believe that predications about what people will (or might or could) want are doing any real work. If intergenerational justice were a side issue, this might not matter. But, for the temporally impartial utilitarian, climate change shows that intergenerational justice is the main moral issue we face.

Because climate change gives rise to conflicts between generations, it is not sufficient to know that we should care for future people. We must weigh their interests against our own. Consider a principle Singer himself presents in several places: If we can prevent harm to someone, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral significance, we ought to do so.³⁰

To interpret Singer’s principle, we must cash out the notion of ‘comparable moral significance’. The preference utilitarian faces two difficulties. First, this test is virtually impossible to apply to the distant future. Even if I know what future people will want, how do I know how strongly they will want it? Of course, we can easily stipulate that their desires are as important as ours, but this is an independent value commitment, not a response to the value of preferences. (Temporal impartiality alone doesn’t tell us how to balance preferences located at different times.)

Second, preferences clearly give us the wrong answer. Suppose, to oversimplify greatly, that I ask what I must sacrifice to protect the interests of distant future people. Should I donate money: perhaps to promote awareness of climate change, to develop policies to combat it, to fund research into new technologies, or to support those who will suffer from climate change? If so, how much money? At what point do the projects I must sacrifice count as morally significant? Or perhaps I should also make lifestyle changes. Should I give up meat-eating, or long-distance flights, or the pleasure of owning a large car?

For the preference utilitarian, the answer turns on the strength of my preferences. The objectivist replies that surely what matters is whether the object of my preference is sufficiently valuable to justify the possible harm to distant future people. Contrast the person who flies long-distance simply to sit in the sun and drink cheap alcohol, with someone travelling to see ailing family members, or to visit their young grandchildren. When we ask whether these are things we should be prepared to give up, we do not consider the strength of the preferences. We look instead at the objects of preference and ask ‘are these essential (or at least valuable) components of a flourishing human life?’

The issue of weighing is crucial. Practical ethics seeks to shape how people live their lives. Practical ethicists – and here Peter Singer is an exemplar – have influenced behaviour in relation to animal welfare and (to a lesser extent) global poverty. I don’t mean to belittle those achievements; they are especially remarkable for an academic philosopher. But it is one thing to get people to give up meat, or to make small donations to charity, and quite another to get them to make life-changing sacrifices to keep the world safe for future people. I don’t know whether anything can make enough people do that. But I doubt that a focus on the preferences of future people is the place to start.

We might also wonder whether any ethic based only on prescriptions – and not on objective moral facts – could have sufficient authority to provide the motivation necessary to grapple with climate change. Climate change thus challenges Singer’s subjectivist meta-ethic as much as his preference utilitarianism. This is hardly surprising. Although the two topics are logically distinct, there is obviously a connection between subjectivist accounts of well-being and subjectivist accounts of morality. Once our story of what makes human lives worth living includes independent objective values, it is much harder to reduce morality to imperatives. It is no accident that Hare’s argument took him from prescriptivism to preference utilitarianism, nor that his opponents often reject both positions together.

To bring our discussion full circle, I will now argue that, by focusing our attention on future people, climate change further undermines the preference utilitarian’s claim to be offering a rationally compelling neutral position. Consider the following puzzle made famous by Derek Parfit.

In cases where different possible futures contain different numbers of people, traditional utilitarian accounts of aggregation yield this conclusion or some close analogue. Yet, as Parfit notes, many people find this conclusion ‘intrinsically repugnant’.

Parfit’s repugnant conclusion has been the organizing problem of recent philosophical discussion of our obligations to future people. Most philosophers begin their discussion by stating their response to it. And those responses vary enormously. Here, more than perhaps anywhere else in contemporary utilitarianism, intuitions conflict – and the neutrality of any one position becomes even less plausible. Why should we add preferences rather than (say) averaging them? And why treat preferences alone as the measure of well-being? Parfit himself argues that – to avoid the repugnant conclusion and to preserve the intuition that flourishing human lives cannot be swamped by lives that are barely worth living – we must posit a lexical threshold; that is, a point on the scale of well-being such that lives above the threshold are incomparably more valuable than lives below. But such a threshold makes no sense within preference utilitarianism and strongly suggests an objective basis to both well-being and morality.³²

Preference utilitarianism cannot answer the most fundamental questions raised by my thought experiment. I have concentrated on what we owe to distant future people. But two prior questions are why we would owe them anything at all and what could motivate us to care for them. In the absence of reciprocity or personal ties, we must fall back on some feature of their nature as sentient or rational creatures. The fact that they have preferences seems a pretty weak basis either for moral status or for motivation. The fact that they are creatures who can respond appropriately to independent values does not.

We saw earlier that preference theory promises neutrality by avoiding the need to examine the foundations of value. We have now seen that we cannot understand our obligations to distant future people without embracing objective values. But can we understand those values without digging deeper, by asking why these things are valuable and what grounds their value? Can we appreciate why, and how much, we should care for future people without asking what the human story is for – and what our place in the cosmos is? If not, can we find a religiously neutral answer to those questions? Or should we seek instead, in John Rawls’s phrase, an overlapping consensus where different foundational stories – some atheist, some religious – both converge on the same values and imbue them with the same urgency?³³

Chickens, eggs, and Just So stories

With apologies to Kipling, my reason for recounting this newly coined Just So story is that, like all the best fictions, it contains a truth, albeit an obvious one. It is not the case that a group of vegan human beings met at some point in prehistory to decide that their metaphysical frameworks contained a clear rationale for a human/non-human distinction that permitted the killing of other animals for food, and that some subsequent assembly added that domesticating other animals was also justifiable. Instead, it seems likely that while some early ancestors of humans may have been vegetarian, at some point in evolutionary history long before we had the capacity for moral reflection at any level of sophistication, our ancestors found that they could prey on other animals in order to survive and thrive, and because they could, they did.¹ Ever since then, almost all humans have been born into societies that kill other animals for their food. When they reached the stage of reflecting on what it was that made it justifiable to kill other animals but not human beings for food, philosophers and religious thinkers developed a range of arguments and interpretations of sacred texts to explain the difference between humans and all other creatures that made such different treatment appropriate. In other words, while it may be difficult to say whether the chicken or the egg came first, it is not at all difficult to decide that the human appropriation of both chicken and egg must have preceded any philosophical or religious rationale for the practice. Human beings used other animals for their own purposes because they had the power to do so, just as human groups with power subjugated other groups of humans to their own ends in enslaving them. Those philosophers and theologians like myself who wish to challenge current human practices in relation to other animals must therefore show that while it has been customary and expedient for humans to use other animals for their own ends, there are reasons that we should cease to do so.

The reason that I have laboured the point that philosophical and religious reflection concerning humans and other animals was subsequent to the human exploitation of other animals is that Peter Singer’s writing often seems to assume the opposite. In Animal Liberation, Singer states that practices such as research on non-human animals, the factory farming of other animals, the slaughter of wild animals for sport or for fur ‘should not be seen as isolated aberrations’ but ‘can be properly understood only as the manifestations of the ideology of our species – that is, the attitudes that we, as the dominant animal, have toward the other animals’.² This ideology has Greek and Jewish roots, according to Singer, but was brought together most problematically in Christianity, with its belief in human uniqueness and the immortality of the human soul. It is Christianity, according to Singer, that ‘spread the idea that every human life – and only human life – is sacred’.³ In the second edition of Animal Liberation (1995), Singer acknowledges elements in the biblical texts that are more friendly towards other animals, such as the idea that humans were vegetarian before the fall, Isaiah’s visions of peace between creatures, together with the development of stewardship rather than dominion as the best image of human relationships with other creatures, but nothing can challenge the overall view of humanity as the pinnacle of creation.⁴ While the Old Testament asserted dominion over other species, Singer comments, it ‘at least shows flickers of concern for their sufferings’, whereas the New Testament ‘is completely lacking in any injunction against cruelty to animals, or any recommendation to consider their interests’.⁵

In evaluating Singer’s critique of Christianity here, it is important to take care about details. Singer is clearly right that the texts of Genesis 1:26 and Psalm 8:5–8, in which God grants human beings dominion over other creatures, have been interpreted to justify human exploitation of other creatures and that Paul’s words ‘Is it for oxen that God is concerned?’ in 1 Corinthians 9:9 suggest a negative answer. We can agree, then, that there are texts in the Bible that could be deployed to support humans exploiting other animals and that these texts have in fact been used to support such exploitation.

Others of Singer’s claims, however, seem to be over-simplistic or false. Take the claim that only Christianity teaches that only human life is sacred, for example. One could make a plausible case that the identification of rationality with divinity in Stoic traditions of thought, together with the attribution of rationality uniquely to human beings among earthly creatures, was an important influence on developing Christian ideas of the status of humanity with respect to other creatures.⁶ If this is true, then it shows that Christianity would not be unique in declaring the key significance of human life. We could also consider other secular and religious traditions in this context: even Lynn White’s provocative 1967 article on the responsibility of Christianity for ecological crisis, which has been widely criticized for its simplistic errors, recognized that Zoroastrianism might espouse a dualism between humanity and nature similar to that which White diagnosed in Christianity.⁷ It therefore looks difficult to sustain the claim that only Christianity declares humans to be uniquely sacred. It is also difficult, however, to sustain the claim that Christianity declares humans to be uniquely sacred. Here, there are two problems. First, there is a difficulty with the claim that humans are sacred, since even Jesus declares that God alone is good (Luke 18:19) and Christians recognize that human beings are fallen, sinful, and distant from God’s holiness. Second, if we reword the claim to say that human beings are valued by God, it is clear that they are not unique in this regard. Even when Jesus is emphasizing the particular concern God has for human well-being, he observes that God cares even for a single sparrow (Matthew 10:31; Luke 12:6–7). Singer’s claim here, therefore, is doubly mistaken.

A second example of Singer’s misrepresentation of Christianity in Animal Liberation is his statement that the New Testament ‘is completely lacking in any injunction against cruelty to animals, or any recommendation to consider their interests’.⁸ In the key collection of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, he invites his listeners to ‘Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them’ (Matthew 6.26). This is not a moral injunction to be kind to birds, but it is precisely a recommendation to consider their interests in seeking food, and those who see that birds are fellow creatures that God also sustains through providing them with food will not look at them in the same way again. Jesus goes on to note God’s care in clothing the lilies of the field as an example of the life free of anxiety he is commending to his followers (Matthew 6:28–30).⁹

Paul’s vision of the liberation of creation similarly functions only insofar as the recipients of his letter are able to understand their common situation with all of creation, in bondage to decay and groaning in labour pains for the freedom of the children of God (Romans 8:18–23). Again, this is not a law against cruelty to non-human animals, but it does set out their plight in common with human fellow creatures and makes clear that God wills their liberation from this situation in a way that has the potential to transform Christian attitudes towards other creatures. In response to Paul’s question whether God is concerned for oxen, it is instructive to note John Wesley’s response: ‘Without doubt, he does. We cannot deny it without flatly contradicting his word.’¹⁰ Paul’s comment cannot be interpreted as a contradiction of the biblical creation theology common to the Old and New Testaments. The story of the exorcism of the demon ‘Legion’ and the subsequent death of the pigs similarly cannot be read literalistically: ‘Legion’ would have been a clear reference to the Roman occupying forces and the unhappy ending of the Legion in animals they raised in Palestine despite their uncleanness to the Jews would have been recognized as an obvious symbol by Mark’s audience.¹¹ Clearly, we do not find a New Testament manifesto for the equal rights of human and non-human animals. Equally clearly, the texts I have cited have often not been interpreted in a way that is positive for the consideration of the interests of other animals. These truths do not, however, necessitate closing down the hermeneutical task by accepting at face value biblical texts that seem problematic and ignoring passages that point to more positive readings of animals. Singer’s position here suggests an unholy alliance between those Christians who interpret the Bible to justify excluding non-human animals from moral concern and external critics such as Singer who accept their arguments and use them against Christianity itself.

Singer’s rehearsal of complaints against traditions of thinking about non-human animals among philosophers and theologians have frequently been repeated since 1975 when Animal Liberation was first published. In an edited book chapter in 1979, Singer repeats his critique of Aristotle, St Paul, Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, and Kant, though in each case there are complexities of interpretation that point beyond the headlines Singer uses to condemn them.¹² Thirty years on, Singer gives a very similar summary of theological and philosophical thought on animals before the eighteenth century in a journal edition foreword.¹³ A chapter on the environment in the most recent edition of Practical Ethics goes through the list again, though notably Singer here identifies ‘gentler spirits’ in the tradition, but states that they had no significant impact.¹⁴ In an interview, Singer defends his selection of voices from the Christian tradition on the basis that those with negative views were the most influential. He also states his belief that many of the most ardent advocates for animals were sceptical about religion and that communities of faith have not been prominent in the modern animal movement.¹⁵ This again ignores significant data: Arnold Maehle shows that theological argument was influential in changes in attitudes towards non-human animals in the eighteenth century and the first national animal welfare society, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later RSPCA), was founded on explicitly Christian principles by Arthur Broome, an Anglican priest, together with Lewis Gompertz, who was Jewish.¹⁶

Singer’s view seems to be that if only the Christian underpinnings of the ideology of our species can be removed, there will no longer be an obstacle to the full and unprejudiced recognition of other animals as moral subjects in their own right. We seem here close to a Singerian Just So story that depicts Christianity as the origin and sustainer of all that is wrong between humans and other animals. What separates my view as a Christian theologian and Singer’s as a utilitarian atheist at this point seems to me a question of faith: Singer manifests an earnest belief in the goodness and rationality of human moral decision-making based on basic premises about which I confess myself to be a sceptic. A theological way of discussing this would be to refer to the doctrine of the fall: human beings have turned radically from the God who created and will redeem them so that they find it difficult to recognize the good through their use of reason and struggle even more to pursue it when this is contrary to their perceived interests.¹⁷

Since human beings are fallen creatures in this way, it is no surprise to the theologian that human beings have exploited other creatures for their own selfish ends, nor that the fallible traditions of the Church, in common with other traditions of thought, have often preferred interpretations of texts and doctrines that rationalize this exploitation. The human exploitation of other animals was and is not primarily ideologically motivated, however. It needs no ideological motivation: the motivation driving it is a basic human desire to survive and gain economic success, at the cost of human and non-human others if necessary. This is not to say that it is not important to challenge religious and philosophical rationales for such exploitation: it is to say that challenging such rationales is only the first step in changing practice. Once the rationales for exploitation have been deconstructed, it is also necessary to provide persuasive reasons that humans should not exploit other animals in order to encourage people to forgo the advantages they gain from so doing.

In emphasizing the point that the primary reason for human exploitation of non-human animals is not ideological, I am not motivated primarily by a concern to defend Christianity against the critique that Singer makes of it. I share with him a sadness and anger that Christian texts and doctrines have been interpreted influentially to support this exploitation: in the main, Christian theology and ethics, in common with wider Western traditions of thinking, have culpably failed to recognize the moral significance of other creatures. My own current theological work seeks to make a small contribution to correcting this failure within Christian traditions, just as Singer’s work seeks to correct the failure of secular philosophical thinking. Rather than deflect criticism from Christianity, my concern is twofold. First, it is important that we see the problem of inadequate respect for non-human animals rightly, and therefore identify strategies in response with the potential to address it. To do so, we must recognize that Christianity, unfortunately, is far from unique in rationalizing human exploitation of other animals and challenging this rationale is a task in very many traditions of thought. Second, it is important not to dismiss the positive resources for changing attitudes towards other animals that are present in Christian texts and traditions, most particularly for the large numbers who still give allegiance to Christianity. To keep retelling the false story that no one paid any attention to animals until utilitarians came along is to disconnect and detach moral thinking about animals from the major religious and philosophical traditions that remain the primary influences on the way we think morally about other animals and all else. In order to win adherents to utilitarianism, such tactics might be useful, but the consequences may be severe for the animals whose interests are neglected as a result of persuading Christians that their faith has no relation to animal welfare.

In the context of analytic philosophy, promoting a utilitarian understanding of ethics may represent a promising strategy for advancing the cause of non-human animals: certainly Singer’s work has been successful in broadening support for the view that the suffering of non-human animals is morally significant. Other contrasting philosophical approaches may also have a role, notably the animal rights work of Tom Regan¹⁸ and more recently, in the context of Continental philosophy, the work of Jacques Derrida challenging the vast diversity made singular in the term ‘the animal’.¹⁹ In the field of Christian theology, authors such as Stephen R.L. Clark, Andrew Linzey, and Stephen Webb have similarly challenged assumptions about the relative moral standing of humans and other animals.²⁰ Analogous efforts have begun in other disciplines, such as geography, sociology, anthropology, literature, history, and classics.²¹ The common task within each disciplinary sphere is to engage with traditions of thought that have frequently contributed to the rationalization of human exploitation of other animals in order to bring to light what has been assumed about the relationship between humans and other animals and subject it to critical scrutiny with a view to changing attitudes and practices. This is clearly a broad and complex task, requiring an accurate analysis as its foundation: it will not be remedied with a simple Just So story that identifies Christianity as the reason humans use other animals for their own ends and the corresponding conclusion that refuting Christianity is a necessary and sufficient step in abolishing this practice. Those who are concerned about the welfare of non-human animals in these different traditions of thought might give consideration to how they can draw on resources available in each tradition in order to make the broadest possible case that improving the welfare of other animals is a pressing moral imperative.

Especially in contexts where Christianity is influential, to characterize the situation in this way seems poor strategy for defending non-human animals, in addition to poor analysis. To tell Christians that they must not only give up their current views about other animals, but also their sacred texts, traditions, and their God is unlikely to ease the transition towards new modes of thinking about non-human animals. There even seems a danger here that non-human animals have absurdly become ammunition in a conflict between Christians and atheists, reminiscent of the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where following a series of insults from a French John Cleese, the English are bombarded from castle walls first with a cow and then a variety of other domestic animals. While the animals in theoretical debates are merely abstractions, the real animals subjected to cruelty while moral debates go unresolved are not, and this mode of argument should obviously be something to avoid for all on both sides who care about the well-being of other animals. I therefore propose a truce during which utilitarians – atheistic and otherwise – and Christian theologians concerned about the welfare of non-human animals make common cause based on their respective insights about the relationships between humans and other animals. The following section explores some potential common ground and points of contention in coming to such an understanding.

Christians, utilitarians, and other animals

In their respective positions on non-human animals, I suggest that Christianity and utilitarianism have a common concern in relation to the welfare of other animals, but each tradition of thought has distinctive advantages and disadvantages that might point towards desirable ways in which their positions could be developed. To begin with utilitarianism, I have already noted that the key advantage of a utilitarian framework is that, beyond the recognition that the welfare of non-human animals is significant, utilitarianism can legitimately claim to be able to weigh up welfare considerations fairly across the human/non-human boundary. Singer’s preference utilitarianism, for example, which includes a commitment to the ‘equality principle’ that like interests are given equal weight,²² argues that this principle means that whether or not beings are members of our species is irrelevant to the weighing of their interests.²³ It is important to note, however, that this does not mean that the interests of all animals are treated equally, for two focal reasons. First, Singer considers only sentient beings to be morally considerable: ‘If a being is not capable of suffering, or of experiencing enjoyment or happiness, there is nothing to be taken into account.’²⁴ Second, Singer’s choice of preference utilitarianism rather than the hedonistic utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill – which aims to maximize the balance of pleasure over pain – means that certain animals weigh more heavily than others. In particular, the preferences of persons, which Singer defines as rational and self-aware beings,²⁵ are often more significant than those of sentient non-persons. In relation to questions of killing, for example, he argues that ‘For preference utilitarians, taking the life of a person will normally be worse than taking the life of some other being, because persons are highly future-orientated in their preferences.’²⁶ The preferences of some beings, therefore, are more equal than others, which makes Singer’s utilitarianism potentially more conservative in weighing the interests of persons against non-persons than unqualified hedonistic utilitarianism. The point remains, however, that what Singer considers to be like preferences of beings are treated equally, irrespective of their species membership.

Singer is correct in recognizing that theological accounts of the relative moral significance of human and non-human creatures are unsympathetic to an impartial weighing of needs across species in a similar way. The unique ascription to humanity of the image of God and the granting to them of dominion over other creatures in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8 have been influential in Christian arguments for prioritizing human welfare over that of other species. In the New Testament, while Jesus notes God’s attentive and providential care for sparrows and the need to rescue sheep even on the Sabbath, he uses both cases rhetorically to point to greater concern for humans and states that humans are of more value than sheep or many sparrows (Matthew 10:31; 12:11–12; Luke 12:6–7). This suggests that Singer’s species-neutral proposal is a clear challenge to Christian accounts, though we should note two points in qualification.

First, as we have just noted Singer’s argument for the greater significance of the preferences of persons, we should note that this may not be as distant from the biblical texts just cited as he himself believes. One traditional theological interpretation of what is distinctive about human beings that enables them to be images of God is their rationality, which Singer identifies as definitive of personhood, alongside self-consciousness. We could therefore venture to say that personhood is what images God in the world and offer personhood as the explanation of why humans are of more value than sheep or many sparrows. The Genesis text does not consider the possibility of non-human persons, but once we have realized that other animals can be rational and self-conscious like us, we could interpret the image of God in this broader context to include non-human persons. Singer and the Bible would seem then to have a similar way of evaluating the relative value of human and non-human animals: all animals matter, but animals who are persons matter more. In fact, I am unsympathetic to this interpretation of the biblical texts, as I think it mistaken to judge that rationality is what most clearly images God.²⁷ Since I have similar concerns about Singer’s privileging of rational creatures, however, my argument here would be against a position that traditional Christian interpretations and Singer might have in common.

The second point to be made in qualification of a simplistic contrast of Singer’s preference utilitarianism and Christian interpretations of the relative priority of human and non-human interests arises from an alternative theological interpretation of image of God and dominion.²⁸ The close proximity of the identification of the image of God with humanity and the granting of dominion to them suggests that the two concepts may be closely related. On this basis, we might suggest that by attributing the image of God to human beings, Genesis identifies human beings as those creatures most able to take a God’s eye view of creation and make judgements about how it should appropriately be ordered. If this is the implication of understanding the image of God in the context of dominion, there are also reciprocal implications for understanding dominion in the context of the image of God. The kind of dominion that would image God in the world would be the gracious and attentive concern for the well-being of even the humblest creatures frequently referenced in the Bible, in the New Testament passages we have noted but also in the closing chapters of Job and the Psalms in the Old Testament (Job 38–41; Psalms 104; 145). In the vision of Genesis 1, this dominion is peaceful and does not include the use of other animals as food for human beings: God gives seeds and fruit to humankind for food and green plants to the other land animals and birds (Genesis 1:29–30). Some have suggested that the scene in Genesis 2 when God brings the other animals before Adam to be given names (Genesis 2:19) is another indication of a problematic account of dominion, but this is by no means the only way of understanding it. To me it speaks of Adam’s task of attending to the particularity of each of God’s creatures, like a proto-Linnaeus.²⁹ Christians have reason to supplement this account of what it might be to image God in the world with the example of Jesus Christ, who interpreted his lordship as servanthood. Andrew Linzey has proposed that this means humans are understood in a theological context to be unique by being servants of the other animals, seeking to promote their welfare.³⁰ This original vision of peaceful coexistence between creatures is lost when humanity turns from God and loses its dominion over other animals, and it is clear that humankind has fallen far short of the Godlike care for other creatures envisioned in Genesis. If we consider how humans might rethink their responsibility to other creatures in relation to the first two chapters of Genesis, however, it does not seem fanciful to me to suggest that Singer’s project might be one model for carefully attending to the competing claims of the astonishing diversity of other animals with fairness. Perhaps, then, it is not too fanciful to think of Singer as an Adam figure, seeking to deal responsibly with the God-given task of managing relations between creatures. Interpreting the image of God and dominion as task and responsibility, therefore, suggests that Singer’s work might be understood as the kind of wise and gracious dominion that Christian theology should be pointing towards.

There seems to me, however, one respect in which a theological account of the respect that should be accorded to non-human animals has a clear advantage over a utilitarian account. Where preference utilitarianism is narrowly focused on the satisfaction of current preferences, theology can appreciate and respond to a number of other dimensions of the lives of non-human animals.³¹ One way to understand this is to consider the meaning of the word ‘creature’. Creatures are beings that have been created by God and therefore share a basic commonality as the root of their identity. Beyond all considerations of difference, therefore, a theological account recognizes other animals as the same as humans in this most fundamental respect. When we encounter other animals, we encounter fellow creatures of one God, and therefore should recognize our solidarity and kinship with them. Creatureliness is more than merely a statement of origins, however: Christians believe that the universe is the good creation of a gracious God who continues to sustain it in being and who will bring about its redemption. Creatures, therefore, cannot be understood properly by taking a snapshot of their existence at a particular moment. Instead, a theological understanding is teleological in orientation, seeing the creature of God as on its way from creation to a place in the new creation.³² This teleological vision means that the questions theologians bring to the lives of other animals concern the place of this creature in God’s good purposes and how it may be enabled to thrive and attain the goal God intends for it.

Here we have a strong contrast with utilitarian accounts. Last week I found a young bird dead at our doorstep. My response was of sadness, not because the bird at the moment of its death had a preference for its life to continue, nor because its parents would currently be grieving its loss, neither of which may be true, but because I had a sense of the life ahead of this poor creature, its growth to maturity and the particular contribution it should have made to the universe of creaturely life. The medieval theologian John Duns Scotus called the unsubstitutable particularity of each creature its ‘haecceity’ or ‘thisness’, rendered by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins as ‘inscape’, as in these lines from ‘As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame’:

On Singer’s preference utilitarian account, there is no place for the teleological dimension of a being, attending to what the animal we encounter may become, except insofar as a creature can do this work for itself in possessing future preferences. Nor is there any possibility of recognizing the particularity of every creature: for Singer, sentient non-personal beings are ‘replaceable’ because their ‘conscious states are not internally linked over time’.³⁴

From a theological perspective, this judgement is close to incomprehensible, as well as heartless. The integral being of a creature does not depend on its own ability to comprehend its life and future, but rests in God, which is good news for those of us who only have a shaky appreciation of what constitutes our future good. The death of that young bird is sad not because preferences went unmet, or the sum of happiness was infinitesimally diminished, but because this one life did not reach the end to which it was ordered. In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, you may remember, the earth is destroyed by the Vogons in order to make way for a hyperspatial bypass.³⁵ If the Vogons had been prepared to take the precaution of teleporting off the personal beings before the destruction and giving them more pleasant lives elsewhere, the Vogon demolition beams had been quick and painless, and they had bred sufficient sentient non-persons elsewhere in the universe to replace those destroyed, there seems no objection Singer would have wanted to lodge with them at the local planning department on Alpha Centauri. The theologian, in contrast, should protest the lives destroyed, because each of those billions of creatures had an irreplaceable and particular life of its own to live before its creator and redeemer God. The application of this argument to raising sentient non-personal animals for food takes it out of the realms of science fiction to the everyday: utilitarianism provides no argument against killing lambs at nine months old for consumption by humans, provided the conditions they are raised in are adequate, their death is painless, the suffering of their mothers is brief, and they are replaced by the next hapless generation.³⁶ The theologian, in contrast, can and should protest at animal lives cut short before their time, a concept that is literally nonsense in a utilitarian framework.

Making common cause

I argued in the first section of this essay that utilitarians and Christians interested in the welfare of non-human animals should recognize that the motivations for human exploitation of other animals are primarily economic rather than ideological and make common cause in showing why this is not morally justifiable. In the second section I indicated the advantage utilitarianism has in its discussion of non-human animals in suggesting the possibility of equal consideration of interests across the human/non-human boundary, but the advantage theology has in being able to give a broader account of the value of animal life well beyond the case of animals with future preferences. In this final section I wish briefly to make two concluding points.

First, it seems to me that the conversation between utilitarianism and Christianity is underdeveloped and potentially fruitful. The case of animals I have considered illustrates this point, I believe, but my own view is that this is only one issue of many. The dialogue is challenging for both sides, because it forces reconsideration of presuppositions and response to demands that have not previously been acknowledged. It seems to me that at a minimum this will clarify differences and the rationale for them, but it may also lead to the development of positions and potential alliances in relation to practical issues of shared concern.

My second point in conclusion is to highlight one area in relation to human practices concerning other animals that seems clearly to be of shared concern and is conspicuous in requiring little further conceptual clarification or debate. The novel practice of raising non-human animals for food in industrial factory farming contexts far outweighs numerically any other area of human practice in relation to other animals: each year 56 billion animals are slaughtered for human consumption, most of which are raised intensively with little regard for their welfare.³⁷ Utilitarians such as Singer define the problem as when the lives of the animals are ‘more of a burden than a benefit to them’;³⁸ Christians might prefer an account that focused on the inability of the animals to live out the kind of life appropriate to their kind of creatureliness. I propose that we can state a provisional conclusion as boldly as this: no Christian and no utilitarian should consume meat from animals raised in factory farming conditions. Both Christians and utilitarians will differ, even among themselves, as to whether non-human animals that have been well treated can legitimately be killed for food, but there should be no controversy about the ethics of raising animals in poor conditions and then killing them. If we are convinced of the merits of this position, perhaps we can commit in common to the practical action of making the case for abstention from the products of factory farming and for the abolition of the practice wherever we can within our own constituencies and in relation to the wider public.

It is appropriate that the conclusion to this essay is a practical one: Christians and utilitarians will continue to disagree on a range of significant meta-ethical issues, though informed dialogue will no doubt reveal some common ground even here. They will also continue to disagree on a range of significant ethical questions, particularly, I suggest, in relation to the ethics of life and death. On other ethical issues, however, different methodological starting points lead to conclusions concerning practical action that demarcate common ground between utilitarianism and Christianity: provision for the poor is one obvious area addressed by other essays in this volume, but in the context of the animal questions I have discussed, improving farm animal welfare is clearly the key priority. Christians and utilitarians are both practical people at heart, and I look forward to the possibility of making common cause on this issue in order to work for real improvements in the lives of farmed animals.

The facts about global poverty

Many of the world’s people live in conditions of extreme poverty. They face material conditions that are almost unknown in the rich countries, such as the United States, Australia, or Western Europe. While there is poverty in these rich countries, it is of a very different sort. We are familiar with relative poverty, where some people have comparatively less than others, which leads to social exclusion, crime, and other problems. This is a serious concern for these countries, but it is important to distinguish it from the topic of this chapter, which is absolute poverty. Absolute poverty is not defined in terms of how much worse off one person is compared to another, but by how little they have compared to a standard for being able to afford the basic necessities of life. This chapter is concerned with absolute poverty on a global scale.

To put things into perspective, consider that of the 7,000 million people in the world today:

1. 2,500 million live on less than $2 per day;

2. 1,300 million live on less than $1.25 per day;

3. 1,000 million lack clean drinking water;

4. 800 million go to bed hungry each day;

5. 100 million children don’t get even a basic education;

6. 800 million adults cannot read or write;

7. 6 million children will die each year from preventable diseases.¹

It is difficult really to grasp these numbers. For example, how could someone live on just $1.25 per day? How could they even arrange accommodation for less than $9 per week, let alone food, clothing, medicines, and other essentials?

First, it must be pointed out that it is not because a dollar buys a lot more in poor countries. Each dollar does go much further in poor countries, with a dollar in India buying about four times as much as if spent in the US, but this has already been taken into account in the above figures. The actual number of dollars that someone at this threshold has access to is, in fact, much less than $1.25 per day, but it has the same buying power as $1.25.

This is not enough money to afford even the lowest standard of accommodation in most towns or cities in rich countries, but in the poorest countries, there is a tier of accommodation below anything available here, and a tier below that. The same is true for many of the other things that they can buy: they are of a standard below anything that the market offers us in rich countries. It is not that everything in these people’s lives is of an inferior standard, but much of the material basis is.

In addition to this material poverty, the world’s poorest people often receive a very low quality of education – much lower than in rich countries – with hundreds of millions of people left unable to read or write. Needless to say, this makes it much more difficult to improve their lot in life.

On top of this, there is a heart-breaking amount of untreated disease. This is an area in which aid has led to tremendous improvements, saving literally millions of lives each year. However, there are still 6 million children dying of preventable diseases each year, to say nothing of the effects of disabling disease or injury.

It is very difficult to really understand such a figure and the ongoing emergency it represents. Six million children dying per year is the equivalent of more than 16,000 deaths each day. This is equivalent to forty fully laden Boeing 747s crashing every day. If a single 747 crashed, it would be on the nightly news. Scenes of rescuers looking through the wreckage and doctors treating any survivors would fill our living rooms and it would – rightly – be seen as a moral emergency. Yet the much larger moral emergency of forty 747s worth of children dying each day from easily preventable diseases is left unreported – even though tomorrow’s deaths are not predetermined, even though it is part of a much more interesting and challenging story about who is responsible and how they should be brought to account. It is old news. It is an everyday emergency.

While the numbers presented above show the scale of global poverty, we should take care not to treat it as monolithic. The shape of global poverty is complex. The world can no longer be cleanly separated into a group of rich countries and a group of very poor countries. Over the past fifty years, many of the poor countries have begun slowly to catch up with the rich ones. We now have a spectrum of countries from the wealthiest to the most impoverished, each with their own challenges and needs. This change should give us hope, as it shows that countries really can be pulled out of poverty through a combination of external aid and internal progress.

There are also many countries that have enjoyed significant growth in income, but very unequally distributed. For example, India’s average income is now high enough that it officially counts as a middle income country. However, it still has approximately 380 million people living below the $1.25 poverty line – more than the entire populations of the US and Canada combined.² Thus, almost a third of the world’s poorest people live in a country that is not itself classed as poor.

However, we should not let ourselves be blinded by the complexities. What is important for the present discussion is just that there are a great many people living in extreme poverty and significant opportunities to help alleviate some of their suffering or to lift some of them out of poverty entirely.

Let us conclude this sketch of global poverty, by considering the world income distribution. Suppose we lined up everyone in the world in order of income. As before, we would want to adjust this for purchasing power parity to get a true picture of income. There is also a challenge concerning how to account for children, who often have no income. Therefore, we shall divide a household’s income evenly between its members. If you lined everyone up in order of income in this manner, you would see the distribution of income as in the Figure.³

A perfectly even distribution would result in a horizontal line on the chart. The actual distribution though, is nothing like this; it is all piled up at the right end of the chart, in the hands of the richest people. Where are you on this chart? Most people in rich countries do not think of themselves as truly rich. They compare themselves to the people their social circles and find that they are a little richer or a little poorer. However, on a world scale, they are often very rich.

Figure: The world income distribution.

For example, a single person in the United States who earned $30,000 per year would be in the richest 2 per cent of the world’s population, and would earn twenty-five times as much as the typical person in the world. Even the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 ($14,500 per year) would be enough to leave a single person in the richest 10 per cent of the world’s population. Moreover, even if you are not among the world’s richest right now, because you have dependent children, you are likely to become so when they leave home.

This chart is one of the most important summaries of the world today. It shows just how unequal the world is, it explains to us our own positions in this mess, and it shows just how little we need each extra dollar compared to the world’s poorest people.

Utilitarianism

Utilitarianism is a moral theory in which the ultimate thing that matters is increasing the balance of happiness over suffering. Though it has earlier roots, it rose to prominence in the work of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

At its heart, utilitarianism is a very simple theory. Its proponents see this simplicity as a great strength, for it stresses an obvious and important truth: that happiness is a great good and suffering a great ill. It can be arrived at via the idea of impartial benevolence: first, considering what makes life good for an individual (increasing the balance of happiness over suffering) and then attempting to achieve this goal for all by maximizing the sum of all happiness minus the sum of all suffering. It can also be arrived at via a veil of ignorance: imagining that you didn’t know which person in society you were and then choosing how to structure society such that it would be best for you if you had an equal chance of being each person.⁴

The simplicity of utilitarianism has also meant that there is very little room for the details of the theory to encode the prejudices of our own time or place. Indeed, this has allowed utilitarianism to have considerable power for social reform, revealing to its creators how they could improve their own societies and often convincing them of the need to reform. For example, it led Bentham to advocate legal reform to protect the welfare of animals and for Mill to advocate equal legal rights for women.

Opponents of utilitarianism see its simplicity as a fundamental limitation. They claim that morality is more complex than the theory can accommodate. For example, we intuitively believe that morality has some agent-relative aspects in the form of constraints and options, neither of which is recognized by utilitarianism. This normally takes the form of side constraints, where an agent is prohibited from increasing the impartial good, for example by not being allowed to kill one person to save the lives of two others. Options are where an agent is allowed to fulfil her own projects to some degree, even when she would increase the impartial good by spending her resources on others. While side constraints will not be very relevant to this chapter, the question of whether we have moral options is central.

Applied to acts, utilitarianism states: An act is right if and only if it leads to more net happiness than any alternative. Now consider how this would apply to making a donation to an effective charity that helps some of the world’s poorest people. For concreteness, consider a charity that provides essential medicines to help save lives from preventable diseases. It is very likely that the expected benefits in terms of happiness and suffering for the recipients will more than outweigh the gains of spending the money on oneself. Since this is all that matters according to utilitarianism, it will judge that it is right to donate to such a charity and wrong to spend that money on oneself. Indeed, since we are so much richer, we would likely increase the overall balance of happiness over suffering even more if we gave away a great deal of our wealth – perhaps half or more – so this level of sacrifice would also be required of us.

This is in contrast to common sense. Many people find this too demanding an account of morality. Instead, we typically think that donating to such a charity is commendable and good (or supererogatory), but not required. It would not be wrong to decline to donate, just non-ideal. Common sense thus has three moral categories of acts: impermissible, (merely) permissible, and supererogatory.

Giving to charity is typically thought to be in the third of these categories. Utilitarianism, however, does not have such a category. It holds that the act with the morally best consequences is permissible (right) and that all other acts are impermissible (wrong). Thus, some acts that are intuitively supererogatory, such as donating 10 per cent of one’s income, could turn out to be impermissible according to utilitarianism if more good would be achieved by donating a higher proportion.

Singer’s Principle of Sacrifice

In 1972, in the first-ever issue of the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, there was an article by a relatively unknown Australian philosopher. Peter Singer’s ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ ignited interest in the ethics of global poverty among moral philosophers and played a large role in shaping the emerging field of practical ethics. At that time, moral philosophers were largely concerned with theoretical ethics, particularly with abstract questions about what moral terms mean. An article in moral philosophy engaging with a major global event and using philosophical methods to stir people to action was a strikingly different kind of ethics.

The article was written in response to the famines in Bengal and considered the moral case for international aid. Of course, it was (relatively) uncontroversial that helping people living in poverty was a good thing, but Singer’s argument went beyond this in two ways. He argued that giving aid was not merely supererogatory, but obligatory, and he did not rely upon a controversial ethical theory like utilitarianism, instead arguing directly from the following intuition:

He illustrates the effects of this principle with an example:

If a person were to abandon the drowning child in such a situation, most people would judge that they acted wrongly. It would not be sufficient excuse that they would get their clothes muddy, even if this meant destroying their new suit. Moreover, our thinking in this case does seem to fit the style of the Principle of Sacrifice: we judge it wrong to leave the child to drown because it is failing to prevent something very bad from happening for the sake of avoiding a comparatively insignificant loss.

However, the situation with respect to charitable donations is similar. By donating to the most effective aid organizations, we can avoid great suffering for others, or even save lives, for comparatively insignificant costs to ourselves. If the Principle of Sacrifice is valid, then failing to donate is also morally wrong.

The case of global poverty goes further than this, for once we have made one donation we could make another. Again, we would face a rather insignificant loss in order to prevent something very bad from happening, so we must do it. As Singer points out, this would continue until we donate so much that the loss to us starts to become very significant compared to the benefit it could produce. This could be because we are made so poor that giving the money is a truly great sacrifice, or because we need a reasonable amount of money in order to be able to function and dress appropriately to be able to continue to get well-paid jobs to earn more money to donate. In any event, the Principle of Sacrifice is both very compelling and yet very demanding. Given the facts about poverty, it requires serious changes in how we think about our lives.

Of course, there are several disanalogies between the case of the Shallow Pond and donating to effective aid organizations. For instance, in latter case we have physical distance, cultural distance, multiple potential saviours, a continuing disaster, and causal messiness. However, it is unclear why any of these features should make a decisive moral difference. Indeed, Peter Unger has investigated each of these differences in his book Living High and Letting Die,⁶ which was inspired by Singer’s article. By analysing these features one at a time, he shows how each can be portrayed in a version of the Shallow Pond, and that the moral requirement persists. It should also be stressed that the very plausible Principle of Sacrifice does not refer to any of these features, so if we accept it, we must admit that it is wrong not to donate, regardless of putative disanalogies between the cases.

Singer’s paper is remarkable for supporting such a strong claim – at odds with many intuitions and with widespread social practices – via a very short and simple argument from common-sense intuitions. While Singer is an advocate of utilitarianism, and his argument may have been inspired by considerations of impartial benevolence, his argument certainly doesn’t require one to share this theory. His Principle of Sacrifice is a significantly weaker principle and is compatible with many moral theories besides utilitarianism.

There are two important ways in which it is weaker. First, it does not require us to provide positively good things for others, merely to prevent bad things from happening. Providing good things for people (say, music and the arts) might still be considered supererogatory. Second, it only applies when the bad thing that can be prevented is much worse than the sacrifice needed to avoid it. It does not require you to sacrifice a lot in order to give someone else slightly more.

There are also two key ways in which Singer’s argument is similar to the utilitarian one. First, it does not (much) distinguish between acts and omissions: it requires us to act to avoid a harm in much the same way that many principles (such as ‘Thou shall not kill’) restrict us from harming. Second, it takes outcomes for others very seriously. It is bad for people in poor countries when they suffer, this badness can be at least roughly compared with the badness of us having less money, and we find the former to be much worse. We must therefore help these people for their sake.

Perhaps most importantly, ‘Famine, Affluence, and Morality’ highlights the scale and immediacy of global poverty as a moral issue. Global poverty is one of the largest moral problems in the world. Perhaps only avoiding major global catastrophes, such as extreme climate change, is of a similar scale. For example, consider war. The entire death toll from all acts of war and genocide in the twentieth century, including non-combatants, comes to about 230 million deaths, or 2.3 million per year.⁷

By comparison, immunization programmes have reduced the death toll from vaccine preventable illnesses from about 5 million per year to about 1.4 million per year, thus saving 3.6 million lives per year, more than would be saved by world peace. Moreover, the smallpox eradication campaign has reduced its death toll from 3 million per year to zero, oral rehydration therapy has reduced the death toll of diarrhoeal illness from 4.6 million per year to 1.6 million, and malaria control has reduced the death toll from 3.8 million per year to 1 million.⁸ Each of these four has saved more lives than world peace would have.

Of course, poverty and illness have not ended. With 6 million children dying from preventable illnesses each year, there is still room for more gains on this massive scale, and a moral urgency to pursue them. Every day we delay is another forty 747s, and this just the deaths, to which we must add all the non-lethal illnesses and many other forms of suffering and disadvantage.

As well as being such a large-scale problem, it is one of the most immediate and omnipresent moral issues. While much has been written on the ethics of new biomedical technologies such as cloning, these often have very little impact on the moral choices in our lives. Even a very important issue such as abortion directly confronts us only a few times in our lives, if at all. In contrast, every day we earn money that could be used to prevent great suffering and every day we could choose to donate part of these earnings, or part of our savings or capital. As Singer shows, global poverty confronts us with life-or-death situations and does so on a daily basis, making it a central moral issue of our times, and quite possibly the central issue.

Christian ethics

In response to the extremely demanding nature of Singer’s views on the ethics of global poverty, many people might be inclined to think that these views are simply too far out of line with ordinary thought to be taken seriously. While Singer argues that common sense leads to his conclusion, if this conclusion is so unintuitive then perhaps something has gone wrong in the argument.

Singer anticipates this reaction and defends his view by pointing to a strong historic parallel between his view and the writings of Thomas Aquinas:

These remarks by Aquinas appeal to a strand of Christian thought that dates back much earlier than the middle ages. Indeed, the ideas are put very clearly by two of the church fathers in the fourth century. Basil of Caesarea writes:

In a very similar vein, according to Ambrose:

Radical though they sound, these ideas are still current within Christian ethics. In 1965, the Second Vatican Council declared that:

Two years later, Pope Paul VI explicitly applied this to the situation of global poverty:

These passages detail a Christian view of property that is markedly different from the modern legal conception. Roughly speaking, it is that the institution of private property is good insofar as it has good effects, such as leading people to take good care of their possessions. However, this right of custodianship is not an unlimited right – it does not entitle a person to do whatever they like with their property. It is wrong to keep wealth from others who need it desperately. Indeed, a person who desperately needs a resource that you legally own is considered to have a greater claim of ownership to it than you do, so that if she were to take it, this would not count as theft. In contrast, if you were to prevent her from taking it, you would be the thief.

This aspect of Christian thought shares the same two features as utilitarianism and the Principle of Sacrifice. It (very dramatically) refuses to make a distinction between acts and omissions, and it takes the outcomes for other people very seriously.

However, there are also significant differences between the views. Both utilitarianism and the Principle of Sacrifice direct you to donate because it helps relieve the suffering of the poor. Since you can do this at relatively little cost to yourself, it improves the overall balance of happiness over suffering. This is of course exactly what utilitarianism is about, and it is also the core motivation for the Principle of Sacrifice. The principle does not always require one to act so as to improve this balance – it is much weaker than that – but when you can improve this balance by making a relatively trivial sacrifice, it is the fact that your act helps another more than it costs you that makes it obligatory.

In contrast, there are at least two other elements at work in Christian ethics. First, there is an element of justice. Recall Ambrose’s words above, ‘You are not giving to the poor man anything that is yours, but are rather restoring something that is his. For you have appropriated to yourself goods that were intended for the common use of all.’ Second, there is the idea that donating your wealth may improve your life in other ways, even while it makes you materially poorer – for example, that living simply improves one’s own character and that ridding yourself of your worldly possessions is a way to achieve this. On these lines, Ambrose continues, ‘Sell your gold and buy salvation; sell your jewel and buy the kingdom of God; sell your land and buy eternal life!’¹⁴ Paul VI makes similar remarks, though stressing the risks to you of not donating: ‘Besides, the rich will be the first to benefit as a result. Otherwise their continued greed will surely call down upon them the judgment of God.’¹⁵

Demandingness

Let us conclude by returning to the central objection to the idea that donating a large proportion of your income is obligatory: that it is too demanding. While this objection is frequently made against the argument from utilitarianism and from the Principle of Sacrifice,¹⁶ I have never heard it made against Christian ethics. It is often seen as very demanding, but not as overly demanding, not as so extremely demanding that we have reason to doubt it is true, which is how many people react to utilitarianism and to the Principle of Sacrifice.

Perhaps this is mostly due to ignorance among moral philosophers regarding how demanding the central views of Christian ethics really are. That is certainly a possibility, but there may be other reasons too. For example, it might be due to the nature of the demand: people might think that if God demands something, it is not too demanding. This does leave open the question about whether God really demands this, but it might be thought reasonable for God to demand this, or that the evidence that God demands it is very strong.

In any event, the fact that people do not typically regard the highly demanding Christian account of charity as overly demanding does appear to provide some evidence that such accounts should not be so quickly rejected on grounds of overdemandingness. This is especially true considering that one might accept utilitarianism on Christian grounds as a clarification of Jesus’ teaching (Do unto others as you would have them do unto you; Love your neighbour as yourself).

For the purposes of this chapter, we can distinguish three kinds of overdemandingness objection: (1) that it is psychologically impossible to meet the demands; (2) that it is counterproductive to demand so much; and (3) that the demands are simply implausibly high.

The first of these is a psychological variant of the putative constraint on morality that ‘ought implies can’: that we can’t be obliged to do something if we can’t do it, or in the present case if we could physically perform the actions, but can’t bring ourselves to do so. We can set aside the question of whether this philosophical principle is justified by pointing out that in any event it is empirically misguided. For example, some people certainly do donate very large proportions of their income. Moreover, it need not be that psychologically difficult to do so. One simply needs to read about the preventable suffering until one reaches a moment of moral clarity, and in that moment, to sign a standing order with your bank to take out part of your income. At that point, the status quo changes and it would become quite psychologically difficult to tell the bank to cancel your ongoing donations. Even better would be also to make a public declaration of your giving to further tie yourself to the mast.

The second objection considers the demand so unrealistic that asserting it will backfire and result in people giving even less. This may well be empirically true, but as Singer has argued, it does not affect the truth of his claim. He argues that we have a moral duty to donate much of our income, but we do not necessarily have a moral duty to tell people this is the best way of raising money for charity. We have a choice of what guidance to offer and some forms of guidance will lead to more good for the poor than others. Perhaps the best public standard in terms of generating action is a more achievable one, such as donating 10 per cent of one’s income. This is perfectly compatible with there being a duty to give even more.

The third variant of the objection is that the claim is false because it violates our intuition that morality cannot demand so much of us. However, many widely accepted moral principles demand more than this. For example, it wrong to kill the innocent. Suppose you are framed for murder and are likely to be executed if brought to trial. The only way to escape is to kill the arresting officer, but since he is innocent, it is wrong to do so. Morality thus requires that you allow yourself to be executed in order to meet its demands. This is a much higher demand than that of donating some of your income, yet we rightly accept it. Similarly, it is wrong to keep slaves, and morality demanded that slave owners free their slaves even if it meant financial ruin. There are many similar cases in which morality demands a very high sacrifice and yet we find it acceptable. Most of these are extreme life-or-death cases, but so is global poverty.

My own analysis of the intuition behind the overdemandingness objection is that an obligation to donate much of one’s income is factually unintuitive, but not morally unintuitive. By this, I mean that the claim ‘we ought to donate much of our income’ relies upon both a general moral principle such as the Principle of Sacrifice and also some factual claims about the suffering that could be alleviated through a given donation. When the principle is combined with the facts about our situation, it produces a practical moral demand upon us.

This demand is surprising, but that could just be because the facts are surprising. It is surprising that we live in a world which is so interconnected and so unfair that we could very easily prevent a lot of suffering at a small cost. On this understanding, once we examine the facts, we could then explain why the intuition arose and why it was ultimately misguided.

Suppose we did take the overdemandingness objection at face value and thereby reject the Principle of Sacrifice. Where would this leave us? I believe that this would actually produce an even more unintuitive position. Our theory would then be open to an underdemandingness objection. Someone who rejects the Principle of Sacrifice is asserting a

To avoid the conclusion that we must donate much of our income, one would also have to accept a

These strike me as supremely implausible moral principles. They are far too underdemanding, and yet they follow from the rejection of the Principle of Sacrifice when applied to global poverty.

Conclusion

More than a billion people live in extreme poverty. They have insufficient education, die from easily preventable diseases, and suffer from lack of food and clean water. Their plight constitutes an ongoing moral emergency – quite possibly the biggest of our time. By donating money to the best organizations fighting the causes or effects of poverty, we can each do a great deal to help, at comparatively little sacrifice.

In ages to come, when global poverty is no more, people will look back at our time and be dumbfounded by the moral paralysis of those who had the resources to help. Even more shocking will be the fact that so many theories failed to accord global poverty a central place – indeed, that they found it advantageous not to demand much sacrifice from their adherents. For a moral theory to demand that we make large sacrifices in righting these wrongs is not too demanding, but just demanding enough.

Initial reservations: proximity and vocation

In a later section, I contrast Singer’s story of a shallow pond with the boundary-crossing love of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Before turning to these stories, it is important to note that proximity and distance present more of a challenge for Christian traditions than Singer’s arguments might address. There is a massive literature on the tension between partiality and impartiality in recent philosophy, especially in debates about cosmopolitanism. They bear upon questions about moral obligations at a very basic level, including the place of morality in a good life. Once the claim of need and the duty of easy rescue are acknowledged, for example, how do we constrain such demands without becoming ‘something other than an engine for the welfare of other people … nothing but slaves to social justice’?⁹ Recent Christian thought also has been focused on debates about universality and particularity.

Christian ethics, I believe, is trying to find a type of moral cosmopolitanism that can endorse virtuous types of particularity even as it rejects vicious ones. Part of the distinctive challenge for Christian theology is that the values of spatial and temporal proximity are never considered merely in themselves or merely contingent as Singer suggests – let alone ‘quirky relics of our tribal past’.¹⁰ Nearness and distance have never been ‘just’ geographic or causal. They are thought to be constitutive of the sorts of affinity that make space and time morally, and theologically, relevant. According to classical Christian theology, divine providence has instituted special relationships, particular loyalties, and distinct identities. These embodied realities set limits on the pursuit of justice and care for others. But the religious logic is more than pragmatic. Friendship, familial relations, and even territorial borders have been thought to be gifts of divine providence that reflect something of our given human nature and God’s ordering of the world. Christians discern their own distinctive vocations within this finite, differentiated, and ordered reality. As Catholic philosopher Robert Spaemann argues, the goodness of creaturely life is grounded in the ‘sensuous, spatio-temporal make-up of life’ and the ‘mediating structure of the ordo amoris’.¹¹ Karl Barth echoes such claims about the goodness of a bounded creation: the biblical command to love others ‘does not float in empty space’.¹² Christian love, according to Barth, ‘presupposes that the one or many who are loved stand in a certain proximity to the one who loves – a proximity in which others do not find themselves’.¹³

Proximity, then, is more than geographic or contingent. Christian theology has developed strong accounts of particular callings in life parasitic on these notions of providence and creation. They affirm theories of vocation often contrasted with non-theistic theories of ethics. As Robert M. Adams has argued, ‘to accept and pursue a vocation is in large part to have a personal project, or a set of personal projects, to which one is committed’.¹⁴ For Christians, this personal project is understood as an invitation from God that Adams describes as having ‘my name on them’.¹⁵ These projects must pursue genuine goods. In fact, vocations often demand a type of devotion to goods that are difficult to sustain. But they are not motivated by direct consequentialist concern with doing the most good. Fidelity to a vocation trades on a distinction between mere selfishness and appropriate theocentric self-interest within the diverse body of Christ. Adams, for example, states that we respond to such vocations as ‘our part in God’s all-embracing and perfect love’.¹⁶ Adams does claim that there might be indirect consequentialist justifications for moral concerns in terms of vocation. Others, like John Hare, have suggested that God coordinates our particular vocations to a final, comprehensive good. Philosophers Tim Mulgan and Brad Hooker have developed sophisticated versions of what Christians might call ‘vocations’ within their own versions of consequentialism. It strikes me that Singer’s utilitarianism has a more difficult time accepting these analogous conceptions of vocation that sustain commitment to particular goods (even moral goods) when tempted to abandon such projects for alternative ones. Mulgan’s and Hooker’s ‘messier’ versions of consequentialism are at odds with Singer’s stricter utilitarianism.¹⁷ They represent suggestive types of consequentialism for Christian ethics that might make room for both human needs and personal goals.

Of course, as Adams and others recognize, Christian appeals to vocation (or its secular analogue) have been made to justify oppressive social, political, and economic arrangements. Vocations, for example, were often linked to feudal notions of ‘stations’ or ‘estates’ widely rejected by modern Christian ethics. Even today, however, Singer’s perspective exposes these appeals as problematic in light of the ways in which human beings choose to ‘distance’ themselves from neighbours in need, artificially shielding their wealth and themselves from the global poor. Empirical realities like developed channels of transportation and effective means of aid (powerfully articulated by Singer) challenge conventional discussions of a Christian ordo amoris. By my lights, long-standing Christian claims about the providential or created structure of moral obligations need revision. Poverty, especially extreme poverty, is no longer seen as a basic fact about the human condition. The ‘neighbourhood’ and the ‘road’ have changed in ways that could not be imagined by classical Christian political theologies. We pass by on the other side of this road, literally and figuratively, every day. Of course, this passing still admits radically different responses to global poverty.

Philosophers like Charles Taylor tell long stories about why we today feel a wider range of moral obligation, a revolution often associated with the rise of humanitarianism and changes in attitudes towards human suffering. For Taylor, ‘never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates’.¹⁸ Singer claims most people do not respond to this demand in morally satisfying ways. Taylor, however, expresses more of a Weberian lament about the nature and character of these demands, tracing the transformation of the Church’s proselytizing work into a secular project of ridding the world of suffering. The embodied life of Jesus, while certainly open to interruptions and attentiveness to those in need, suggests that even he did not perform every possible act of beneficence, especially if beneficence is equated with meeting material needs. He seems to have eaten leisurely and attended beach parties. His teachings and lifestyle evoked the scorn of those following the more ascetic John the Baptizer. The diverse examples of Christian saints also resist any singular (let alone welfare maximizing) conception of the imitation of Christ as a model for Christian living. In fact, to turn the parable into a moral axiom is to pervert the very contingency of the Samaritan’s response. So someone like Taylor might argue.

A longer history: poverty and the early Church

Christian attitudes towards poverty span a wide spectrum. Poverty has been regarded as ‘both a virtuous ideal and just reward for wrongdoing, as central to the concerns of the gospel and as peripheral, as inevitable as well as unacceptable’.¹⁹ There are now many historical studies of arrangements for poverty relief between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries.²⁰ These social histories complement various philosophical accounts of the transformation from Christian charity to utilitarian benevolence.²¹ In fact, unlike Taylor’s dour contrast between a Christian world of charity framed by transcendence and a secular world of bourgeois reform framed by immanent human flourishing, Samuel Fleischaker argues that a commitment to distributive justice itself emerges only after the developments in social science and moral philosophy epitomized by someone like Adam Smith.²²

Alongside these historical debates, it might be helpful briefly to recall a more distant past: the Christian Church of late antiquity. It is an alien and enchanted past. But thanks to developments in the social history of this period, we can now appreciate the extent to which the biblical imagery of ‘treasure in heaven’ – joining the heavenly and the earthly by money and religious giving – was a defining feature of early Christianity. Many moderns, Christian included, find this union mercenary and distasteful. But these historians argue that while the Greco-Roman world was capable of sponsoring tremendous generosity, it was Christian bishops who invented a category of ‘the poor’ in their exegesis of Jesus’ new mapping of the social world. For Augustine and many pre-modern Christians, the central social imaginary became not the division of citizen and non-citizen, but that between the rich and the poor. As Peter Brown puts it, early Christian thinkers started to pit ‘love of the city’ against ‘love of the poor’.²³ Secular philosophers often contrast global justice (duties owed to those outside one’s borders) and social justice (duties owed to fellow citizens). This early Christian shift, I think, opened the space for a new and influential type of moral cosmopolitanism at odds with a preoccupation with civic glory or honour. It relied on a notion that what goes to heaven literally goes through the poor. For these Christians, precisely because the poor are unable to reciprocate gifts, commerce with the poor was a sacrament of God’s grace. Wealth was of divine origin, belonging to God, and charity was returning the gifts of God to the people of God. The many sayings of Christ (Matthew 10:42; Mark 9:42; 12:42; Luke 21:2) furnished preachers with an ‘entire aesthetic of reversed magnitude … they infused the humdrum practices of Christian giving with a sense of drama’.²⁴

What is important to note about this counter-culture is not simply a moral view that took compassion seriously. Preachers did sensitize hearers to the suffering and misery around them, much like Singer’s popular writings. For these early Christians, however, it was part of something like a ‘culture war’ between Roman and Christian ideals. Christian bishops offered discourses on compassion and prophetic justice from the Hebrew Scriptures that rivalled, if not exceeded, the best of contemporary global justice literature. Augustine, in fact, feared that wealthy converts who desired to rid themselves of their wealth would leave their dependents destitute and succumb to Pelagian temptations of moral heroism. Picture Bill Gates or Warren Buffett immediately giving away all of their wealth after reading Jesus’ instruction to sell possessions and give to the poor (Matthew 19:21). Augustine would come to counsel regular giving and daily prayers for forgiveness, a spiritual and moral practice ‘for the long haul’.²⁵ His attitude towards wealth was similar to his attitude towards sex and politics: use it with care, but do not be dominated by it. This type of Christian preaching generated gifts from the very rich and the average giver, leading to a long Christian tradition of the stewardship of wealth. About 80 per cent of the wealth in the churches of late antiquity came from 20 per cent of the rich. This might not adhere to Singer’s standards, but it was better than the broader giving patterns of Rome where only 2 per cent of citizens funded public charities.

To be sure, the early Church wrestled with many of the same issues that continue to this day. Is Christian solidarity with the poor conceived in terms of faceless and statistical ‘others’ or as brothers and sisters in Christ?²⁶ Are the poor ‘beggars’ for charity or, as the Hebrew Scriptures suggest, ‘plaintiffs’ for justice? Do the ‘least of these’ in Matthew 25 refer to all human persons created in the image of God or only to ‘the brethren’ of the Christian community? The pathos of remembering the poor in the early Church was intimately bound up with a renewed emphasis in Christian writings on the interrelatedness of the love commands. In fact, Augustine dared to suggest that the two commands to love God and neighbour ‘cannot exist without each other’.²⁷ Societies are judged by the quality of their loves, and the treatment of the poor became a characteristic motif of Christian social criticism.

Augustine and other early Christians knew little about the capacities of governments or other institutional actors to relieve poverty. His politics of compassion did inspire numerous practical activities within the Roman Empire’s economic system. It was left to later Christian thought to develop institutional charity, or the type of distributive justice that Fleischaker describes. Poverty was simply a fact of life in this darkness after the fall. But Augustine offered a foundational reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan with formative consequences. In On Christian Teaching, he writes:

This reading continues to attract many modern thinkers seeking to widen the scope of justice beyond national borders. The early Church, however, often preferred more allegorical interpretations that linked the parable to the saving work of Christ. It was not a very popular text among those worried about building in-group Christian solidarity in the face of various opponents. Of course, the parable has also been a fraught and polemical text in the history of Jewish and Christian relations. The history of Christian readings that rebuke Jewish legalism shapes the experience of modernity, especially this side of Luther’s reading of Paul. The parable has encouraged many to think that Christianity preaches universal love while Judaism encourages narrow particularism. Like any biblical passage, the parable has been pressed into the service of many different political and moral agendas. In the 1940s, Henry Luce called upon the United States to be a ‘Good Samaritan’ to the world, a harbinger of renewed concerns about Christian care for the world. One of the more famous conservative appeals came from the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. In the heat of welfare debates, Thatcher remarked in a television interview, ‘no one would have remembered the Good Samaritan if he’d only had good intentions … He had money as well.’²⁹ Her defence of capitalism follows many who argue that commercial societies expand the opportunities for care. From a very different angle, Martin Luther King, Jr, often invoked the parable to speak about the need to transform economic structures alongside his calls for personal charity.

King’s powerful sermons reflect the visceral quality of the Greek in the parable. The Samaritan is moved in his ‘bowels’ by compassion. Critics of humanitarianism often remind us that compassion interferes with prudence and judgement, not to mention masking relations of power. Augustine also diagnoses the pathologies of compassion. He offers the following example that reminds us of Singer’s shallow pond and so-called ‘compassion fatigue’:

He worries that compassion can provoke a self-righteous attitude that demeans the dignity of persons and reduces them to an object – a frequent temptation in providing goods and services to the poor. Augustine warns:

Some critics hold that the rhetoric of compassion and solidarity are merely bourgeois ideologies of social control. In fact, many recent discussions of humanitarianism adopt a severe form of scepticism and call for more revolutionary change. Augustine, like Singer, does not allow this type of suspicion to get in the way of his call for charity. Augustine claims that Christian love is unconditional and universal, but ‘love, like a fire, should cover the nearest terrain before it spreads farther afield’.³² But what is the ‘nearest terrain’? Augustine offers this influential picture:

This formulation is strikingly egalitarian and universal, especially for a Christian tradition that can also romantically celebrate the local, the private, and the familial. Augustine claims that a Christian cannot love every neighbour. But she should love any neighbour who contingently happens across her way. Time and opportunity place limits on the realization of universal love that Augustine thinks must await the consummation of love when God is ‘all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). It was left to Thomas Aquinas to develop it with exacting clarity.

Shallow ponds and the Good Samaritan

Singer’s arguments regarding obligation to the global poor also invoke Aquinas, citing the argument that superabundance is owed to the poor by right. His reliance on common moral intuitions and disturbing facts about global poverty has combined to accomplish a rare feat for moral philosophy: it has changed the way people actually live. Like a good preacher, his reasoning aims to convince people and change their behaviour without leaving them paralysed by guilt. In this case, as Singer hoped, it has changed how they spend their money. ‘The Singer Solution to World Poverty’, published in The New York Times, raised more than $600,000 for Oxfam and UNICEF in one month. More recently, Singer has offered a public standard that follows a sliding scale calling for between 5 and 10 per cent of one’s income in the fight against global poverty.³⁴ For many, the immediate appeal of Singer’s moral argument emerges from the elegance of his shallow pond analogy.

Framing the issue in this way elicits a response that Singer hopes will overcome Darwinian constraints on altruism or what he calls ‘the bounds of human nature’.³⁵ Debates continue as to whether or not a global economic order exacerbates inequality in relative terms but also helps the poor in absolute terms. Most Christian ethicists join Singer in admitting that free markets can promote moral goods even if they also feed a vicious consumerism. In fact, as already noted, modern economies allow us to consider aid to distant strangers in previously unimaginable ways. This opportunity raises the moral stakes of affluence and changes the way obligations might be understood.

Some objections to Singer’s modest principle are less palpable than others for Christians who affirm charity’s intimate relation to justice. Christians, presumably, do not need justifications for why they should act morally or consider the interests of others. Counter-arguments that the very poor merit their fate are both empirically dubious and irrelevant for those called to imitate Christ’s unconditional love. Game theory claims that the poor will squander their resources in anticipation of unreciprocated aid or the dangers of foreign aid do merit prudential regard for effectiveness (i.e. incentives and regulations), but they do not undermine the moral imperative. They may also neglect possible transformations in the game itself. Most importantly, objections fail in the light of the consumer behaviour of affluent Christians. Critics, for example, might argue that Singer’s moral ideal implies that affluent citizens reduce themselves to the level of a Bengali refugee. This scenario would mean that no resources are left for future aid – a bad consequence both economically and morally. If affluent Christians were sacrificing anywhere close to the point of what used to be called evangelical poverty, then this objection would warrant more attention. Few Christians reach even the parity considerations of 2 Corinthians 8:14: ‘as a matter of equality your abundance at the present time should supply their want, so that their abundance may supply your want, that there may be equality’. Singer himself admits that ‘most middle-class people in rich nations don’t have to make this choice’.³⁶ But questions remain.

How should we distinguish between luxury and necessity? One imagines all sorts of practical pleas: ‘this vacation is necessary for my psychic integrity or to save my failing marriage’; ‘this new car or new suit is necessary for my work’; ‘a university education for my son will help him give more aid to the poor in the long run’; ‘I can help the poor in my country more effectively than the poor in distant countries’. Here we enter the attractive world of commensuration of goods.

Many interpreters point out that the Good Samaritan is not a ‘model of heroic, individual extraordinary self-giving at all, but rather a model of love based on interdependence’.³⁷ The Samaritan acted within, and relied upon, a network of communal resources. In fact, it was because he was able to trust the innkeeper (another member of a despised group) that he was able to go about his personal affairs. Aquinas, as Singer notes, affirms the rightness of the distribution of ‘superabundance’ given Christian convictions about the common good. Singer, however, does not comment on Aquinas’s seminal discussion of the differential ‘order of charity’ that shaped Christian morality and continues to inform practical decisions about aid.³⁸

Aquinas’s gloss on Augustine sits uneasily with Singer’s conclusions about the Christian tradition:

Aquinas’s further appeal to the judgement of prudence may strike Singer as pregnant with the possibility of moral evasion. Given the role of human sin in socially constructing relations of nearness and distance, Christians should also question the role these arguments play in debates about moral obligation. Should the concept of neighbour change with the globalization of the neighbourhood?

Recent developments in theology signal an emerging rejection of twentieth-century universalism, which was once celebrated against nineteenth-century theologies bound up with nationalism and racism. John Milbank, for example, joins Spaemann and Barth in arguing that that the ‘specificity of given proximity … is our only creaturely way to participate in God’s equal love for all’. Of course, Milbank also affirms the biblical command to care for ‘those strangers with whom suddenly we are bonded whether we like it or not, by instances of distress’.⁴⁰ Milbank’s economics are decidedly socialist, though religious rather than secular in origin. I suspect he would worry that Singer’s proposals traffic too much in the abstraction and austerity of universalism that makes charity an anxious duty, rather than a festive gift offered in gratitude to God. But my question for Milbank and other Christians remain: does globalization change the way we experience the ‘sudden bonds’ of strangers?

Legal philosopher Jeremy Waldron offers a nuanced reading that also celebrates a traditional concern about ‘communal and religious boundaries like those that separated Jew and Samaritan’. Yet Waldron elevates another feature of the parable:

This reading suggests a helpful practical question in making judgements about material resources: are you crossing to the other side? Regularly to ask that question requires more than just being prepared to be interrupted by the ‘sudden appearance’ of a fallen neighbour. It shifts the force of the parable from the philosophical status of the neighbour back to the practices of being neighbourly.

Singer does not spend his life searching the shallow ponds of the world. And there is no biblical indication that the Good Samaritan spent the rest of his life looking for remote strangers in need. Singer aims high in principle. But his public standards accommodate human frailty in practice. Even Singer, whose own practice is much greater than his public standard, admits to ‘not doing all that I should do; but I could do it, and the fact that I do not does not vitiate the claim that is what I should do’.⁴²

Levels of giving by most Christians pale in comparison to Singer. No more than 5–10 per cent of religious giving in the United States goes to charitable uses such as helping the poor. Most of that charity supports domestic rather than global causes. Christians share Singer’s candid admission that humans are failing to do what is right even when not intentionally willing evil. How does one understand this moral failure?

Conclusion: moral dilemmas

What sort of dilemma does the injustice of global poverty present to us? Not, perhaps, one of the ‘dirty hands’ variety, in which we must violate prohibitions for the sake of a greater good. But it does plausibly confront us with conflicting obligations. Reflection on global poverty seems to involve weighing prima facie obligations or various goods we could be promoting against each other, as well as complicity in failing to meet obligations that seem morally required. To meet this challenge, some adopt Kantian language, arguing that such duties are imperfect. Most Christians who feel the pull of aiding the distant poor also feel some conflict with other duties, but not in the way that constitutes a genuine moral dilemma, since reducing what we spend on those near and dear will rarely constitute a real harm. But are there moral costs for those who follow Singer’s modest principles? Do the global poor still have justified complaints?

Most Christian traditions adopt an eschatological optimism. This might have a certain confluence with utilitarian hopefulness in the face of doubts about the goodness or harmony of the world, deep pluralism of values, and the avoidability of personal guilt. I take it that most utilitarians reject moral dilemmas. There is always a best possible act available for utilitarians, especially if a distinction between making something happen and allowing it to happen is rejected. Many Christian traditions, especially Thomism, also reject claims that the world is structured in a way that compels one to sin. Moral perplexity is due to ignorance, weakness of will, or perhaps perversity of will. We might feel sad about our failure to aid the global poor, but we are not forced to do evil. The ethical life cannot be that internally inconsistent. To speak theologically, creation is thought to be deeper than the fall. Our anguish is a type of non-moral anguish. As Spaemann puts it, ‘often the only solidarity which is possible with another is an ineffectual wish to help’.⁴³ Of course, some Christian moral traditions are more open to an even deeper moral tragedy. Divine-command theories sometimes entertain the prospect of genuine moral dilemmas that force us to flee to the grace of God. Some even rely on consequentialist arguments about the best of all possible words that include such dilemmas in order to generate piety and dependence on grace.

Responses to global poverty, I think, would do well to address such concerns. The fate of the global poor in an age of affluence should elicit moral anguish about our fragmentary and broken loves. This anguish appears regardless of ‘direct’ causal contribution to the plight of the severely poor, even sometimes through our best efforts to help them, which unintentionally reinforce patterns of domination. Of course, some Christians are direct agents of exploitation and domination against the global poor. They might recognize a grief born of guilt. But how do we distribute complicity for individuals caught up in systems of injustice thought to be no fault of their own making? The difficult questions that need to be taken up include: How was the state of affairs caused? To what extent is it an effect of unjust acts? Who is obligated to do what to ameliorate the unjust state of affairs? Are any of these obligations absolute? How do the relevant prima facie obligations of assistance weigh relative to other such obligations? And so forth.

Pursuing such analyses plausibly lends credence to a familiar Christian notion that our actions always already participate in sinful realities. Augustinians would call it original sin. Singer states ‘the rich have harmed the poor’.⁴⁴ Such cases are not resolved by appeal to prima facie duties, pity for the state of the world, or heroic actions of individual Christians or utilitarians. Following Aquinas, we might characterize moral anguish in the face of global poverty as perplexus secundum quid.⁴⁵ In such circumstances, we are all faced by situations that involve such a massive history of unjust actions that our wills are not able to respond rationally. Such indeterminacy may reflect not only what Christians call incontinence, but conditions imposed by failures of practical reason itself. If such a tragic tension exists between rationality and the moral life, Christians do well to pursue their own accounts of how a commitment to the moral life relates to divine forgiveness and sanctification. In fact, much of the Christian tradition has counselled repentance as a way of responding to human failure, deflating our pretension to act morally. But it seems to me that Christian responses to global poverty may require identifying and confessing the sin of sloth. To the extent that utilitarianism is a secularized Christian ethic, it may have analogous conceptual resources for dealing with moral anguish even in its denial of moral dilemmas. Christians would be wise to listen.