Professor Peter Singer came to fame for his advocacy of animal rights in the 1970s, with his book Animal Liberation (1975), which was an early argument for veganism. He has supported a radical redistribution of wealth from the West to the Third world, as put in his essay, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality", published in Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1972. He also has pursued topical issues such as IVF and reproductive technologies. He goes down the, what is now standard liberal line, extending the “liberationist” position of the 1960s Western cultural revolution movements. He tended to argue from a simplistic utilitarian position, that the right are the acts that maximise the greatest good for the greatness number. But, he also holds that animals with sentience have rights. How it all fits together I do not know, for all utilitarian positions enable rights to be trumped by over-riding utility.
Anyway, his next big thing is to give civil rights to conscious robots. Of course, human foetuses do not have a right to life, for the utilitarian interests of the mother wanting an abortion, trump them, and they are not the sort of things to have rights. It is unclear why conscious computers should be given moral concern, by his own logic. If the foetus does not have rights by virtue of existence, then why should consciousness be a morally relevant quality? Isn’t this just a form of discrimination and bias?
