As I work on the draft of this chapter, I am using both my capacity to reason and my ability to type.

This distinguishes it from, say, the ability to type. The capacity to reason is a special sort of capacity because it can lead us to places we did not expect to go. First your family, then your tribe, then other tribes you have contact with. The initial audience for reasons may have been a small group, but soon the implicit audience of reason becomes increasingly abstracted in time and space an expanding circle of ethical concern. Once you start trying to put things within a framework which doesn’t depend on the particular individuals or circumstances involved, that disinterested stance has no natural limit. But, Singer argues, the very act of justification requires adopting a “disinterested stance”, and a disinterested stance is the trigger for a chain reaction. Justification implies an audience, and that audience initially was the small group of our fellow ancestral humans.

He places the origin of reasoning firmly within the history of our biological evolution, and the particular nature of reason as due to the conundrums of social life that are core to the evolutionary consideration of behaviourĮthical reasoning, according to Singer, began as justification. Singer’s argument doesn’t involve denying the relevance of evolution. Wilson’s book sought to explicitly bring human behaviour within the scope of animal behaviour, and also said, it seems, that science would replace philosophy as arbiter of ethics. No main course, just tasty morsels from my recent reading.īook: The Expanding Circle (1981), by Peter SingerĪn extended reply from the ethical philosopher to E.O.

The Narrative Escape by Tom Stafford