I have a higher opinion of Peter Singer than many philosophers, but I still think this is a bad idea.

bq. The President of Good and Evil: The Convenient Ethics of George W. Bush by Peter Singer

bq. Anyone who has followed recent critiques of the administration would learn nothing new from these familiar arguments and conclusions, such as that the justification for the Iraq war might have been problematic. Singer’s logic can also be mushy. A chapter that decries the influence of religion on Bush’s policy dissolves into vague, emotional language better suited to a TV pundit than a philosopher. Singer’s most intellectually adventurous chapter involves stem-cell research, where the author exposes fissures in Bush’s “compromise” to allow research on existing stem-cell lines. But mostly Singer’s critique does little to distinguish itself from other anti-Bush books.

The quote is from the Publishers Weekly review on the Amazon site. I hope when the book comes out it will turn out to be an unfair review. But I fear it won’t be. The blurb makes it sound like the book is targetted at Michael Moore fans. Writing mass-market critiques like this is not what God invented philosophers for. Other people can do that better than we can. On the other hand we do careful analysis fairly well, or so we say, and I hope that Singer has written such a careful book.

It doesn’t surprise me that the chapter on stem-cell research gets a more favourable review. That’s a topic Singer is an expert on, and I’d imagine he has more resources to bring to bear than other commentators. Hopefully he’s brought similar expertise to bear on the other topics. Because it really would be interesting to see what Singer qua theoretical philosopher had to say on the Iraq war. After all, the war raises all kinds of juicy issues for a preference utilitarian like Singer.

* As always when we try to apply utilitarian theory to a practical case there are hard questions about preference aggregation and the relative weighting of preferences. In particular, we have to decide how we shall compare self-regarding vs other-regarding preferences.

* Utilitarians can’t simply say that because the administration lied to get the war going, the war was thereby wrong. After all, this may be an occasion when lying led to a better outcome.

* On the other hand, many of us would prefer to live in a society where governments do not launch wars on the basis of lies. Is that preference morally relevant, and how should it be weighed against the preference of an Iraqi not to be living under Saddam’s rule?

* Finally, issues about how to weight informed vs uninformed preferences become crucial here given how much misinformation is flowing around.

I think these are all hard issues, some of which tell in favour of the morality of the war from the point of view of preference utilitarianism and some against it. A thorough discussion of them would tell us a lot about what one of the most prominent modern utilitarians thinks about the state of utilitarian theory. But it probably wouldn’t make Good and Evil leap off the shelves at Barnes & Noble.