Does One Globe Equal One Animal Ethic?

This week I’ve been reading Peter Singer’s 2002 book One World: the Ethics of Globalisation. Although Singer is most famous/infamous for his work on animals and ethics, he focuses on the increasingly globalised ‘community’ of humans in One World, with animals cropping up mainly in the abstract, in the form of references to ‘our environment’. However, the ideas, I would say, can be as easily applied to ‘foreign’ animals as they can to foreign human beings, and so I’ve compiled a cheat sheet of the pertinent questions raised by Singer.

1. To what extent should we be concerned for ‘our own’, and to what extent should we be concerned for the ‘other’, who lives ‘elsewhere’?
2. If we should be more concerned for ‘our own’, why is this?
3. Is the person who kills somebody indirectly, for example through driving a gas guzzling Chelsea tractor, as culpable as the person who kills somebody directly, for example through the medium of stabbing with a sharp knife?
4. If another country’s leaders are accused of genocide/pollution/miscellaneous atrocities, does trading with that country imply an ethical judgement, or is trading with that country value-neutral?
5. Is knowing about atrocities in another country and not doing anything about them, as bad as knowing about atrocities in our own back yard and not doing anything about them?
6. Is imposing our own culture onto other, foreign cultures, a force for good or evil?

It is quite interesting to compare instinctive reactions to these questions when thinking about humans, with the instinctive reactions when thinking about animals. No answers, though, just food for thought…