Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
conversationswithtyler.com
conversationswithtyler.com
He chooses dolphins. The primary reproductive strategy of many dolphins is to gang up on a female, beat her into submission and gang rape her. They also routinely murder the infants of rivals. They’re vicious predators, with all the behaviours that come with that. Given the right context of communication it’s a likely a group of dolphins would side with us to exterminate another group to take their territory and females, as condemn us for anything.
Oh but we can’t call it rape or murder because that’s projecting human values. He’s doing exactly the same thing.
I’m not saying humans are beyond criticism or that his points against us are wrong. He makes a lot of actually very good points. I’ve discussed his ideas with my kids before.
It’s just trying to portray humans as specially, egregiously worse than any conceivable comparison is kind of stupid frankly. It’s children’s fairytale morality.
"moral agent" is someone whose actions are actions are eligible for moral consideration.
Non-human animals are usually considered "moral subjects" or *"moral patients". Moral agents must treat them well because they can suffer, but they don't have moral agency themselves. They can be purely amoral. Their acts can be horrible, but they don't have concepts of morally right or wrong.
In the middle-ages pigs were were tried and sentenced to death for murdering humans, but today attributing moral responsibility to non-moral agents is usually considered wrong. Within humans, insanity or young age can limit moral agency. Little children are moral subjects.
Infanticide was very common in ancient times pre-Christianity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
and is still somewhat accepted in modern many cultures if the child is a girl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
It also should be noted that Singer himself is not against it in many circumstances (though he doesn't view the entities involved as people, so it's not infanticide under his own definition):
> Similar to his argument for abortion rights, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[61]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".[62]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Euthanasia_and_in...
What many in the West think of as 'obvious' universal rights are in fact culturally contingent on Christianity.
But christianity allows for infanticide. God himself did wipe out all the first born infant sons of egypt after all.
> What many in the West think of as 'obvious' universal rights are in fact culturally contingent on Christianity.
The racism, misogyny, slavery and genocide is also culturally contingent on Christianity as well.
"Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction[a] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Samuel+15%3A2...
The "beauty" of the bible is that it is hundreds of pages long and gives christians the justification for all the evil and good in the world. It isn't an accident that the greatest acts of genocide in human history have been carried out by christians. Entire continents genocided, entire races enslaved, entire cities nuked. All by christians.
A religion, book, god, etc that orders you to murder children and infants cannot be a source of morality. If you think equality of sexes, races, etc are grounded in christianity then you do not know christianity. A religion that believes a woman was created from a man's rib and brought about his downfall is the basis of the universal rights?
Wikipedia:
> In 318, Constantine I considered infanticide a crime, and in 374, Valentinian I mandated the rearing of all children (exposing babies, especially girls, was still common). The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was homicide, and in 589, the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the custom of killing their own children.
Also note that Jesus was jewish and he explicit said he came to uphold the old laws and prophets ( old testament ). And the bible contains both the old and the new testament for a reason.
> Feel free to criticize Christianity as well as other religions, but the criticism is more fruitful if based on actual practices or authorative texts such as the Catholic cathecism
I quoted the bible. What's more authoritative than that?
> In 318, Constantine I considered infanticide a crime
So constantine I should be credited, not catholicism?
> The Council of Constantinople declared that infanticide was homicide, and in 589, the Third Council of Toledo took measures against the custom of killing their own children.
So these christians went against the word of god? As I said, the bible and therefore christianity allows for infanticide. God himself commanded it. Obviously I believe infanticide is wrong. But to credit christianity with the banning of infanticide doesn't pass the smell test.
Also, it's hard to take anyone seriously when they claim the bible is not an authoritative christian text when it's the foundation of christianity.
Can you pinpoint where you got that impression? Note that it's not him that "chooses" dolphins, but it's the interviewer that asks him about what would it look like if we had an LLM that works with dolphins.
I see no evidence in the podcast transcript of Singer making such a claim. What exactly are you basing your assertion on? Quote the transcript please.
Dolphins are violent murderous rapey predators. What on Earth makes anyone think an intelligent dolphin would give a crap how humans treat animals in general? They’d be just as likely to try and make a deal with us to help us out with marine research, in exchange for helping them to genocide the males in another dolphin group so they can gang rape the females.
1. The context is Cowen posing a quirky, ice-breaker kind of question that entertain some counter-factual assumptions to get a conversation rolling. Not unusual in these kinds of pod conversations. The quirky setup and the laugh is evidence that strict realism about real world dolphins is not assumed by Singer and Cowen there. For example Cowen says "We explain to the dolphin that you’re Peter Singer, right?", but from Singer's other work it is clear that he doesn't think science into any dolphin so far has found cognitive capacity necessary to understand the concept of a well known academic moral philosopher who has written the kind of arguments Peter Singer is well known for. The best interpretation is that what is happening at the start of the conversation is merely a loose way to imagine and talk about an outside view on the harm humans do to other animals.
2. Setting 1 aside you ascribed a view about not just Dolphins but "anything non human" to Singer. What's your basis for that?
3. As for the "moral superiority" ascription, Singer imagining a dolphin asking him "Why have you failed to stop humans treating animals so badly?" doesn't imply that Singer thinks dolphins (in general, or that imagined kind) have "moral superiority". For one, real humans have already asked that question so the imaginary dolphin is at most on par, not superior, in asking it. Secondly a moral thinker (real human or imaginary dolphin) may be able to point out some moral problems or ask moral questions while at the same time be unable to refrain from harmful behaviour and unable to understand other moral problems, including those where they're themselves part of the problem. So nothing Singer says there implies that he thinks dolphins (real or imagined) are morally superior in the sense of never causing any harm or understanding all moral problems better than humans or anything like that.
Uh... Okay. The Industrial Revolution to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting... bigger.
So, you see, the puppy was like industry. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy - "society" - knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the industry, my friends, that was a revolution.
maybe with great brains should come more responsibility/morality ?
Anyway, a lot of philosophizing and debating extreme corner cases is just an excuse to avoid the elephant in the room. No amount of lions hunting zebras or dolphins practicing gang rape can be an excuse for the horrible way intelligent animals are treated today by humans considering themselves civilized and humane. Just as concern for the nutritional requirements of poor children in third world countries is not a free pass for wealthy westerners to consume large amounts of animal products themselves without much regard to environmental impact and animal welfare.
You can also see his perspective on dolphin gangbang in his discussion about reintroducing or controlling predator species (these seem to me to be morally similar situations); he is not very confident on such marginal cases.
How would we go about doing it in a sane way for animals?
He seems to accept that what most folks would call infanticide is okay:
> Similar to his argument for abortion rights, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[61]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".[62]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Euthanasia_and_in...
So he's not just "I'm just asking question, bro.". He seems to accept many positions and not just using them as though experiments. Or, if he started things as 'just' thought experiments, he has now accepted those "inhuman answers" as valid.
So whereas your disgust (and our illegality) at infanticide today serves as a good starting point to thinking about its morality, I don't think it's infallible and certainly not a veto over Singer's reasoned argument.
I fail to see where I make any moral judgements on Singer: can you please quote me the parts of my post where I do so?
AFAICT, I simply describe the common contemporary moral stance ("…what most folks would call…"), and what I interpret as Singer's position ("He seems to accept…"). Is stating the facts (AFAICT) taking a moral position on them?
Is stating "Bob (appears to) believe the Earth is flat" the same as stating "I believe the Earth is flat"?
> […] Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents.
> Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.
* https://petersinger.info/faq
Do not most people nowadays consider a post-birth entity with the DNA of homo sapiens a person of particular sub-type "infant" (as classified by age)? Singer does not classify them as a person from what I've read.
One chance was more than enough. I assume you're arguing in bad faith at this point.
No, it is not. When he talks about "disabilities" he also means things like Downs syndrome.
> […] Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her or his parents.
> Sometimes, perhaps because the baby has a serious disability, parents think it better that their newborn infant should die. Many doctors will accept their wishes, to the extent of not giving the baby life-supporting medical treatment. That will often ensure that the baby dies. My view is different from this, but only to the extent that if a decision is taken, by the parents and doctors, that it is better that a baby should die, I believe it should be possible to carry out that decision, not only by withholding or withdrawing life-support — which can lead to the baby dying slowly from dehydration or from an infection — but also by taking active steps to end the baby’s life swiftly and humanely.
* https://petersinger.info/faq
Do not most people nowadays consider a post-birth entity with the DNA of homo sapiens a person of particular sub-type "infant" (as classified by age)? Singer does not classify them as a person from what I've read.
I have not read Singer's position on the issue until just now. His position is basically exactly the same as what I independently concluded (and still believe).
> He seems to accept that what most folks would call infanticide is okay
If you life begins at conception and abortion is never morally okay, you can skip reading my argument because I know it won't convince you; I'll see you in the footnote [1].
If you believe abortion is okay before a fetus is A weeks old, pick some X < Y < A. Two women are pregnant with fetuses of X weeks old. Alice gets an abortion at Y weeks (morally okay, according to you). Brenda gives birth at X weeks, then asks to have the baby euthanized at Y weeks (morally murder, according to you).
The only difference in the two situations is that Alice's child happens to live in her body, and Brenda's child does not. They are at the same stage of development otherwise. If Brenda's child has additional rights that Alice's does not, what are those rights based on?
My answer is that the law needs a bright-line test to determine what is or is not a person. Whatever test we pick should be easy to understand / perform (even for a layman), and there should be no false negatives (it's fine to forbid the killing of an organism that does not yet have the moral status of a person, and abhorrent to permit the killing of an organism that has the moral status of a person.)
"Birth" is an easy-to-measure bright line that already has some legal and historical backing (e.g. for establishing one's legal age for things like school / driving / tobacco use, we count since birth.)
So I would say infanticide of an infant that has the same level of personhood as a fetus is morally on the same level as abortion, which is morally on the same level as euthanizing a pet. Having infanticide be regarded as murder (legally) is an unavoidable side effect of trying to find an easy-to-test heuristic (has the person been born yet?) to approximate something with moral color that's hard to test (is this organism human enough yet that killing it is morally worse enough than euthanizing a pet that the parent should go to jail for it?) [2]
Your argument is basically a reductio: You have decided that infanticide must be defined as murder, and any moral system that allows it must therefore be thrown out. "Infanticide = murder" is "too far up the stack" to be used as a premise, especially if you're pro-choice. If you say "infanticide = murder, we must adopt a system that provides this outcome" then a pro-life opponent would say "abortion = murder, we must adopt a system that provides this outcome." It's basically that one weird trick that makes mathematicians hate you: If coming up with an argument is too hard, just make your desired conclusion an axiom; the proof is then trivial.
[1] I reject the premise that life begins at conception, as the arguments in favor seem to invariably rest on either an unmeasurable claim based on the "soul," or some religious authority. Government is in the reality business, and separation of church and state is an important principle. Therefore the premise is invalid for creating policy.
If you accept the premise, it seems to me that the pro-life side has an enormously strong case for its conclusion that abortion is murder. Despite the simplicity of the pro-life argument, I'm always astounded when I realize how many pro-choice people seem to be fundamentally, perhaps willfully, ignorant or incapable of logically addressing their opponents' position.
[2] The logic behind "innocent until proven guilty", and the entire legal/court system, is based on the same kind of thinking. You're trying to find an easy-to-test heuristic (was there a written law against something the person did, did the court system follow the rules of evidence and procedure?) to approximate something with moral color that's hard to test (did this person do something so bad that they deserve to be jailed or otherwise systematically punished?)
But in all honesty given the trauma, complications,... involved my simple solution [3] would be to just hand out free pregnancy tests (one for every week of the year) to avoid the problem all together.
The whole abortion thing has just turned into one part of the "culture/identity wars" unfortunately instead of a problem that we as a society want to fix in the best way for everyone. [4]
Infanticide was still practiced even in late 19th century in Europe/France by poor farmers who were starving [5]
I think the whole point of the philosopher is just to do his "branding" as the logical "efficient altruism" solution would be to just bring the kid to an orphanage.
Unfortunately every year it gets harder and harder to get attention and hence these silly "solutions" that are meant to force people to form an opinion pro or con.
---
[1] depends on technological possibility and availability, generally considered 21 weeks in USA. [2] Of those that are born before 28 weeks, many do not survive. Those that do face high rates of disability and other medical complications. (the gap is getting wider between top end and middle, again complicating references here) [3] emperor for a day simple solution. [4] morning after and abortion pills that can be used within a week would be the logical outcome for the problem if there was no ideological nonsense to it. [5] Geert Mak - in Europe book, don't have it at hand but 1/3rd of the book is dedicated to his sources, if anyone really want his reference will find it tomorrow.
It is still practiced now:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Modern_times
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
Can you define "life" please? Because by some definitions bacteria and fungi are alive:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_(biology)
If single-celled organisms are (allegedly) alive, why not a multi-cellular organism like a zygote/fetus?
Further, just because it is alive, does not necessarily mean it is a person (according to some). Further-further, just because it is a person does not necessarily mean we have any moral obligation towards it (according to some):
> Some philosophers, like Thomson, think so, but very many philosophers disagree. If I live alone in the woods and wake one day to find an infant on my doorstep, am I obligated to care for it? Or may I simply step over it and go on about my day, until it dies from exposure and neglect? To think I am obligated in justice to help it, as a great many people (philosophers and non-philosophers alike) do, is to think we owe things to other people simply because they are people. And if we can owe things to other people simply because they are people, then Thomson’s argument falls apart. If the fetus becomes a person long before birth — as even Thomson concedes — and if we can owe things to people simply because they are people, then we can owe things to the fetus as well, long before birth.
* https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2022/06/05/phi...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Jarvis_Thomson
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Defense_of_Abortion
So according to some folks (I am not making the argument, just describing it) : it can still be life/alive (which started at conception), and also be considered a human person, and abortion would still be okay.
Goes back to Schopenhauer:
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
If it is morally ok for Lions to kill their prey. Then it is also morally ok for humans to do human things, which includes killing each other and eating everything in sight.
The only morality is enforced by humans on other humans. There is no universal morality. Humanity is just a group of monkeys that would prefer to live where killing within their group is not allowed and appoint other monkeys to police their area and put any killers or thieves in a monkey prison. Note, killing or stealing from other groups of monkeys is a-ok.
That kind of life is preferable to not being vegan. I think it is a realistic perspective instead of an idealistic one.
The same goes for meatless Mondays. If you get one population to eat vegan food on Mondays, it is as if you turned one seventh of them full vegan.
I have been vegan for 12 years, and telling people it is not about being 100% pure, but about striving towards 100%. That is probably that made me stay 99% vegan in bum-fuck-nowhere northern Sweden the first couple of years.
After skimming the content:
I guess most controversial ideas are to controversial to be published in this journal. (which is maybe a good thing)
Every democratic country has laws which are motivated by the way people feel emotionally. Check out this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#/media/File...
12 weeks in Germany, 24 weeks in the UK. Why is there such a difference? Because these laws are based on how people feel.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/arianna-goberdhan-fetus-homi...
Calling it a hole in the rules is inaccurate. It's not a person. You can disagree if you want.
My post was informational and intentionally lacking opinion.
The hole in the rules called out, from the OC you linked:
A handful of private member's bills introduced in Parliament over the last couple of decades have tried to remedy what seems to be an arbitrary distinction in law. The most recent was in 2016, when Saskatchewan MP Cathay Wagantall tabled Bill C-225, which would have made it a "separate offence to cause injury or death to a preborn child during the commission of an offence against the child's mother."
[deletia]
I'm just replying to the other countries laws and including Canada. Which is related to the article really, more so than many countries.
You seem to think I am siding on a negative opinion, but I am not.
0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/private-members-bill-violen...
That's a non-argument. People did all kinds of horrible things in the past (human sacrifice, cruel corporal punishment, slavery) and yet it is now obvious to us that these things are bad. I think it is safe to say that infanticide is one of the things that we don't need to debate in modern times.
At best this is an attempt at persuasion by “Everyone else is doing it and so should you.”
In fact, if something is perceived as horrible by most people in current society, I think the burden is on you to explain why and when it is justified. (So far your only argument was that people in the old times did it, which is no argument at all.)
I find it personally revolting that people would assent to my own murder. I am the product of an unplanned pregnancy, and it is mere happenstance that I was not strangled, torn limb from limb, had my skull crushed, and my spine snipped apart at the nape of the neck, then carefully extracted piece by bloody piece, reassembled in a dish (to make sure that nothing was left behind to infect mom - abortions are "safe"), and dumped in a biological waste bin to be incinerated. I escaped that fate, but others do not, so I abstain from meat on every Friday of the year.
I do not understand why you and all the others would not assent to my grisly murder as an infant, as a 50-year-old, or perhaps not even as a feeble and helpless 96-year-old hospital patient, but you would readily take up the speculum and scalpel just because I had an umbilical cord attached.
Apologies, but I could not find any recommendations for killing babies. Please clarify.
Practical Ethics 3rd ed [2011], Peter Singer https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=02C20FF721FBFC562268D14...
Perhaps an earlier edition advocated infanticide?
https://libgen.is/search.php?&req=singer+Practical+Ethics&ph...
I believe the relevant section is page 169 of this: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Singer%20-%20Practical%20eth...
Some of the text is copied and pasted below, but it should be read and interpreted in context:
ABORTION AND INFANTICIDE
There remains one major objection to the argument I have
advanced in favour of abortion. We have already seen that the strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals have in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation between an embryo and a newborn baby. The standard liberal position needs to be able to point to some such line, because liberals usually hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or fetus but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.
Eg, try and find people who believe US participation in WWII was immoral because participation involved German children as collateral damage.
Rules like "don't murder people" don't ever work. If you held yourself to that rule, your opponent would have a very easy time exploiting it. So in my opinion such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice.
But really, all moral systems have horrifying failures. If in utilitarianism you can inflict horrors for utility, then in deontology you can inflict an unlimited amount of it if you ever come to the conclusion that it's allowable.
Eg, any time a deontological system decides that foreigners/gays/jews/etc aren't truly people, then they get kicked out of the system completely. And then any amount of suffering they might feel as a result is literally irrelevant -- deontology doesn't even consider it at all.
I’ve found it to be a pretty workable rule in living my actual life so far.
> such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice
I’m curious what life experiences you’ve had which lead you to conclude that “don’t murder people” is so inapplicable as to be fiction. Are you living near Bakhmut?
There's two ways to go about it. Either you ignore the rules whenever they start getting in the way, or you build huge subjective holes into them.
> [Truman administration head of Joint Chiefs, General Omar] Bradley accused the Navy of being in “open rebellion” against the civilian leadership of the United States. The admirals were “Fancy Dans” and “aspiring martyrs” who just didn’t like to take orders. As for the accusation that [an “atomic blitz“] targeting [seventy] cities [hosting a plurality of the Soviet population] was immoral, Bradley responded, “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”
I can’t model or even try to imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to just stop at this—as opposed to continuing to “therefore we should not engage in it”, which is of course refuted by that (supposedly) being even more immoral, which in turn breaks the original assumption that all immoral things are equally bad.
Put it this way: If your friend asks you for advice on how to set up his wedding website, which of the following is good advice?
A) Use Squarespace.
B) Write an HTML & CSS file and put it on github pages.
C) Use Netlify.
D) Set up a multi-region kubernetes cluster with enough storage and capacity to stream the World Cup.
You can be required to do things because of external forces that intentionally break the “moral rules” of normal society.
It can be morally wrong to kill a man, but you can still have to do it to defend yourself to survive.
What about the Golden Rule? It would provide for not killing others, except in self-defense.
Note that I probably agree with you, but the solution isn’t as simple as you think.
Except it doesn't. The "simple" cases of utilitarianism (i.e. happiness-maximizing or unhappiness-minimizing) are both supportive of killing people if their expected remaining lifetime happiness is negative or if their death would result in others being happier - see the infamous organ donor problem. Worse, by following that philosophy you eventually get to the Repugnant Conclusion[0], which is a world of as many minimally-happy humans as possible. The complex cases result in complex epicycles of propagating out utilitiarian ideals to the rest of society and eventually asserting that heuristics of the moral value of actions would actually be best in most cases because the effects of actions are impossible to quantitatively evaluate for anyone. Those heuristics essentially boil down to deontological principles.
[0]: The fact that many public utilitarian philosophers are so unable to find a way out of this, yet so enamored with the idea of utilitarianism that they can't imagine it being wrong, that they signed a public statement saying that actually the Repugnant Conclusion is totally fine and people should still push for population ethics that lead to it is wild to me. See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/wha...
> There are acts which are right only if no one – or virtually no one – will get to know about them. The rightness of an act, in other words, may depend on its secrecy. This can have implications for how often, and in what circumstances, such an act may be done.
> Some people know better, or can learn better, than others what it is right to do in certain circumstances.
> There are at least two different sets of instruction, or moral codes, suitable for the different categories of people. This raises the question whether there are also different standards by which we should judge what people do.
> Though the consequentialist believes that acts are right only if they have consequences at least as good as anything else the agent could have done, the consequentialist may need to discourage others from embracing consequentialism. …
> The idea that it is better if some moral views are not widely known was not invented by Sidgwick. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes that ordinary people be brought up to believe that everyone is born ‘from the earth’ into one of three classes, gold, silver or bronze, and living justly consists in doing what is in their nature. Only the philosopher-rulers will know that this is really a myth, a ‘noble lie’. …
> Esoteric morality is a necessary part of a consequentialist theory, and all of the points above can be defended. …
> One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.
> But because the operation is a delicate one, no one could blame her, or have any reason to suspect anything, if the patient were to die on the operating table. Moreover, the hospital is experienced in organ transplantation, and the surgeon knows that if the patient were to die, the recipients of the patient’s organs would soon be able to go home and lead a more or less normal life. The surgeon knows no other details about her patient or the other patients, such as whether they are married, have children, or are about to discover a cure for cancer. In these circumstances, critics of consequentialism say, the consequentialist must think that the doctor ought to kill her patient, since in that way four lives will be saved, and only one lost, and this must be better than four dying and only one being saved. But, so the objection runs, it is obviously morally wrong for the surgeon to kill her patient, and any moral theory that says the contrary must be rejected.
> We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.
0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329....
Which, morally sophisticated people inevitably find is almost comically sensitive to details of the scenario or context, and that's it's virtually impossible to find a satisfying generalizable solution. And then singer is just like "no. u simply pull the lever." It's not interesting.
So for instance, in the real world you can't guarantee you will get away with it. Real surgeons operate in teams, not alone, and are surrounded by other well trained professionals. Real people have loved ones that may press for an investigation of what happened, especially if the patient's death was suspiciously convenient.
So now the real calculus is more complicated. Your calculus isn't nearly as simple as "1 patient vs 4 recipients". You could get caught. The organs might be unusable. The transplant might get rejected. Investigations may result in enormous negative consequences. Etc.
If you were the conductor, what choice would you make?
so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.
The point of his argument is not that under certain exceptional conditions surgeons should kill people to harvest their organs to save more lives, but precisely that any sort of formal pledge or personal obligation or non-utilitarian moral code can be betrayed if that leads to higher expected utility; and that it is prudent to lie about your true intentions and convictions if you think that is a precondition to achieving greater total utility. It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset, and not just specifically on the issue of saving lives – like the trolley problem, this is only an illustration. This applies to utility in general, and thus to all instrumental preconditions for creating it: to money, power, anything; therefore, any act of a Singerian should be suspected as part of an instrumentally useful scheme to secure a position to achieve more utility. This applies the most to pretenses of having integrity, valuing promises or even some kind of sentimental loyalty.
People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying, because you cannot know what sort of a convoluted scheme to maximize total utility they have imagined that could necessitate deception in a particular case.
Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly by defrauding his clients and appropriating money for the purposes of Effective Altruism and AI Alignment movements, and then by piling an absurd lie on an absurd lie. Singer defends the teaching by claiming, contrary to his somewhat more sophisticated argument, that "honesty is the best policy"[0]. This is what he, in his article, describes as morality for children – that is, the immature people who cannot be trusted to make consequentialist decisions and should be taught deontology.
> and he believes you could never recommend the action to others
Oh. Okay, so he says that it is the morally correct course of action logically following from moral philosophy he has been advancing and propagandizing all his life, but [generic] you should not recommend it to others. How is that very claim not such a recommendation? What is the meaning of this sophistry?
Perhaps it serves to separate those who can practice the shallowest Straussian reading from those who are effectively children.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/24/giving-goo...
That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds. It is also a misrepresentation of what utilitarians more generally think about practical ethics and the virtue of truth-telling. The following text is in my experience fairly representative of the views held by real world utilitarian philosophers: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/virtues-for-real...
It's not. However, utilitarians are inevitably compelled to argue that it is, because their efficacy depends on it. This amounts to gaslighting about plainly obvious positions they have committed to paper, which is an act of violence in and of itself.
> While it may seem that utilitarians should engage in norm-breaking instrumental harm, a closer analysis reveals that it often carries large costs. It would lead to people taking precautions to safeguard against these kinds of harms, which would be costly for society. And it could harm utilitarians’ reputation, 33 which in turn could impair their ability to do good.
Your link proposes a number of contingent reasons for utilitarians to not act like defect bots. It does not bite the bullet on cases where defection is clearly optimal, and those cases are plentiful. This is cheap and disingenuous rhetoric. His paper's very clear implication is that killing the patient is valid move if perfect secrecy can be ensured; so strategic arguments about reputation are irrelevant. Most importantly, this ethos breaks down in non-iterated games, e.g. if Utilitarians do build their God AI to subjugate the world and remake according to their moral code, as many in the rationalist community now intend to do.
> We have a proof of concept in the effective altruism community, which does collaborate relatively well.
Again, EA does very well on processing SBF's loot into anti-AI propaganda and funding for "AI safety" labs, but that's still a defection against broader society.
Nothing in your reply now, nor in any of your other comments, supports that claim. Your claim does not follow from the fact that in rare, exceptional cases rule-breaking, perhaps in secret, is what an agent has most reason to do according to act utilitarianism, a well-known feature of the view. The act utilitarian reasons to be honest, not defect and so on are on philosophical reflection instrumental to the core utilitarian goal but such virtues, once habitualized, are nonetheless real features of the utilitarian person's psychology just like in other people.
Do you possess any empirical evidence showing that real world utilitarian adherents are less upholding of everyday norms against lying, stealing, and so on? In my experience real world utilitarians (I've known a bunch of them so far in life) tend to be overrepresented in working for or donating to effective charities or organizations that work to eradicate global health problems, poverty and factory farming and at the same time no less conscientious with regard to common sense norms about honesty, keeping your word, not stealing and so on.
You haven't described what alternative moral view you yourself adhere to. Does it have an absolute prohibition against secret rule-breaking? If the only way to prevent the end of the world and the death of everyone would be to secretly break some everyday rule once then you'd think your obligation in the case is to let the world end? If not then we have identified a case where your own moral view promotes secret rule-breaking. Would that warrant saying that your own view obligates you to have a "fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset"? If not, why not?
Singer's insistence that a utilitarian doctor is morally bound to kill a patient to save others is sufficient.
> Your claim does not follow from the fact that in rare, exceptional cases rule-breaking, perhaps in secret
No perhaps about it, secrecy is part that can only really be discarded in non-iterated settings, in the endgame.
> but such virtues, once habitualized
Of course you know that "habit", contextualized in the moral framework where habitual action is merely instrumental too, is a categorically weaker insurance against rule-breaking than habit plus belief in the principle according to which those habitual decisions are correct generally.
> Do you possess any empirical evidence showing that real world utilitarian adherents are less upholding of everyday norms against lying, stealing, and so on?
Yes, for example the effective altruism movement is comprised of generic totalitarian scum, which is well reflected in their consensus position on AI safety. I notice you flinching from the example of SBF and his little club of Singerians too.
The problem of utilitarianism, however, lies precisely on the margins. It is rational for utilitarians to build up reputation and influence with charities and such nonsense, to then expend it on a massive power-grab. SBF's only fault is that he moved to early, isn't it?
> You haven't described what alternative moral view you yourself adhere to.
Intuitive deontology.
> If the only way to prevent the end of the world and the death of everyone would be to secretly break some everyday rule once
Jaywalking isn't what the "pivotal act" theory entails, and your theory about total death is specious and motivated by the political benefits of such an act.
Moreover, if [you believed that] the only way to prevent the eternal suffering of everyone would be to secretly work towards the extinction of humanity, would you not work on it? A consistent utilitarian would.
> Would that warrant saying that your own view obligates you to have a "fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset"? If not, why not?
Normal people (ie not effective altruists/utilitarians) have ad hoc "decision theories". I am not an exception. Existence of a world is good qualitatively, not as an ultimate expression of the Singerian principle. I believe that lying is wrong qualitatively too, so for me, the logic of habitually being honest applies in the way it cannot apply to a utilitarian, even if you can design a hypothetical where I would have to agree that lying is justified. A world of utilitarians is not a morally good world; a surgeon should commit to losing more lives than otherwise possible in that scenario, because it would not befit a surgeon to kill patients; utilitarian calculations are invalid, so I do not engage in them.
In more contingent terms: habitual, as you put it, utilitarian reasoning leads to justification of your preferred policies via nonsense utility estimates. Proclaim "vulnerable world hypothesis", now anything you'd want is justified by saving the world, and you get to ape the respectable adult too.
It's risible.
... in rare, exceptional cases which are extremely unlikely given the teamwork and papertrails of modern day health care systems, as others have already pointed out to you, but which you keep dropping. Once that context is added your claim (the one I quoted in my previous reply) does not follow.
> No perhaps about it, secrecy is part that can only really be discarded in non-iterated settings, in the endgame.
No idea what that means.
> Of course you know that "habit" ... is a categorically weaker insurance against rule-breaking than habit plus belief in the principle ...
Actually I don't know that. Do you have empirical evidence for it? Evidence with regard to moral views with norms in a multi level structure, like what act utilitarianism tends to have, compared to views with a single or fewer such levels?
> Yes, for example the effective altruism movement is comprised of generic totalitarian scum ...
I hear you reporting your contempt and your intuition. I'm waiting for supportive evidence, studies.
> SBF
A bad-behaving billionaire. But I don't know if his behaviour is worse on average than billionaire peers who hold other moral belief systems.
> Jaywalking isn't what the "pivotal act" theory entails, and your theory about total death is specious and motivated by the political benefits of such an act.
No idea what that means.
> I believe that lying is wrong qualitatively too, so for me, the logic of habitually being honest applies in the way it cannot apply to a utilitarian, even if you can design a hypothetical where I would have to agree that lying is justified.
What does "wrong qualitatively" mean and how does it differ from "wrong non-qualitatively" or "wrong" simpliciter? I so far don't see anything in the sentence that gets you out of the bind of the hypothetical I presented.
edit: It is clear that you contempt the "EA consensus position on AI safety". But it isn't clear what you think that position is nor what other position you think is better nor how you think that other position is reached from intuitive deontology or some other normative theory.
yes a fair bit, thanks for showing an interest in me!
> Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly
I think it's much clearer that Bankman-Fried had absolutely no expectation that his rule-breaking would meet Singers requirements and, you know, he was just lying for the many normal reasons people lie.
> People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying
in which case, nobody who believes in (this) Singerian doctrine should reveal that they do so.
Anyone telling you they follow this doctrine severely compromises their ability to actually execute on it. The rational thing for a Singerian secrecy advocate to do would be to publicly attack the doctrine, as you are doing.
He's sitting on the fence about being a species traitor?
Maybe this is just pure projection on my part, but I’m having a hard time imagining this species being eco-friendly, animal rights upholding, etc. considering Singer’s standards. But again, I only have one species to go by (currently).
Bearing the collective guilt of all mankind is not a noble burden to bear because it is totally detached from taking actions that care for others. It seems more likely to motivate people to self-flagellate, stay in bed depressed by the fact that all of their actions will still result in a hugely negative outcome, or spend lots of time commenting on the internet. The results are as productive and caring as someone playing Call of Duty.
Seems more effective to pick something very specific to strive for like the joy of knowing that some specific group of users from Senegal can provide for their families and to strive towards that.
that's the most ridiculous thing i've ever read and i hang out on fark.com sometimes.