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Peter Singer is so awesome you don't even know
Loren Michael
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Registered User regular
So, I mentioned Peter Singer in my other thread on ending poverty, and I included this discussion that he was a part of, which I feel is ++good and everyone should watch it.
Someone else posted this a link to this article in the NYT, from a women with a disability who apparently doesn't think highly of Singer's views (to put it lightly).
If you are unaware of Singer, a cursory Google search would do you good, but Wikipedia has a handy overview of him and some of his views.
My own views are that he's got a pretty compelling ethical theory. It's pretty relentlessly logical, but it often completely disregards the boundaries of good taste that our ethical intuitions have set up. I feel that often, at the margins where it really counts, our ethical intuitions can't really be trusted. This, I think, is what makes his views rather unpopular, beyond the fact that they are contrary to a good deal of traditional moral views.
Tyler Cowen, who talks with Singer in the first link, shows that while Singer has a good grasp of logic, his views on policy may be somewhat lacking. That is, the means to best utilize the outcomes of his arguments may not be clear to him. I don't think this is anything resembling an indictment of his philosophy, however.
What do you think of his philosophy?
Someone else posted this a link to this article in the NYT, from a women with a disability who apparently doesn't think highly of Singer's views (to put it lightly).
If you are unaware of Singer, a cursory Google search would do you good, but Wikipedia has a handy overview of him and some of his views.
My own views are that he's got a pretty compelling ethical theory. It's pretty relentlessly logical, but it often completely disregards the boundaries of good taste that our ethical intuitions have set up. I feel that often, at the margins where it really counts, our ethical intuitions can't really be trusted. This, I think, is what makes his views rather unpopular, beyond the fact that they are contrary to a good deal of traditional moral views.
Tyler Cowen, who talks with Singer in the first link, shows that while Singer has a good grasp of logic, his views on policy may be somewhat lacking. That is, the means to best utilize the outcomes of his arguments may not be clear to him. I don't think this is anything resembling an indictment of his philosophy, however.
What do you think of his philosophy?
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He's a utilitarian and everything. I guess I forgot to mention that before...?
EDIT:
Edit: Any book recommendations?
But I didn't want to really have a debate about it. But now I feel sad for your poor, ignored thread. So there.
I don't think that's a particularly fair objection at all.
The root problem is that there's a finite amount of resources in the world, all beings experience pain if they are deprived of them. Saying "no pain for any being" doesn't exactly work out.
Aside from that I agree with a lot of what Singer says. Especially regarding vegetarianism. Like Quid, though, I still eat meat. Intellectually I agree with Singer, but emotionally I feel no moral compulsion to cease eating meat, and I am comfortable being a hypocrite. Regardless, I also agree that the meat industry is cruel and harmful overall.
Measuring utility is already hard as hell and the best mechanism we've come up with so far is a person's willingness to pay IMO, which is really not all the good in a lot of instances.
Has he actually discussed that case? Because I would be surprised if he came to that conclusion, and interested to read his reasoning.
Sometimes we have to make trade-offs. He certainly doesn't deny that.
I don't think he's discussed that case specifically, but he says when considering trade-offs, experiencing pain should be weighted more heavily than intelligence. If you really believe that, you come to the conclusion that the big, inherently resource hungry human race should be largely eliminated, with a small force left over to kill all meat-eating animals and large herbivores.
I for one think that intelligence is something extremely valuable when determining who on the planet gets what.
(edit) But maybe that's just my rampant intelligence-ism talking.
I don't think someone with even a basic grasp of human empathy could honestly suggest infanticide as justifiable, sorry.
Singer lives and breathes in his theoretical ivory tower and his theory doesn't always stand up against reality. I agree with the handicapped woman in the NYT article that people like singer are quick to justify assisted suicide or infanticide, but they are ignoring that most people are pushed to the desire to commit suicide (or infanticide) because society does very little to help them. I think assisted suicide should be legal but I understand why people are against it, they are against it because people are pushed into wanting suicide because they are not getting the help they need.
If we allow assisted suicide (or infanticide) because it is easier to help someone die than it is to help them live that doesn't strike me as morally acceptable.
from the NYT article in the OP
''Excuse me?''
''By that I mean they are grounded in current conditions of political, social and economic inequality. What if we assume that such conditions do not exist?''
''Why would we want to do that?''
What's so special about being out of the womb, instead of inside it? I agree with him that there's nothing magically transformational about the act of birth itself, and that our assessment of the moral worth of an infant should not differ significantly from our assessment of the moral worth of a fetus at the same stage of development.
Of course, you could just as easily use the same argument to say that late-term abortions should be impermissible in most cases, which is, as I recall, your position. That debate hinges both on facts about the development of the child in its earliest stages as well as ethical arguments. I don't, however, think that the fact that the fetus will eventually, under favorable circumstances, become a person in the future endows is with especially great moral significance in the hear and now.
My exact position tends to morph a bit, as it's based largely on pragmatism. I think that a newborn is the rough moral equivalent of a 9 month old fetus. I think we should thus work as hard as we can towards protecting 9 month old fetuses. However, given the infrequency of abortions that late and the legal clusterfuck you get into when you try to legislate that sort of thing, I am open to leaving abortion legal all the way to the zero-hour. It's not that I think late-term abortions are particularly moral; I think they're immoral as all fuck, barring life-and-death situations. But being immoral as all fuck is not sufficient justification towards something being legal.
Legality and morality are almost always completely separate issues, as well they should be, though the latter very often drives the former.
That's a little overly dismissive. You make it sound like newborns are just kicking off right and left. The vast majority of infants born in developed countries wind up as what Singer might term a "person". Sure, it's true that it requires effort to keep them alive. If you don't interact with the child so as to keep it alive, the child will die. I fail to see how this in any way justifies infanticide. Especially when it's the actions of the parents who caused it to be there in the first place.
If I see you sleeping and precariously balance a cleaver above your head, it will take positive action on my part to keep you alive - namely, I need to move that cleaver out of the way. Does it suddenly become moral to walk away and leave you to die? Even if I didn't put that cleaver there, is it moral to leave it be?
I mean, what are we looking at here? A person who is even less conscious than a newborn, who is thus only a potential person. Is he more special just because he used to be a person? I doubt you would argue that, given that it invalidates euthanasia. So fuck it, let him die. C'est la morte, eh?
It's a horrible, horrible position, and Singer is a fucking nutter for holding it.
And again, I am speaking morally, here, not legally. And I will reiterate that I have no problem at all with women aborting due to health issues at any point, and for matters as trivial as convenience early on. But if we imagine a hypothetical (if unlikely) mother who decides with cold and impartial reason that, at 9 months, she'd just really like to get that kid out of herself... man, fuck that mother.
I don't think any human/animal/fetus has a soul or a an automatic right to life, but it seems Singer is justifying infanticide by saying the infant is not really a person (arguable) and that killing the infant is a net gain in utility (counting society, the parents and the infant), which is IMO very debatable.
Given that you can't prove the infant is not a person and you can't prove that just because it is defective or unwanted killing it will be a net gain in utility I think it's rather unreasonable to conclude we should make infanticide legal.
Hamburgers are tasty.
Fuck Singer.
Animals are cute; kids are tasty: way to make a non-argument.
Singer is not a relativist.
There is a sense in which babies are instrumentally rather than inherently valuable: this is the sense in which most babies are valuable because they make other people, like the mother, happy. This value could be sufficient to make it wrong to kill one of them. In most cases, it is. However not all babies posses this value--specifically, unwanted babies do not.
And when it comes to inherent, rather than instrumental, value, well, that's not reducible to popular opinion.
He's important both because he used to be a person, and because he will be again. That may seem ad hoc, but trust me, if you try to value everything with the potential to become a person then you're going to be fucked six ways from Sunday. Literally, because you'll feel the need to pop out as many little ones as you can: can't sit by and allow those sperm and eggs to go to dust.
That is also my understanding.
I'm not sure what sense of 'prove' you're using here. After all, we can certainly marshal evidence for these propositions, even if we can't know them with absolute certainty. But what can we know with absolute certainty? Not much, and certainly not much related to issues of public policy.
Even if we accept his premise I don't think your conclusion necessarily follows from that. In the absence of natural predators small herbivores would stop dying from being eaten and undergo a population explosion until they reached the limits of their food supply.
At that point the natural exponential growth rate must be countered by an equivalent rate of animals starving to death (plus the occasional accident and some diseases, but the starvation would likely be way more prevalent). Once that's happened we've simply exchanged being eaten for starving to death. Putting it another way, we've traded some number of animals experiencing a high amount of pain for some relatively short period of time (usually) for a larger number of animals experiencing a less intense amount of pain for a longer period of time, along with most of the rest of the animals being close to starvation themselves.
Man, that's a depressing thought; both of those are kinda shitty.
Reducto ad hurrr.
The fact that one class of things that sits at a particular point on the potentiality-actuality graph is granted sufficient worth to avoid arbitrary murder does not mean everything that exists on that graph is.
I can similarly argue that because babies don't meet the criteria, neither do sleeping people. Except I won't because that would be dumb.
Babies are more actualized than fetuses, which are more actualized than embryos, which are more actualized than unfertilized eggs, which are more actualized than the gleam in your daddy's eye. It's pretty silly to claim that "infants shouldn't be slaughtered" leads to "you're a terrible person if you're not fucking a fertile woman right this moment."
If you (a mother) do not want or are unable to support a child in the womb, you have no choice but to end its life.
if you do not want or are unable to support a child outside of the womb, it is not impossible (and in the first world, not all that difficult) to find somebody who is willing to take your place.
That's a pretty important distinction.
If we're discussing the hypothetical possibilities of infanticide, including the possibility of infanticide in a country in which there are not safe surrender sites or adoption agencies, then infanticide maybe be a viable moral option for somebody who is unwilling/unable to care for a child, as outright murder is likely going to be more humane than leaving the baby on the side of the road to die from exposure.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
This is essentially where I break from Singer (and, for that matter, a lot of unapplied philosophy).
It's one thing to say, "Would you consider that the conditions of the world are not as you describe them to be?" (For example, one might be mistaken about the availability or affordability of health care or social services.) That's an important question to ask, as we should actively challenge our assumptions and prejudices. However, asking "What if we assume a fictional hypothetical world?" is generally pointless and serves only to rig the board in an elaborate mental chessgame - such questions, though they might be fun academic puzzles, are no more useful than asking, "What if humans didn't actually need oxygen or food?"
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
For a non-relativist, when you're constructing the rules for your ethical system, you're trying to create universal rules. That is, they'll work just as well and be just as right in any hypothetical world as in this one. The world is constantly changing, so if you're creating a system of ethics, you want it to be just as good today as it was 5000 years ago and that it will still be good a million years from now.
Utilitarians still take into account the state of the real world though, when they're calculating utility. Utility has to depend on societal norms, since those strongly determine preferences (which is what Singer bases his utility calculations on), happiness, sadness, etc.
This is the way I look at infanticide, abortion, animal rights and other issues. You don't really know what the inherent value of a baby or a dog is. You can't ask them and you can't really view the world from their angle. We don't know the point of brain sophistication at which it becomes possible to experience emotions or display preferences. There may not even be one, it could be a gradual process.
So all we have to work with is instrumental value. It sounds cold, but if the death of a baby increases utility, then it is moral. So, abortion would usually be wrong in a society of Catholics, but right in a community of Planned Parenthood members.
That's a remarkably hard hearted line of thought for a vegetarian.
The idea, as I understand it, is that a disabled person supplants a non-disabled person by draining the resources of the parents. Culling of disabled babies at birth allows the parents of disabled children to have more, presumably non-disabled, children who will live happier lives, which maximizes total social utility.
I think that even he cannot live by it.
That's probably true of every worthwhile ethical system.
Also, utilitarianism is about optimization, so it's not really all that important to follow its precepts perfectly.
That's actually the opposite of "worthwhile ethical system".
Well, you should be able to apply a worthwhile ethical system to real life. However, it's probably impossible to live by all its tenets. The world is a complex place. There are ethical dilemmas that have no good solution. A utilitarian will never be able to maximize utility, even though that's what they're supposed to do, but utilitarianism is still worthwhile.
An Ethical Dilemma with no good solution is a faulty dilemma resulting from a faulty ethics.
That's one of my issues with Singer. His starting point "Let's assume a bunch of incorrect shit with which most people would agree" leads to conconclusions with which no one agrees. And upon reaching that conclusion he does not say, "See? Your assumptions are fucking stupid" but rather he says, "Ok, that's my ethics. now give me a shit-ton of money."
And then he goes off to live an unethical life, by his own standards, as he feasts upon royalties.
I really fucking hate Singer.
For one thing, his standards would say that there is no such thing as an unethical life. One life can be more or less ethical than another, but you can't characterize a life as unethical in absolute terms. For another, he's a vegan who donates a quarter of his income to help the poor. I'd say he upholds his ethical standards more than most people do.
Oh, I agree.
My point is that his conclusions destroy ethics; the system destroys itself. Which is fine by me. I just hate that he tries to maintain ethics after demonstrating the folly of ethics.
I agree with most of Singer's arguments. The difference is that once I see the conclusions I say, "See? This is why ethics is stupid." whereas Singer attempts to maintain ethics, which is nonsense.
So when he argues that an infant has no value? When a retard has no value? Yes. But that is the precise reason for why ethics is folly. When one attempts to conform life to logical consistancy life itself ceases to be possible; the system destroys itself.