Singer vs Bush

Isn’t Peter Singer the guy who thinks its okay to kill babies and disabled people?

I guess I could see him appealing to Michael Moore fans.

With equal logic, I guess I could see him appealing to Elvis fans.

Okay, those of you with sensible comments to make can start posting now.

Anyone whose tempted to become a Peter Singer fan ought to be required by law to read this:
http://www.racematters.org/harrietmcbrydejohnson.htm

A few years back, actually a lot of years back, it was very common to hear people on talk radio forums demanding service from public servants. They’d emphasize that word, servant.
People wanted tax “relief”, so good public servants did what they were told and lowered taxes, in response to the expressed desire of the public.
What kept spinning me out was the glaring lack of civic leadership, anywhere, by anyone.
Leaders don’t do what their constituency demands. Their responsibility is to need, expressed or not. There’s something of the servant in a parent, and something of the parent in a leader.
Lying to someone for their own good is not something I have a problem with, whether doing it myself or having it done to me; if it’s truly for the good. If it causes harm then it’s wrong, but wrong for that specific reason, harm.
So I don’t have a problem with a politician lying to the public, especially a public whose integrity is as degraded as this one’s is.
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The people as a mass object have too much momentum and inertia to respond swiftly to crisis; by the time the information’s been processed by a majority it will have become too late to do anything with it, in too many instances.
Leaders assume responsibility for that. Democracy’s the leadership of the people, by the people. To make that work requires civic leaders to become a kind of surrogate of the people. That’s pretty much what representative government’s about. But the strongest principle underlying that assumption must be the delegation to do what’s best, regardless of the current majority’s demands. Choosing representatives who re-present the highest qualities of the public, as opposed to those who cater to the public’s self-interest, is paramount.
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The good king serves his kingdom, not by obedience, but by the selfless application of his gifts.
Bush lied about the invasion of Iraq – his reasons for the invasion were other than what he said they were. But the moral problem isn’t the abstract sin of lying, it’s that he lied to cover up venality; or worse, treachery.
I’m personally not convinced that oil isn’t anything more than a second layer of deceit, real enough, but not the primary motive.
Still, deception’s not the problem, and ultimately intent isn’t either, though it’s closer.
The problem is what was done, regardless of motive, and the harm it’s caused; and worse, and far more incriminating, the harm it’s going to cause.

Shorter msg: Das führerprinzip requires a competent leader.

Given the free availability of information these days, and the evidence that perhaps the majority of humans have better access to it than the average American, at least in the case of the case for the war against Iraq, it would appear that lying is fast becoming least useful contraption in the toolbox.

Yes, I think there is a potentially rule-utilitarian case to be made for international rules prohibiting pre-emptive action and such — for the kind of reasons you cite: lying governments, etc.

I am Cloud William, chief. Also son of chief. Freedom is our worship word: you will not speak it.

“Which, in turn, is related to his assumption that all the heavy lifting in moral theory can be done simply through abstract reason, without discourse with reference to actual lived experience and subjective understanding.—djw

Yes, because actual lived experience and subjective understanding have been such a reliable guide to moral reasoning in the past.

‘Singer (a) draws the line later than most and (b) thinks the line is determined individual by individual not species by species. ‘

Ted Bundy drew the line rather late as well, and thought the line was determined by what he could get away with.

He doesn’t defend killing ‘cripples’, as you’d know if you bothered to actually read what he wrote rather than 10th hand summaries. He defends taking active measures to end people’s suffering (i.e. kill them) in cases where mainstream opinion says we should ‘not take active measures to ensure survival’. That seems like a perfectly humane position to me. As for the babies, unless you are going to seriously defend “Every sperm is sacred” you’ll need better arguments than this.

Well, Keith, it’s not exactly like retreating into your own mind, no matter how clever it is, has been without some notable failures either. Moral reasoning is hard, and fallible. It’s hard for me to imagine how it could reasonably be done without both.

As for the babies, unless you are going to seriously defend “Every sperm is sacred” you’ll need better arguments than this.

Brian, I don’t want to get into a whole thing here, but you’ve got to see there’s much more going on here. As a society, we have to determine a moment at which a potential human becomes a human for moral/legal purposes. With some notable voices of dissent notwithstanding, we’re moving toward a consensus that that moment is birth, which seems appropriate to me. What Singer proposes is a different, later line for a particular class of people, based on his assumption that they will be inherently “worse off,” without considering that a significant part of the reason one could reasonably assume that is unjust social arrangements and attitudes that also treat them as less than human. When confronted with the fact that much of the same could be said of, say, mixed race babies, he suggests that in the former case the parents belief is ‘unreasonable’ in the latter case, and ‘reasonable’ in the former case. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who finds that deeply unsatisfying to say the least.

Maybe you think that’s reasonable, but I simply don’t see how the “every sperm is sacred” line is relevant. It’s not the location of the line drawn between potential human and human that raises my ire, it’s the drawing of two different lines. I would think egalitarian liberals would join me in finding problematic.

I hate talking about Singer because we always have to hear about how nuanced he is. Lets have him in his own words:

Peter Singer from his book Practical Ethics:

“Killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all” p.191

“We should certainly put very strict conditions on permissible infanticide, but these conditions might owe more to the effects of infanticide on others than to the intrinsic wrongness of killing an infant.” p.173

“Suppose a woman planning to have two children has one normal child, then gives birth to a haemophiliac child. The burden of caring for that child may make it impossible for her to cope with a third child; but if the disabled child were to die, she would have another. . . . When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of a happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him.” p.186

“the quality of life of someone with Down syndrome [is] below the standard at which medical treatment to sustain the life of an infant becomes obligatory” p.111 of his Should the Baby Live?

Note that hemophilia is difficult to treat in some children, but it is absolutely possible for them to live good lives. Note also that the worth of the hemophiliac child is measured by the burden on the mother. Note he is not talking about abortion, he is talking about post-birth killing. Note again that he is talking about very treatable diseases, not mere ‘hopeless cases’.

But all this is beside the point. As far as I can tell almost all utilitarian theories are mere shell games. They want to make more ‘objective’ decisions on morality based on overall measures of happiness (or whatever their metric of the day is). But all that does is move the moral intuition behind one set of curtains. What counts as happy or whatever metric you are using? Why is the metric you are using important as opposed to some other metric? You just make all your moral choices earlier and then hide them behind utility theory.

I’m not at all sure that I would call libertarians generally ‘individualist about morality’. You could easily be a moral absolutist who believes that many or most arguments about morality shouldn’t be solved by the government. Furthermore almost all libertarians believe that harm to others is not generally ok even under the most permissive system. Surely a debate about infanticide comes down under that rubric.

What’s odd is all the libertarians who object to this. Singer’s argument is really hard to combat I think if you have the kind of individualist morality that you need to be a libertarian.

Brian, people often refer to libertarians as a homogenous group; but in my experience, I’ve run into two different types of libertarians that seem to have a fundamental difference between them. Maybe the best way to draw the line is between ethical objectivists and ethical subjectivists. Here’s what I think I see…

On one side are the ethical objectivists / absolutists: followers of Ayn Rand, most net libertarians, natural rights theorists, followers of Locke and Jefferson, etc. They tend to see ethics (and consequently politics) as a matter of absolutes. When their freedom is threatened, they point out their rights (“back off man, you’re violating my rights!”). These libertarians tend to be, I’d say, more right wing, more idealistic, more individualist and pro-capitalist.

On other other side, I’d say, are the ethical subjectivists. When their freedom is threatened (usually by someone making some moral claim), they’re more likely to point out the subjective nature of the claim (when provoked: “back off, man, take your fanatical views elsewhere!”) These libertarians tend to be more left wing, more cynical, more communitarian and more likely to be critical of capitalism.

Then again, maybe I’m just seeing things.

On rereading it seems I was a little over the top in some comments, so let me try being a little more academic. Because it seems that there is something very valuable in Singer’s work that we should all agree about even if (especially if) we disagree with his conclusions.

Start with a thought experiment from Parfit. Lucy gets some tests done on the unfertilised egg(s) she is carrying and told that any child that comes from them will end up with Down’s Syndrome. Lucy responds by resolving not to have children until this danger has passed, and takes a pill to sterilize the eggs. The next month she is given the all clear and conceives a healthy baby.

Now we all agree that what Lucy did is morally acceptable. (Or I think we all do. If you don’t like contraception assume she goes sex-free for the month. I don’t think that matters much.) Indeed, many of us would think she’s a moral monster if she did otherwise.

The usual question now is in virtue of what is Lucy’s action morally required. But let’s ask a different question.

All of us (I hope) think that if Lucy gets pregnant anyway, has the child, then decides 5 years later she made a mistake and kills it to conceive another, she would not be doing the right thing. Indeed, in this case she would again be a moral monster. This leads to two (hopefully related) questions.

The practical question is: if it’s OK to sterilise the egg, but not OK to kill the 5 year old, where in between do we draw the line? Actually since Lucy is required to not let the egg grow into a child, but not permitted to kill the 5 year old, there are probably 2 lines here – when it ceases being required to not let the egg/embryo/foetus/baby develop, and when it ceases to be permissible to stop it developing.

The theoretical question is: in virtue of what are those lines where they are?

Singer has an interesting answer to the two questions. The practical question he (famously) says should be answered “a lot later than you think”. The theoretical question he answers by arguing that being a moral agent (what he confusingly calls a ‘person’) requires having future-directed preferences, and those don’t arise until a long time after birth.

There’s a hyper-theoretical question that comes up here which Singer doesn’t directly address. (At least not in stuff I’ve read – he may address it elsewhere.) Which of the two questions should we answer first? Many people here I think take it we should answer the practical question first, and let that constrain permissible answers to the theoretical question. Singer thinks the opposite – the theoretical question is primary, and the practical question later. I’m rather indecisive on that one, but I think both points of view have merit.

For what it’s worth, my answers to the questions are (a) at birth and (b) because moral status depends inter alia on membership in a moral community and that’s something babies have and foetuses (in general) don’t.

Note that even if you think (contra as I read him Singer) that the theoretical question should be answered first, having the questions posed is really quite valuable, because the constraints you get on answers to the theoretical questions tell you quite a lot about what theories of value you can accept. And that I think is a service, much like Descartes’ discussion of scepticism is valuable for asking the right questions, even if he gives the wrong answers.

What makes the second group libertarians? How can a left-communitarian critic of capitalism be a libertarian?

For a short answer, I think it mostly boils down to issues of property, what is controlled and used by whom and why.

When one is born into a world consisting almost exclusively of private property, it’s not so easy to be free, regardless of how much one desires freedom.

Should the control of structures and institutions created over course of hundreds and even thousands of years by generations of human effort be determined by birth right?

Property, for example, is a contentious issue.

moral status depends inter alia on membership in a moral community and that’s something babies have and foetuses (in general) don’t

But then I think you have to ask, why don’t they? In general, we accept babies as part of the community because they’ve “arrived”, whereas a foetus still might not get here alive, but I’m not sure that is any part of what constitutes a moral agent. What of the people who would consider their dogs “people”? Can a hermit be a moral agent?

On the other hand, the social status of the neonate is clearly different from that of the foetus. Whether that makes a moral difference or not, it does provide a reasonable basis for drawing the legal line between potential and full-fledged membership in the tribe, with all the rights and protections attendant thereupon.

Disclaimer: I don’t have kids, and (for a variety of reasons) never will have any. So I consider my opinions to carry somewhat diminished weight in this debate, since I will never personally face the implications of my ideas.

How can a left-communitarian critic of capitalism be a libertarian?

One more thought…

It all depends on how one organizes the political continuum (the standard left-to-right things seems insufficient to me), but it seems to me that if you go one click farther away from the center on the right side of libertarianism, you start running into anarcho-capitalists; and if you go one click farther away from the center on the left side, you start running into anarcho-syndicalists.

Then again, I could be wrong.

“We have no king! We’re an anarcho-syndicalist commune!”

Just out of curiosity, Brian, what do most philosphers think of Singer? I don’t need a long answer, but I have wondered for years whether many in his field didn’t find him more than a bit embarrassing.

I don’t expect you to explain how much higher your own opinion is, since that isn’t always good for own’s career, but if you do, that would be interesting, too.

Jim, my impression is that he tends to arouse fairly extreme reactions, far more so than any other philosopher I know. His reputation is not as bad as you might think for a few reasons.

One, we’re less inclined to judge other philosophers by how much we like their conclusions than we could be. Robert Nozick, for instance, was very widely admired throughout the profession (and quite rightly so) even though there are very adherents to any of his views. This isn’t to say we never let views about conclusions colour views of people, but we’re not as bad as some caricatured version of the profession.

Second, the views on infanticide are really a very small part of what Singer is known for. Ask any philosopher what is most notable about Singer and they’ll say his work on animal rights, which has a central part in one of the most important stories in contemporary philosophy. Even within bioethics, they’ll probably just as likely cite his support for voluntary euthanasia as his arguments for the permissibility of infanticide. Singer’s own work is less important in the story here, but again it’s something where philosophers have had a role in a big and ongoing change in social values.

Obviously not everyone likes Singer. There’s a fair bit of institutional opposition to utilitarianism in various parts, and that rubs off on him. But it doesn’t account for all of the feelings he arouses, which as I said can be fairly extreme.

I think senoma’s point that it’s hard to say why membership in a community should count as morally relevant is a good one. It’s a variant really of the argument Singer ends up giving against birth being morally relevant. I’d need to be a much better ethicist to give a thorough answer here. Again though, I think this is why Singer’s arguments are valuable. Finding alternative answers and justifying them is hard work, and it’s just the kind of hard work you need to do to come up with a plausible theory of value.

For what it’s worth, I do think dogs are moral agents. I suspect they have future-directed preferences, i.e. goals, though this is an empirical question. And I suspect that’s sufficient (though unlike Singer I’d question whether it is necessary) for moral agency. They certainly have some moral standing – it’s immoral to prevent a dog getting any water in a way that it isn’t immoral to prevent a plant getting water. But whether they have higher moral standing that that is tricky.

I appreciate Brian’s thoughts on Singer because I was getting a little tired of the piling-on here in the comments.

My very, very strong sense is that the people that deeply dislike Singer do so because his conclusions clash so violently with their sensibilities. He makes some deeply counter-intuitive and counter-cultural arguments; and he does so in a very analytical manner that, I suspect, just pisses people off more.

I don’t agree with the outrage about infanticide. It has been acceptable in some cultures, and it’s not at all clear to me that infants are fully human in the sense that’s relevant to this discussion. It especially disturbs me that a strong pro-choice position favors the legality of late-term abortions but, I daresay, many of those same people find infanticide abhorrent.

People strongly dislike Singer for his animal rights positions. Here, too, a lot of the criticism seems to me to be motivated by an outrage that he’s deeply violating cultural norms. He’s a smart man and a pretty rigorous thinker; and it’s revealing to me that people would mistakenly assume that his fellow philosophers would find him an embarassment.

I’m a utilitarian, but I’m also deeply influenced by complexity theory. The latter moderates the former—I’m skeptical of a “utilitarian moral theory of everything”, so to speak, since I think that we likely can only determine utility for an appropriate level of description of a system and certainly not for the whole of it.

The last two sentences in my previous post weren’t very clear. I was sorry someone with Chomsky-like views on foreign policy is also associated with a defense of infanticide. Maybe Singer secretly enjoys being on the fringe of every issue.

It’s rare that I find myself in agreement with Sebastian Holsclaw, given what I can remember of his positions in other posts I’ve read. What’s the temperature in hell today?

I suppose I’m in some slight disagreement with him even here. Zeno’s paradoxes, as I understand, really are deep, even if wrong and it was worthwhile for philosophers and mathematicians to think deeply about the convergence of infinite series and so forth. So maybe there’s something to be learned from pointing out the flaws in Singer’s arguments. But no one needed to take Zeno’s conclusions seriously because there was no independent evidence that we were all being deceived in some way. And Singer’s arguments should receive the same treatment. Yes, some cultures practice infanticide, just as some practice female circumcision, slavery, and genocide. Most people still wouldn’t feel the need to rethink their opinion on those issues in the event that some extremely clever man defends them. But maybe something could be learned from dismantling his argument.

I don’t think it is—I’m pretty solidly pro-choice—but I worry that abortion might be genocide. On the other hand, I’m not sure that infanticide is murder, either. The status of infants as fully human seems unclear to me and I don’t think either my intuition or conventional wisdom are reliable guides to deciding this matter.

Well, Keith, thankfully for everyone :) there’s such a thing as legal definitions and human rights standards that define very clearly a person as a human being from the very moment of birth to the moment of death.

You’re 1 day old, no, 1 second old, then you’re a person with the very same human rights as a 25 or 45 or 75 year old. No matter what illnesses or disabilities you may have.

The rest is all abstract speculation, good for challenging philosophical arguments and heated academic debates (and for publishers ;) ), but – thankfully again – not ever standing a chance of changing those (almost) universally accepted standards and legal definitions.

(“Almost” referring to the fact in many countries, the basic idea that say, women and children are also individuals fully entitled to their own rights is not yet accepted)

As an habitual carnivore, the concept of not eating anything with a face was something I used to keep in the back of my head. A visit to northern Spain and weeks of feasting on seafood decalibrated my sensitivities, and upon consulting my Seafood Watch afterwards I realized that the appalled attention my fellow travelers applied to my avid appetite for the cheeks of a monkfish were not merely squeamish.

Certainly one is far more than their DNA. But one begins with their DNA, their single egg, the bases for the reproductions of cells that become a fully formed human being. We are MORE than our DNA, but we were never less than that origin.

I still say the existance of DNA, human DNA, makes one human. Just as chimp DNA makes one chimp.

There’s nothing hard about framing morality in this manner. It simply means that killing babies, either fully formed or not fully formed, is killing babies.

There are many arguments to allow it or disallow it. That hardly contradicts the fact that combined chromosomes define a creature within its species as a member of that species. Any attempt to reduce a fetus to a small and insignificant lump denies the fact that that lump contains all that is necessary to be classified as a human being, even though not fully formed.

CBK

Why do intelligent people even treat Peter Singer as a peer? At what point do someone’s utterances become so outrageous that the person is treated like that “special” relative no one really wants to sit next to at the family reunion. In my opinion the man is a loon. The fact he is a professor at a very prestigious university is embarrassing. Anyone who has spent that much intellectual capital trying to mitigate the social constraints regarding sex with animals is so far beyond the pale he is irrelevant.

The man is like David Blaine. Singer has put himself in a box of self-inflicted silliness; where are the masses throwing rocks and hurling the deserved insults?

Read a few issues of the Atlantic Monthly is you want reasoned critiques of the President….