Peter Singer, Round 2

Utility of taboo vs. utility of individual cases is hard.

“But a familiar one, and abstract enough, as philosophical issues go, that it needn’t lead to such personal animosity and sense of moral contagion. ”

Gack, I don’t understand what you’re saying here. Saying that the world would have been better off if you had never been born, and wanting to allow policies that ensure people like you aren’t born in the future or are “mercifully” killed early so your parents could have more fun with other children is about as concrete an attack as I can imagine. If that is abstract can you give me an example of concrete? He’s an academic, I don’t expect him to strangle the disabled children himself, arguing to have other people do it is the concrete work he does.

And I don’t understand the politeness thing either. Telling a black man that he has inferior intelligence but shouldn’t worry about it because he’s from an inferior race and could you please me sure not to spill a drop of gas thanks couldn’t be characterized as polite no matter what the rest of the tone of the exchange was. Similarly, not being gratuitously cruel BEYOND publicly attacking your right to exist at all and advocating that society kill all people like you in the future doesn’t strike me as particularly polite. Privileged? Definitely. At some point smiling and talking softly while driving the knife between my eyes isn’t polite. Or if it is, “polite” isn’t a praiseworthy character trait at those extremes.

There are good reasons for infanticide in some cases. The life of the infant is in some cases so bad that it is better for the infant to not go on living and that makes infanticide the right, respectful, caring and loving thing to do. Anyone who thinks that arguments for infanticide are somehow exclusive to utilitarianism is seriously mistaken.

As an abled-person it does not offend me that my mother had the choice to abort me for reasons of personal utility.

John: Try comparing it to the fix-the-debt people. Disabled people need lots of things, of which infanticide is really low on the list. It’s not just that I disagree with his stances, but that I see his issues as having a very large element of wasteful distraction. Look at Michael’s account of what helps his son live well, or McBride’s account similarly, and you mostly find stuff that Singer apparently finds simply irrelevant or uninteresting. I see no sign that he learned anything at all about humility or priority from any of his encounters.

It’s like trying to deal with the realities of a mortgage and managing your assets when all you’ve got as a guide is Hayek and a few Tea Party rants. It would be easy to just dismiss him back except that, like the assholes given op-ed space at every major newspaper, he takes up attention that real needs won’t get.

Sebastian H:

I think John is saying that Singer and Johnson disagree about whether rights are a real thing at all, with Singer being on the “nonsense on stilts” side with Bentham. And that this is an abstract and well-worn philosophical discussion.

I have read some of Singer’s essays but none of his books in full, so I may have the wrong impression of him. But I got the impression that he started out defending ethical treatment of animals on utilitarian grounds, and kept encountering objections (in public, if not in academic literature) about how animal experiences don’t matter because they are too powerless or unable to reason or just not-human. So later he worked from the other direction: “I was talking before about how animals should be treated with respect comparable to humans, now let’s talk about treating humans comparably to animals.”

Nobody who gets really angried up at Singer seems to notice (or at least embrace) the perfectly consistent and caring approach in line with Singer’s utilitarianism: treat disabled humans and all other animals with compassion and dignity. Whatever you’re willing for a dairy cow to suffer should be consistent with whatever you’re willing for a human infant to suffer, and vice versa. You don’t have to disregard the experiences of either one by his lights. He might never have examined disposing of humans if people more readily embraced his arguments against disposing of animals. But as long people keep believing that animal torment and slaughter is ok because they are stupid, why not float some proposals about killing infants, who do no better on the GRE than pigs?

This is interesting:

“Clearly, what Christians have claimed as divine moral givens can prove oppressive. The Bible and Christian history alike provide copious examples. But, serious as that setback is, it is not of itself a reason to deny moral givens. Singer himself now seems more inclined to accept as much.

He described his current position as being in a state of flux. But he is leaning towards accepting moral objectivity because he now rejects Hume’s view that practical reasoning is always subject to desire. Instead, he inclines towards the view of Henry Sidgwick, the Victorian theist whom he has called the greatest utilitarian, which is that there are moral assertions that we recognise intuitively as true. At the conference, he offered two possible examples, that suffering is intrinsically bad, and that people’s preferences should be satisfied. He has not yet given up on preference utilitarianism. Neither is he any more inclined to belief in God, though he did admit that there is a sense in which he “regrets” not doing so, as that is the only way to provide a complete answer to the question, why act morally? Only faith in a good God finally secures the conviction that living morally coincides with living well.”

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/25/peter-singer-utilitarianism-climate-change

Anyone here have any insight into why Peter Singer was the one chosen to do the Very Short Introduction to Marx? it always puzzled me

It’s not really the answer you’re looking for, but Singer wrote the volumes on both Marx and Hegel for the old Oxford “Past Masters” series, and nearly all of those were just re-packaged in the new “Very Short Introductions”, though they have commissioned a lot of new ones for the new series. It seemed like an odd choice in the past, but it’s at least an old odd choice by now- maybe 25 or 30 years (I think the “Past Masters” books came out in the 80’s.)

Peter Singer isn’t saying that the disabled are less deserving of rights, he’s saying that babies are less deserving of rights. Focusing on his argument as if the former was the point seems to be a rather serious misunderstanding.

Oops_actually, Kirk and Spock prevented McCoy from preventing that pacifist from being run over by a truck. Nonsense discussions should be conducted on a firm basis of fact.

i think Matt @12 is right to emphasize the importance of consistency for Singer. a lot of the criticisms leveled at Singer, especially re: infanticide, are terribly unpersuasive because they do not engage with his thought in its proper context. objecting to a stance he arrived at through deductive application of principles without addressing those principles themselves is a recipe for missing the point.

but then again, so long as people here (even here!) are going to characterize his views as positively advocating infanticide, or that his beliefs arise out of the same sort of un-thought as base racism, the discussion is not going to get very far. to someone who has read some of Singer’s work, you appear to be sparring with straw-men.

that being said, i think that at the end of the day utilitarianism is a load of bunk, Singer’s philosophy included. but you have to appreciate the consistency and scope of the approach, which endeavors to think ethics in a rigorous way. i would much rather live in a world where ethicists argue for unconventional positions and force us to grapple with difficult questions, than in a world where those same ethical thinkers either A) all thought the same conventional ways, or B) were afraid to articulate controversial positions publicly for fear of public backlash. but then again, i think that the role of provocateur comes with Singer’s job. now that i know he used to write some books on Hegel, i would bet that he thinks it is part of his job as well.

Peter Singer isn’t saying that the disabled are less deserving of rights, he’s saying that babies are less deserving of rights. Focusing on his argument as if the former was the point seems to be a rather serious misunderstanding.

I’m not even sure he is really interested in diminishing the rights of babies so much as he’s luring people who are callous about animals into a trap. “They don’t feel things the way we do, they’re not intelligent like us, and treating animals as disposable means to an end makes my life richer or more enjoyable” are all common folk if not academic arguments against ethical treatment of animals. If those criteria are acceptable for making decisions about other powerless creatures’ lives, what’s so special about infants? But the trap usually doesn’t work, because most people don’t care about consistency, so they perceive Springer as developing two unrelated themes neither of which they like.

An extended quote from Michael Specter in the New Yorker, 1999, included because I know all the people involved and agree with Anne:
ANNE MCDONALD lives in an airy Federation home in one of Melbourne’s many suburban neighborhoods. The building, which still has its turn-of-the-century pressed-zinc ceilings, is shrouded in vines and surrounded by cypresses. When I went to visit her there one crisp afternoon, it took five minutes for her to answer the door. McDonald has athetoid cerebral palsy. She is bound to a wheelchair – literally strapped in with a seat belt. An elaborate computerized device sits on her lap, and this is what permitted her to say hello to me, in a recorded voice message that had been created from the seven thousand utterances programmed into the machine. McDonald has long brown hair, and her eyes are an electric blue. They play an especially important role in her life, because she uses them to say yes and no: squeezed shut for yes, wide open for no. She is exactly what Peter Singer had in mind when he wrote, in ‘Practical Ethics, “It may still be objected that to replace either a fetus or a newborn infant is wrong because it suggests to disabled people living today that their lives are less worth living than the lives of people who are not disabled. Yet it is surely flying in the face of reality to deny that, on average, this is so.’
McDonald, who has known Singer for more than fifteen years, agrees with much he has to say and is glad he has the nerve to say it. ‘There was a point when I should have been killed,’ she told me, referring to the years when she was treated as human refuse on the wards of Melbourne’s St. Nicholas Hospital. ‘I often prayed for it. But now I am alive,’ she said, tapping out her messages in phonetic code on her alphabet board, ‘and I enjoy my life very much.’
…….
McDonald demonstrates as forcibly as anyone could that it is impossible to know what is going on inside the brain of a person who is unable to communicate. After a long struggle, McDonald learned to read and write. She studied philosophy of science at Deakin University and fine art at the University of Melbourne, has published a book, travels around the world and pays her taxes with at least as much pleasure as any citizen of Australia. In 1982, she and Crossley considered writing a book, ‘Care, Cure, or Kill,’ about the fate of disabled infants. They eventually decided against it, but in the course of their research they went to interview Peter Singer.
It was the start of a strangely warm relationship. Singer’s sister is a lawyer who has been active in supporting the disabled, and she and Singer have become the Deal Communication Centre’s biggest benefactors. Singer likes McDonald, and he would never say that she should die, while McDonald is clearly fond of Singer. Their principal conflict concerns how to determine what it is possible for a disabled person to achieve. ‘It is always a question of whether the future will be as bad as it looks,’ McDonald told me. If you know that it is going to be impossibly bleak and filled with suffering, she says, then Singer’s view has more validity. But who, exactly, can know the future? ‘We can always be sure of one thing,’ McDonald said. ‘The dead have no regrets. Peter thinks that way. He knows me. But he doesn’t think about individuals. We are all just a category to him.’

“My personal reaction to Singer is that he’s proven that a universal, non-God-based, deductively reasoned morality is impossible.”

So we’re ruling out anything Aristotelian or Kantian just from the get-go?

I think the problem is thinking that morality is supposed to be like math, with relatively clear answers. You have to push really hard on math – Lobachevsky, Goedel – to find yourself in anything close to Antigone’s shoes. So saying “wow, morality turns out to be a lot fuzzier than math, hence it’s all shit!” is a cop-out.

Aristotle said in the Ethics, you expect from any given science the degree of certainty appropriate to it. Makes sense to me.

But the trap usually doesn’t work, because most people don’t care about consistency

It’s inconsistent to treat human infants and non-human animals differently only if you’re a hedonist (broadly speaking). Maybe you (not you personally) think that all other views are dumb, incomprehensible, etc., but it is worth noting that different treatment just by itself doesn’t imply inconsistency.

Singer’s position ultimately rests on his identification of humanism with speciesism. This identification is deeply problematic, as I have argued in places I’m sure Singer knows and which he has ignored. So once more:

Singer’s argument works this way: If humanity is to be a fundamental and important moral category in the way humanism sees it, then we i) have to discover a property shared by all and only humans, and ii) this property has to be the kind of thing that is relevant to morality, and deeply so. Then he says there is no such thing. Anything that might be enough for ii (language, rationality, etc.) won’t satisfy i.

Everything depends on refusing to count “X is a fellow Human Being” as answering i) and having the status ii) requires.

But how – except by fiat – can one rule this property out? It is a real property (Species are scientifically respectable entities); and it is equally real that fellow membership in a species is a real property. And, of course, we and only we are fellow members of the species. So here is the distinguishing property and it has the relevant status. (In metaphorical language we mark the same distinction by saying “There but for the grace of god, go I – or my children, etc.”)

It is not only ignoring this, but labelling it a vice, that leaves so many queasy when it comes to Singer’s moral pronouncements.

It’s been a while since I had occasion to say this, but Sebastian H. is saying many things I wish I had the words for but don’t right now. Good work, Sebastian, and thanks.

On second thought, the “only if” in my last comment should probably be an “if”, though that doesn’t really affect my point. And just to avoid misunderstanding: I mean “hedonist” in the technical sense, where states of pleasure and pain are all that matter in moral evaluation (ok, that’s a bit crude and elliptical, but it’ll do).

Long term oriented technical hedonism lines up pretty well with my actual beliefs when it comes to deciding how to treat other living things. It’s ok to eat cultivate and eat soy because it doesn’t experience pleasure or pain. It’s ok to consume animal products like wool or milk if the producer animals are treated well at all times, including after they are no longer economically producing. It’s ok to eat meat if the animal was killed without experiencing pain or panic, and the absence of the animal is not going to cause distress to others (e.g. inert gas asphyxiation while asleep, only of animals not part of a social unit). Given current agricultural norms it’s very difficult to ethically consume meat or even wool. It’s ok for a prospective human mother to terminate an early term fetus for any reason (no nervous system to experience pain), it’s ok to terminate a late term fetus to preserve the health of the mother (she is more embedded in social relations so her suffering is more to be avoided, if someone must suffer), and it’s ok to terminate a late term fetus for any old reason if you can find a way to do it without inducing pain. Terminating the life of an infant likely to experience severe suffering and shortened natural life is still an ethically difficult case, because we only have tentative knowledge of future suffering and because people start forming social bonds with infants almost immediately.

The really difficult case isn’t euthanasia or abortion, but other species that are obligate carnivores. Are all lions to be fenced in and fed only ethically pre-killed meat to reduce the suffering of their prey? Or perhaps predators should even be driven extinct? That’s correct by technical hedonism as far as I can see, but it doesn’t sit well with me even if it truly reduces suffering*, so I guess I’m not able to fully embrace any small set of ethical axioms either.

*It would be a real juggling act to reduce net suffering in ecosystems that have evolved under influence of predators. Depo-Provera instead of predators for swelling gazelle populations?

Matt @ 38: Well, it’s an “easy” problem because what you describe is so staggeringly impractical. (Especially since apex predators are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cruelty in nature.) If we had the power of gods, “obviously” the sensible thing would be to radically restructure nature to alleviate the suffering of sentient beings. But we don’t, so even to the extent that we try to alleviate suffering, we have to acknowledge that nature is too complicated for us to handle and even “modest” reforms of trying to cage up all the lions would shock ecosystems in ways that would be hard for us to compensate for.

@39. i think the further point is that other than ‘humans are morally special’, a good majority of the potential additional premises do result in an inconsistency there. this applies even for many of those moral premises which themselves are smuggling a bit of the ‘humans are a special case’ element in themselves (such as intelligence as relevant moral yardstick, or capacity for language, or capacity to experience pain, etc. ). this is clearly a point Singer relishes in making – that other than explicitly setting out humans as superior, all of the common sense candidates for ‘what matters’ in morality end up elevating certain grown mammals above human infants.

I see many fewer problems in the world around me coming from people who think that all people are something special than from people who think that certain groups of people are special and everyone else is as dispensable and unworthy as dirt.

Bruce Baugh: That’s not at all what Peter Singer is doing. On net he’s very much expanding the circle of entities deserving of moral consideration, it’s just that babies get the short end of the stick in the process. And even then he doesn’t at all think that babies are unworthy as dirt, just that they are dispensable in the somewhat narrow sense that taking the life of one baby and replacing it with another baby is at most a very minor harm. He’s not in favor of “infanticide on demand,” he focuses on cases like disabled babies because he’s actively trying to prevent the suffering of the child, which is not a level of consideration people give to dirt.

The urging toward ethical treatment of animals may or may not mean not killing them, because there may or may not be ethical ways of and reasons for killing them.
The context of the discussion here seems to exist in a really naive zone of social ignorance, however understandable.
There was a segment of the Nuremburg Trials called the Doctors’ Trial specifically about the condemnation and adjudication of medical experimentation on the designated untermenschen, which included some pretty broad categories of what most of us today consider fellow human beings – Jews, yes, but also gays, Roma, anatomical freaks, as well as the disabled.
Well and good, you say, to that legal response to grotesque immorality.
At the same time that trial was taking place, and for decades before and after, medical experimentation in the US was conducted on the institutionalized, a large portion of them what we now call disabled as well as prisoners – the feeble-minded, lunatics and criminals. The voiceless and disregarded. Hideous experiments on already suffering creatures.
At the same time. And for decades before and after.
The Salk polio vaccine was developed with the use of just such experiments. The Cold War paranoias around A-bomb radiation gave license to many experiments on members of those same groups, to their extreme detriment, and for some, death.
It wasn’t about intentionally killing the irrecoverably infirm and societally “unfit”, it was about using them, allowing them, in the words of some of the bizarro scientists involved, to contribute “productively” to a society on which they were otherwise merely a burdensome resource drain.
No doubt there are still many otherwise right-minded folk who would consider, as did the elusive Dr. Joseph Mengele, the laboratory utilization of the “unfit” a more humane treatment than eugenic euthanasia, a less immoral, less heartless thing. Just as there are those who would consider sport-hunting the chimpanzee, or dogs, a less humane treatment than breaking their limbs and severing their spinal cords for purposes of medical research.
And no doubt there are many who’d just rather not know about it, or think about it. Which is why that shit happens.

On net he’s very much expanding the circle of entities deserving of moral consideration

Maybe you mean something quite specific here, but as put this is quite misleading. Holding that humans qua humans have special moral standing relative to members of non-human animal species does not at all commit me to the ridiculous proposition that non-human animals have no moral standing. Just for example, I can perfectly consistently hold that:

(1a) Humans have special moral standing, so that (1b) there are categorically distinct moral obligations that apply with respect to humans, (2) that we are morally obligated not to cause gratuitous pain to non-human animals, and (3) that e.g. killing an animal to eat it is not always (or even almost always) a case of causing gratuitous pain. You might think one or more of these is false, but they’re far from inconsistent. And frankly, trying to show that (1) and (2) are inconsistent is a hopeless task. (Though you’re welcome to try.)

More to the point, if I hold a position like this, I of course think that non-human animals are worthy of moral consideration; yet I also think that the way they enter into moral consideration is categorically different from the way other humans do.

And what’s funny about this is that all of us of course think that the moral obligations we owe to infants and children are categorically different than the ones we owe to adult humans—e.g., it’s perfectly right and proper to deny infants and children various rights and liberties that it would be utterly repugnant to withhold from adults.

(Somewhat more elliptically, all you need to arrive at a sane view in ethics is to give up the idea that moral behavior must always be about, or evaluated in terms of, ‘maximizing x‘ for one or another value of ‘x‘. Kinda like what Anderson said, paraphrasing Aristotle.)

P.s. 44 percent of the 6 million+ under-five-yr-old deaths in 2012 occurred in the first month, which means, obvs., that 56 percent didn’t. [All figures available via this page:
http://www.childinfo.org/mortality.html%5D

UserGoogol:

“species is in fact rather weak [moral] category.”

Consider this situation:

You are walking along a jungle trail as it is approaching dusk. You round a bend and, in the failing light, see what is obviously a large animal violently attacking what is, equally obviously, a human being. Although the light is not good, you are an excellent shot, and have no doubt that you can hit what you aim for. You shoot the animal.

For most of us, whether we think about the case from the point of view of the agent, or from the point of view of the spectator, no blame could be attached to this action. There may well be some cause for regret – in the killing of what could be a magnificent or rare animal – but this would not justify a charge of unethical behaviour, it would simply be an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of doing the right thing. It is one of the harder lessons of life that doing the right thing provides no guarantee that regret is inappropriate. However most of us would not expect the agent to feel remorse, the possibility of which is a necessary condition of guilt. Indeed, a charge of unethical conduct, and the blame attached to it, could more properly be laid if you were able to intervene in such a situation and did not do so, or did intervene, but to shoot the human being, or simply had, as Bernard Williams puts it, “one thought too many” before you shot the attacking animal. Here ‘but that is (or was) a human being’ does not seem morally arbitrary or selfish, nor to be “a rather weak [moral] category”. It seems to be, in fact, the mark of moral decency – in fact, of that most important of things “common human decency”.

Whenever my children and I talk about how people used to say they thought it was morally right to own people, and ‘were they just lying’ and so forth and ‘to themselves or just other people’, we often say, ‘what will it turn out we were totally doing that was 100% wrong and we pretty much knew it’ and the answer is always ‘eating meat.’ My great-grandchildren will regard me with actual physical as well as moral distaste for this reason. And there are many reasons to be a vegetarian other than moral ones that are concerns about animals’ lives! Destruction of the planet, immoral distribution of food resources with some people starving to death every minute of they day, etc. And FFS we live in Singapore! Would it be hard to rustle up a chickpea or some fresh pressed tofu or something? (Word to people who don’t like soy milk and tofu and stuff: it turns out you don’t like shitty soy products. It’s like you ate Wonder Bread and thought you didn’t like some fucking…not Italian bread because they pull jack moves, like Florentine bread which is bullshit, because it doesn’t have fucking salt in it. It’s not strictly their fault every single where else in the world is trying to make you eat a ciabatta, but. Bread from Paris, let us say. Fresh soy milk is GOOD. Fresh, sweet soy custard, which is a gently wobbly dessert with none of the “I’m full of agar” or “there’s a revolting skin on me” problems so rampant in custard-like-dishes, is delish.) Admittedly we eat little meat, but some still, and shrimp. We’re up to something obviously immoral and totally know it and don’t give a shit because bacon.

Maybe I’m just dense, but what’s the point of the intelligence-is-not-a-good-reason-for-killing-animals-bc-we-don’t-kill-babies argument? Couldn’t we classify groups based on their intelligence, as a general matter, for purposes of saying “people are special?” And once you’re in the class of “people” you’re, you know, a person entitled to special moral consideration?

This seems pretty close to how people actually think. Dolphins and whales and dogs are pretty smart and human-like as a rule and we get really squeamish when they suffer. But a snail? Not a lot of love lost their. Even if a super smart snail could read Shakespeare we wouldn’t give the whole class of snails any special consideration.

I don’t think Singer is anti-eating-vegetables, for instance, but you’ve got to work awfully hard to show how killing a Venus flytrap is fundamentally different than killing a tube worm or a primitive jellyfish. Is it the cell wall that matters? Or a certain arbitrary level of environmental interaction? Or does a Venus flytrap become an honorary animal despite being no different from any other plant in any meaningful way?

Just seems confusing to me. I’m missing the point of the argument.

To go further than that, what the issue for Singer is is “Does it suffer?” So I don’t think he’d really blanch at jellyfish-eating per se.

Couldn’t we classify groups based on their intelligence, as a general matter, for purposes of saying “people are special?” And once you’re in the class of “people” you’re, you know, a person entitled to special moral consideration?

I wouldn’t go with “intelligence” per se, but I do think that appealing to kind-membership as a ground of moral status is not at all implausible. And you can flesh out the idea of kind-membership through a set of basic capacities that are internal to that kind, ground obligations with reference to those capacities, and extend the obligations via kind-membership to individual members who lack some of the capacities in question.

Hmm, not quite sure why I’ve taken on the role of pushing a kind of dime-store Aristotelianism on this thread, but since I have, I’ll go ahead and recommend Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness, which is not unrelated, quite excellent, and not dime-store anything.

We’re notably inconsistent in the ways we treat other animals, taking the side of a dog against a coyote or wolf, for example, even though these aren’t necessarily different species. In most of our countries the thought of eating a chimpanzee or a gorilla is abhorrent, but unfortunately this isn’t universally the case. Humans are more closely related to rats and squirrels than to dogs or cats, but we tend to despise the former and prize the latter.

Intelligence isn’t the defining distinction. Our consumption of calamari is increasing at the same rate as our appreciation of the ingenuity of cephalopods. How we decide what is and isn’t food, or who lives and who dies, seems to be largely arbitrary.

Last month I visited an elaborate Halloween celebration in Laguna Beach, “The Pageant of the Monsters”, a pun on the tableaux which are a prized feature of the annual arts festival. The monsters roaming the grounds, mostly zombies, occasionally sneaking up and frightening the guests, reminded me of the homeless people who frequent our streets and are actually much scarier.

What’s so scary about the homeless people on your streets, Jim? I generally don’t find them any scarier than non-homeless-people. Probably less so, on average.

godoggo: the short answer is the paranoid schizophrenic who wants to discuss her persecution, and others with issues, shouting at the wind, or at shop windows. It would be nice to think they’d be okay with proper medication in an institutional setting, but that isn’t available, and it might not even be true. We don’t have a fix.

It’s a small town with a large homeless population and an uneasy equilibrium. For the most part they’re pretty easy-going, and only threatening in the sense that “there by the grace of God go I”. On occasion I’m thought to be one of them, unkempt, deeply tanned, haunting public places during working hours, and I never minded being cadged for a cigarette (though the morality of the act worried me: am I trying to kill them?)

There isn’t enough room for the long answer.

@67 – John, I think that’s exactly the reason one may find him frightening, too.

. He’s motivated by his abstract, rational theory

I don’t know how common that sentiment is, but I generally find people who elevate abstract reasoning over human empathy very frightening. And when they do this in spite of knowing and liking someone that their reasoning condemns, I find that even more frightening, because it shows their view isn’t amenable to normal human compassion. So the consistency actually makes this worse, not better.
I’ve been trying to think of a good analogy and the best I’ve been able to think of are gay rights. To me, people who don’t like gay people because ick!!! – people who typically have never knowingly met or talked to a gay person – are quite obviously wrong and bigots, but I don’t find them particularly frightening. On the other hand I find people like Robert P. George – who know gays folks, interacts with them frequently (and, I’m sure, very politely) but develops lengthy, very learned and rational theories on why they should remain second class citizens – much more frightening and sinister.
And the same is true for Singer – think he’s wrong about animal rights, but I’m a vegetarian with many vegan & animal rights activist friends, so I don’t find that particularly upsetting. It’s his consistency that I find frightening.
(On a sidenote, because LFC has mentioned it above, I find Singer’s work on poverty a complete disaster. Here he is getting taken apart by Tyler Cowen: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bih/peter_singer_and_tyler_cowen_transcript/ the exchange starts out with Singer admitting that he hasn’t thought much about immigration in the context of global poverty (!). As a utilitarian! To be clear, I don’t actually think much of Cowen in general. That’s makes this even more devastating)

He’s motivated by his abstract, rational theory.

And his abstract, rational theory just descended from heaven on a rope made out of angel’s knickers, clearly, and isn’t in any way shaped by any desire to support Singer’s personal biases.

In roleplaying — D&D style, a hobby I don’t have time for currently but I still keep in touch with — there’s this thing.
“Why are you angry that I raped and murdered the nuns! I’m just playing my character“.
“Perhaps… you should play a different character?”
“…”

This “abstract, rational theory” is the same order of thing, no?

From the Cowen/Singer thing linked by adam.smith:

“Cowen: Thank you, Peter. Let me first stress: I agree with most of what’s in your book….”

Sorry to have raised the issue of extreme poverty. It was ‘off topic’. Plus, obviously, vegetarianism and animal rights and infanticide are much more important than whether millions of people have access to basic sanitation, clean water, adequate food, minimal health care, jobs, education, etc.

And, again obviously, there is clearly no connection between Singer’s views on poverty and, e.g., his views on animal rights. Why would there be? As an analytic philosopher, he just goes from unrelated topic to unrelated topic, grazing on animal rights here, ruminating on infanticide there, and then munching on poverty when he tires of the other subjects. The notion that there might be possibly be some unifying conceptual threads is preposterous on its face.

P.s. I strongly suspect that if were to re-read Singer’s “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (1972), which I haven’t read in a very long time, or for that matter if I were to read the recent book he discusses w Cowen, I would be unable to agree w adam.smith that Singer’s work on poverty “is a complete disaster.”

Thomas Lynch@54: Peter Singer has said (and I would agree) quite explicitly that given a flat choice between the life of an adult human being and an animal, you should choose the human barring some peculiar extenuating circumstances. But the point is that this isn’t based on being a member of Homo sapiens, but it’s because of various cognitive properties that humans generally have. Even if it turned out that by some freak occurrence the human being lacked these properties, it would still be a perfectly reasonable assumption. The point is that just because two things are by and large correlated doesn’t mean you should valorize the second and then apply it in situations which are more ambiguous.

adam.smith@72: Hyperrationalism certainly has its flaws, (people who get tangled up in some technical mistake can move into very stupid territory that the more common-sense person would avoid) and it is a very good thing that most human beings possess empathy. But by and large I think empathy-based morality has more in common with the disgust-based homophobe than the rationality-based philosopher. You are looking at a situation and judging it based on the emotional response it invokes. It’s inevitable that emotions are going to come into play, (that’s just how the brain works) but you need to be able to sit back and determine whether those emotions are pointing you in the right direction. And that means rationality has to be able to overrule empathy when it determines that something is wrong. (And this is true of most systems of ethics, not just Peter Singer. Any practical ethical system is going to need us to occasionally have people we empathize with suffer.)

Fundamentally, I think morality is about fairness. People are faced with various conflicts in life, and ethics tries to figure out the way to go which a truly unbiased and reliable observer would choose. And if you’re trying to figure out how to be unbiased and reliable, rationality is really the tool to use.

bad Jim, his moral philosophy is based, as I understand it, on assessing whether animals can feel pain, suffering and fear for the loss of their own lives. That doesn’t seem abstract and rational to me. He’s trying to find something other than a category of thing (“human”) or an indefensible trick (“god”) on which to build a moral philosophy (“eating meat is okay”) that leads to the suffering and death of millions of sentient creatures.

@5 I don’t really know what to say when someone politely advocates actual baby killing.

Singer is no more an infanticide advocate than your local gynecologist.

@82 More precisely, Singer subscribes to the Principle of Equal Consideration of Interests. As he puts it, “this means that if an animal feels pain, the pain matters as much as it does when a human feels pain – if the pains hurt just as much. How bad pain and suffering are does not depend on the species of being that experiences it.”

The point isn’t that disabled people are fundamentally inferior. It’s that people have a fundamental right to a life which is as happy as possible, and if early in a person’s development it is possible to replace someone with someone who might live even a slightly happier life, then we should. Kill baby Peter Singer and replace him with a slightly more upbeat Petey Singer if you can. But you can’t fine tune your estimates like that, but you can at least say that a person born with some disability is probably going to suffer some hardships that an average person won’t, even if they will still live a relatively decent life in the grand scheme of things. To cause any misfortune to a person that could have been prevented is cruelty, and that’s what should trigger your empathy, not the theoretical talk about potential lives being lost.

“What’s so scary about the homeless people on your streets, Jim? I generally don’t find them any scarier than non-homeless-people. Probably less so, on average.”

Well a homeless person threatened to throw me off a bridge the other day so there is that….

Z, what do you think of attempts to cure physical disabilities? If disabled people live equally fulfilling lives as anyone, it would seem that such medical research is a waste of resources at best. (At worst, perhaps these researchers are suffering from the same blind spot as Singer.)

“The major difference being: Singer isn’t motivated by animus towards a despised ‘other’ group. He’s motivated by his abstract, rational theory.”

First, I’m not at all sure we know this, and second I’m not sure we should care. He is a professor and major thinker in the area of ethics and morality and he seems to have a complete lack of empathy. So either we have to think that empathy has little or nothing to do with morality, or we have to think that his discussions of morality are going to have an enormous black hole which he is completely incapable or unwilling to address, and while it is mostly clearly revealed in his discussions about this disabled we can certainly suspect that it exists throughout his ‘reasoning’.

And the reason the Nazis keep coming up with him is because he is actually advocating KILLING disabled babies because of his ‘abstract, rational theory’. Not essentially advocating. Not making arguments which might lead in that direction if taken to absurd lengths. That is his present and stated aim, and he is eager to have seminars about it.

There were lots of things wrong with the Nazis, but the one that freaks me out about the Nazi scientists specifically was that they lacked the human empathy to override their curiosity and this let them do horrible things to people because they wanted to see what would happen if you did certain things to people *and there was nothing in their moral frame to stop them*. As a matter of overall Nazi philosophy, that was (from our perspective) animus against Jews and ‘other races’. It also involved a dehumanization of the disabled as being a drag on the master race or some such garbage. But the point on the disabled was not necessarily the same as the point on Jews, and even the point on Jews is very close to Singer’s point on the disabled if you buy the Nazi’s silly point of view about racial evolution. The Nazi’s point was that for the good the rest of humanity the disabled should be removed from being a drain on the rest of humanity.

Sebastian, is your problem specifically the killing babies thing? At what point does it become wrong to prevent a disabled person from going down the path to becoming an adult person? Is it acceptable to select gametes for this purpose? Abortion?

If disabled people live equally fulfilling lives as anyone, it would seem that such medical research is a waste of resources

Honestly, I don’t see how it would seem that at all. People’s lives are fulfilled by many blessings and darkened by many obstacles. Sometimes, probably most of the times, disability is one of these obstacles. I am all for promoting the most general possible access to means of achieving whatever makes people happy and to means of minimizing whatever makes them miserable. So I am in favor of the most general access to potential cures and don’t think this is a waste of resources at all, just as I am in favor of the most general access to general health care and education even though I am sure one can live fulfilling lives without these goods. Likewise, the fact that I think women can live fulfilling lives does not entail that I think fighting against sexism is a waste of time and resource or the fact that I believe people from oppressed communities can live fulfilling lives does not mean that we shouldn’t fight oppression.

When it comes to Singer and disability I think his opponents are not engaged in a fight with just his ideas but with a whole nimbus of likely effects (many of which Singer would personally disapprove) were his beliefs more widely accepted. I can sympathize with this stance even though I don’t feel it with Singer because it’s the same way I feel about the ticking time bomb torture scenario. It might, might just be an abstract thought exercise in itself, but people who accept torture in the never-seen-in-the-wild ticking time bomb scenario are more likely to accept torture in much murkier circumstances. Ridicule, shaming, shunning, full-spectrum disapproval are necessary and right to prevent even the narrowest of torture advocates to get a toehold, even when someone is “just” asking you to participate in an abstract thought experiment. The mild mannered professor’s scenario may just be good brain exercise for his students, but a decade later you’ll find it repeated in a leaked or declassified memo justifying widespread torture of suspected insurgents. Likewise I think that advocates for the disabled see a shadow looming over Singer’s work that might spread in terrible ways were they to concede even a little.

Well a homeless person threatened to throw me off a bridge the other day so there is that….

In order to evaluate this claim, I feel compelled to ask: had he thrown you off the bridge, would you have stopped a runaway trolley from killing five people?

So you agree with Singer that disability results in a reduced quality of life?

No, that is an oversimplification which would usually come with an “all else being equal” assumption. But as D^2 once observed, this is exactly where one should point out, “no, let’s not assume that”. Life is not a separate bundle of experience, at least that is not how I experience my life how people I feel I know seem to experience theirs, and so very few things can be so evaluated, and certainly not something as personal, intimate and enduring as a disability. Most disability, in our current society, are accompanied with quality-reducing effects (by definition) , just as being of mixed ethnicity was accompanied by many quality-reducing effects just a few decades ago (and still is, in a large measure). But 1) this is in both cases in large part a reflection of transient social conditions which have proven highly dependent of social policies (many disabilities which were considered completely intolerable just 100 years ago are now so trivial that they barely elicit comment) 2) being disabled (or of mixed ethnicity) also has the potential of being a life-defining trait, and so is usually accompanied with quality-enhancing effects as well.

And who is to say which effects will weight heavier in the balance? And who, apart from the individual, has the moral right to perform the calculation anyway?

And who is to say which effects will weight heavier in the balance? And who, apart from the individual, has the moral right to perform the calculation anyway?

But aren’t you making the same calculation when you endorse efforts to cure disabilities? If disabilities may be life-defining and quality-enhancing, why would you support efforts which could eliminate them from the population?

If disabilities may be life-defining and quality-enhancing, why would you support efforts which could eliminate them from the population?

Because everything is in the may. And because I respect the right of the actual person with disability to make the calculation: if she thinks a cure can help her live a better life, then a moral society should look for cures; if she thinks she is fine with her disability but would be helped if there were more elevators, then a moral society should built elevators and if she thinks that her life is so horrible that she should die right now, then she should be helped to a clean suicide. This is really not that hard.

I admit that I know very little about his position (only what can gathered from the linked pieces above), but Singer seems to consider that other persons (typically parents of disabled children) have the right to weight the pros and cons in lieu of the individual. That I strongly disagree with.

L2P: if there was a super smart snail that could read Shakespeare, and communicate this to humans, I would sure as heck feel squeamish about eating it, but then, having spent a fair amount of time studying cephalopds I think there are octopuses that are smarter than most mammals, it does not however stop me from eating them. Of course the atavistic side of me would be terrified at the prospect of sentient molluscs, but honestly I think learning about a completely alien non tetrapod intelligence would make me just ask the snail: what do you think is acceptable to eat?

“Ben, are you calling MPAVictoria fat?”

Well I am carrying my winter weight….

But more seriously it was a very scary experience. Not that I am saying all homeless people are dangerous but many do have mental illnesses and I can see how being around large numbers might make a person nervous. As an example I now avoid the particular bridge where the homeless man who threatened me tends to hang out even though it is on my most direct route home (I walk to and from work).

So, if a baby is born blind and the doctors say they can cure the blindness immediately, the parents should not be able to make the decision for the child?

Frankly, there is a moment where I have to presume you see me as someone completely living outside the world of human experience. Of course parents will take tons of decisions for their children, and many of them will have life-long impact, that’s what being a parent means and this is a stubborn contingent biological fact that it has to be this way. That doesn’t mean they have the right to take any decision (specifically in the case here discussed, the decision to kill the baby, or the decision to treat the baby like complete dirt because it is allegedly non sentient) and that does very emphatically mean that they should take these decisions with great moral prudence, because they are unilaterally deciding to impact a life that is not their own.

There is something that I wish to add about your specific question. Notice that for some reasons you felt the need to state not any actual example but a highly speculative case (this is the reason I don’t answer you question, BTW, give me some actual example and I’ll gladly state my position). Wouldn’t it be wonderful if some severe disabilities could be cured risk-free in a blink of eye? And, one might continue, wouldn’t the parents deciding not to so cure their children be so horribly selfish? Well, I could discuss the implicit framing and explain what I find deeply wrong about it, but someone on some site did it with far greater eloquence already, so I’ll just link.

https://crookedtimber.org/2010/01/14/mighty-moloch-cure-me-of-my-severe-allergy-to-the-discourse-of-the-cure/

@105: What if the person wants to die now, but you had good empirical reason to believe that if you gave them certain psychoactive drugs they would change their mind? Do you still help them die, or do you give them the drugs, by force if necessary, for their own good? I don’t think it’s as clear cut as all that. And this example may not be purely hypothetical (although, not being a psychiatrist, I may not have gotten it quite right).

If the individual is incapable of weighing the pros and cons, which an infant certainly is (although it may be more debatable for the suicidally depressed), then someone else has not just the right but the responsibility to make the decision, if it can’t practically be deferred until they acquire the capability (or, for really severe disabilities or injuries, there is no reasonable prospect of them ever doing so — see the Schiavo case, which I don’t know how Singer would have judged). Although one might question whether parents are the best choice or merely the traditional one, the Schiavo case also demonstrates that different potential decision makers may disagree acrimoniously.

What I find absolutely astonishing about Singer is his ability to make people pretty much entirely give up on ethics.

For example, Tony Lynch @34 says the following :

But how – except by fiat – can one rule this property out? It is a real property (Species are scientifically respectable entities); and it is equally real that fellow membership in a species is a real property. And, of course, we and only we are fellow members of the species…It is not only ignoring this, but labelling it a vice, that leaves so many queasy when it comes to Singer’s moral pronouncements.

Similar reasoning appears to underlie a number of other comments here, as well as some of Singer’s academic detractors (including, it seems, Cora Diamond in the piece linked @59 above, to the extent that she offers any justification other than just “that’s just how things are”).

But this reasoning would utterly obliterate ethics as we understand it: As an attempt to come to an objective system which should applies equally regardless of who is appliyng it. It would replace this with, essentially, tribalism – “I owe greater duties to humans because they are like me”. Not only does the logic so easily extend to race, but also gender (“I owe greater duties to men because I am a man”), sexuality and indeed any criterion of difference.

Not only are these consequences intuitively despicable, but the reasoning deviates so far away from all currently understood methods of ethical thought that I’m not sure it can be considered an “ethical” system at all (although that may just be semantics). I find it astonishing that people are driven to such extremes in order to avoid the implications of Singer’s speciesism argument.

Even best-case scenario, it’s probably not going to be risk free or in the blink of an eye within the next decade. But why should that matter to your opinion? You already said that you disagree that parents “have the right to weight the pros and cons” of disability.

Yes, I disagree that parents have the right to weight the pros and cons of disability. And yet I also think (like any human being) that parents have the responsibility to take decisions requiring just that assessment. Tough shit being a parent! And the ungrateful brats don’t even thank you in the end!

So what do we do? We do our best with the greatest possible care, always keeping in mind that we are affecting a life that is not our own, that we have no right to do so and at the same time that it is our greatest duty to do so. With a lot of luck, love and rational thinking, it might just be that we will succeed and that our children will end up being autonomous being that will manage their life without us. And I’ll be ever so glad.

Anyway, now I’m off. Thanks for the conversation temp: I was occasionally snarky while you kept your messages impeccably polite and civil at all time; it was such a pleasure!

I find all the straw-Singers populating this thread a little stifling. Here is Singer on animal rights:

All the arguments to prove man’s superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering the animals are our equals.

Here is his position on sentience and the consumption of meat:

If possessing a higher degree of intelligence does not entitle one human to use another for his or her own ends, how can it entitle humans to exploit non-humans?

Singer is a vegetarian. He follows the principles he espouses, i.e. that regardless of species one should not use a living thing for one’s own ends, or treat it in a way that harms it. Yet here on this thread he is described as advocating infanticide and lacking empathy. How is this possible?

Singer’s work on infanticide from Practical Ethics can be found here. It relies strongly on the belief (reached, I think, through a process of reasoning) that birth is not a valid dividing line for deciding whether an infant can die. He presents two forms of utlitiarianism (total and partial), one that supports infanticide and one that doesn’t. He equates infanticide with the killing of non-sentient animals (something he himself does not do), and it is clear from the text that he is not advocating any kind of industrialized or state-supported form of involuntary euthanasia.

This doesn’t make him a moral monster or an advocate of infanticide. He finishes the section on infanticide by saying:

Nevertheless the main point is clear: killing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.

This may be radical, but it doesn’t make him a moral monster and the existence and practice of late-term abortions makes it very clear that most of society agrees with him.

It would be better if people argued with actual Singer, not the imagined Singer whose great evil is largely promulgated by anti-choice religious websites.

adam.smith @72:

Interesting interview that, tho more frustrating. I’d agree with your assessment of it. It’s ultimately annoying because if instead of Cowen it were someone on the left with a more compelling theory of institutional change, they could’ve destroyed Singer.

(I got as far as the colonialism bit and then had to stop, or might’ve terminally damaged my computer, so not sure what happens after.)

@prasad 125
Singer doesn’t just make an argument that saving starving babies should take precendence, he makes the argument that the principal practical consequence of this is that you should give more to Oxfam.
It’s that part of the argument that Cowen takes apart and that does matter a lot. A lot of people want to end global hunger. The idea that letting children starve in Africa is morally unacceptable – I’m not buying that that’s a particularly novel or useful argument. I find it trivially true. I find Singer’s appeal to private charity as the main solution to this rather ridiculous. And I’m surprised that I even have to argue this on a blog populated mainly by folks on the left (that, I take it, is part of the frustration that js expresses @124). (I don’t object of course, to charitable giving

I’m also surprised that people just gloss over the immigration part. That’s not just some “oh he forgot about a tiny detail” issue. The way the US, and even more so Europe and Singer’s home country Australia, defend their borders to keep poor people out is a huge moral outrage, directly tied to global poverty. And Cowen is absolutely right that more open immigration policies are probably the single most important humanitarian thing rich countries can do. The fact that they’re completely absent in a book on the ethical obligations of moral poverty? I really can’t put into words how much of a failure that is.

Where I think fits into the larger debate about Singer (this, to justify the excursion into his poverty-related work) is something that TM says on Belle’s post – Singer’s lack of epistemic humility. It’s incredibly arrogant to make sweeping arguments about a topic – in this case global hunger and poverty – with so little engagement with arguments about, well, how to fight global hunger and poverty. And I see that same willingness to make strong moral pronouncements before engaging with details in his arguments on the value of human life at various points (I think Singer’s exchange with Berubé is a case in point).

“The idea that letting children starve in Africa is morally unacceptable – I’m not buying that that’s a particularly novel or useful argument. I find it trivially true.”

I think most people find it non-obvious that they should act in response to millions starving faraway exactly as they would upon seeing a child drowning in a pool. No-one acts that way, not even Singer, so I’m amazed you’d regard *that* view as “trivial.”

re “he makes the argument that the principal practical consequence of this is that you should give more to Oxfam.”
and I’m also surprised that people just gloss over the immigration part. That’s not just some “oh he forgot about a tiny detail” issue.

This simply isn’t central to his ethical framework as I said, and you’re simply iterating over and over that getting the details right matters. I can’t imagine any philosopher, but especially a utilitarian, would disagree with this. I’m also extremely big on open borders (unlike the modal commentator here) but this seems like a bit much.
At least if merely not having considered/come out in support of immigration is enough to seriously undermine a philosopher, and demonstrates lack of “epistemic humility,” you won’t find that many philosophers alive worth reading. ISTM you’re just flogging a hobby horse here.

Maybe I am crazy, but I find myself able to read the long section Sebastian quotes, and not conclude Singer is depraved.

*Presupposed* in the quoted discussion (but argued for elsewhere) is a distinction between persons and non-persons. The entire passage about ‘replaceable’ infants makes no sense without it, for example. I notice neither argument against this distinction nor acknowledgement of it in the above criticism. Maybe none is needed, because only shallow souls and monsters have forgotten how to shudder. And Sebastian is nothing if not concerned to signal how deep and non-monstrous his soul is.

Instead, I was glad to see Singer address the case that’s most directly difficult for his position re euthanizing disabled babies. He might just stop after discussing acephalic baby, or baby whose suffering would be unendurable, but recognizes that he needs also to think about babies which would merely not maximize utility were their replacement an available option. It’s indeed the omission of this case that would be unpardonable. And Singer then sets forth what different utilitarian principles would imply for this case.

js. That’s not exactly what he’s saying. He says that individuals have an obligation to engage in individual acts of charity, which doesn’t exclude the possibility of some larger scale activism going on. His point (and the drowning child argument he keeps making emphasizes this) is that individuals have an obligation to act regardless of what the government is doing, as long as extreme poverty still exists. His viewpoint on what exactly individuals should do is still pretty simplistic, but I don’t think it’s particularly wrong for there to be a division of labor where Singer’s point is primarily that people should do something.

Singer would reply that it follows they should do everything non-ruinous to stop it.

Except he doesn’t say this. Just e.g., he doesn’t say that citizens in rich countries should mobilize and lobby their governments to stop doing their bit to create and perpetuate the structural conditions for widespread poverty. Surely non-ruinous, this. What he says is: give to private charity. And that’s a dumb approach if your topic is: global poverty and how to end it (not that there’s anything wrong with giving to charity of course).

“Sebastian H’s comment is a great example of the disingenuity of Singer’s opponents. The sections he bolds in Singer’s text are carefully crafted to make it look like Singer is advocating exterminating hemophiliacs.”

Wow, I make a huge blockquote from Singer’s own book and I’m carefully crafting what? The problem isn’t that Singer is personally advocating exterminating hemophiliacs. The problem is that he thinks the great moral system he wants to craft doesn’t have any strong objection to killing hemophiliac babies. The problem is that his moral system doesn’t have a sticking point that lets you object to killing the hemophiliac babies.

I disagree with his framework on multiple levels. I don’t think you get to kill a human being to make your life a little more pleasant. I don’t agree that babies don’t count as human beings. I don’t think it is generally ok for parents to kill their children in the hope that other children will be easier to deal with. I don’t agree that his method of determining which beings count and which ones don’t is a good one. I DO agree that given his framework, you have to come to his conclusions. I just happen to think that is an excellent argument that his framework is a monstrous one. The interesting thing is that I had somehow softened his argument in my head from when I last read it–as if I couldn’t believe someone would actively argue something so grotesque.

Being a vegetarian doesn’t insulate someone from being a moral monster. Like at all.

I don’t see why there can’t be an ecology of responses to poverty, with Singer focusing on advocating for private charity. There are better things available to say about private charity than merely “nothing wrong with it.”

More to the point, rhetorically this is the *harder* case for him to make. Any fool can argue “go lobby your government to not be evil.” Singer’s arguing instead that you have an obligation to give a large fraction of your income away. Regardless of which elected representative you may also mail handwritten letters to – not that there’s anything wrong with that either ;) That anyway is what I meant by “non-ruinous.”

Sorry, I don’t want to keep going over this again and again and again. But Singer seems to me to have no, _no_, analysis of the structural causes of poverty and so of how these structural factors need to be addressed if the problem of global poverty is to be addressed in any meaningful way. So I find his approach to be dumb.

You’re welcome to respond to this, but since we’re not going to convince each other anyway, I’m going to stop repeating myself.

js., the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation have done quite a bit for poverty and have strong principles on poverty alleviation. There’s a lot of simple, straightforward work that can be done with e.g. HIV in sub-Saharan Africa that will make a big contribution to poverty alleviation. These things may not be as great as structural solutions, but ordinary people who read a book by Peter Singer have no role to play in those structural solutions – what proposal do you have for you, personally, to reform health systems and lower the price of AVT in South Africa? – and private charitable contributions do give individuals some influence in those areas, as well as the chance to make a difference however imperfect.

If Singer had said “don’t vote for a party that will change the structural problems, give money instead,” you would have a point. Has he said that?

Should a philosopher address the problem you want him to address?

He’s the one hectoring people on how to end global poverty, dude. I don’t give a shit what he addresses. I just ask he has some idea about what he claims to be addressing, and as far as I’m concerned “global poverty” and “the structural causes of global poverty” are not two separable issues.

Sebastian H, if you won’t believe that Singer follows his own ethics, why do you accuse him of being a moral monster?

Sebastian, do you think the person/non-person distinction matters? Or do you regard the passages you quoted as showing such an approach is broken? Or is it instead that you believe infants are in fact persons? Your abhorrence of Singer’s view comes through loud and clear, but the basis for it or analysis of where roughly he’s wrong isn’t clear imo.

Re “Singer seems to me to have no, _no_, analysis of the structural causes of poverty”

Even an actual clickable Amazon URL to his frickin book on the ethics of globalization (with a moderately long discussion of structural factors in global poverty) can’t count as _some_ analysis of the Right Sort? Yeah.

Even an actual clickable Amazon URL

And awards for thinking about that stuff…yet the comment thread has devastated Peter Singer!

@prasad
1. You keep saying that solutions aren’t Singer’s expertise, that I can’t expect him to get the details write etc. Well, why the hell does he offer them then? The exhortation to give more to charity dates back to his 1972 article and is a centerpiece of his more recent book. If he can’t get the details on this write he shouldn’t write about this. He should have left things at the moral analysis of the issue. But he didn’t and I don’t see why it’s somehow unfair to attack a substantial part of his argument.

2. But aren’t donations the best any individual can do? Well, no. Since, apparently, silly thought experiments are the way to go, let’s take the drowning child. Let’s imagine there wasn’t just one drowning child. But every day, a couple of children drown in pools and wells in your immediate neighborhood.
If your main reaction to that is – well OK, I’m going to spend 2hs a day watching out for drowning kids in my neighborhood, I think you’re a misguided fool and you don’t understand the severity of the situation. I would hope (and I would argue that it is morally imperative) that you would move heaven and earth to fight the structural causes of those mass drownings — what do I know – rally, petition, engage in direct action, run for office, if you want to spend money help to fund a movement that bans backyard pools – I’m sure there is more. Just try to think of the things that would actually happen in a neighborhood with 50 drowned kids in a year and then compare them to the pathetic suggestion to give more money to charity.

sorry, late here – “…can’t get the details right” *2

Sebastian H: Peter Singer does not think that babies are not sentient beings. That is not even remotely his position. Of course babies have experiences, and of course if you take a baby and poke at it with a stick or whatever, it is going to experience pain and you shouldn’t do that. His point is that they don’t have much preferences that go beyond immediate pain and pleasure, nor the capability to even develop them until they grow up a bit. Thus, since their desires extend only to the immediate, to end their life is not to cause them any harm as long as you do it painlessly. But is still a very bad thing to cause suffering to them for no good reason. And in fact he has explicitly argued that much of infant euthanasia should be done not for the sake of children who are disabled, but for the sake of children who are born with some horribly painful condition which will cause them to die soon anyway, precisely because a newborn being in pain is a bad thing.

another example: if you care about human trafficking, your personal ability to change that issue is minimal. But if you give money to a good charity they will change laws, as they have done in e.g. Sweden and the UK, and you will have had some effect on the issue. The alternative – letter writing – will not be as effective.

Substance – the drowning kids are Singer’s initial example, the pool is mentioned by prasad above. That’s why I use those.

Yes, quite right. But if, say, six cents would cover a pool in said killer pool neighbourhood wouldn’t you give $20 to solve the problem? Probably quicker than all that other crap.

UserGoogol, initially you appear to be violently agreeing with me. I agree that Singer thinks babies are non-sentient beings. (Or at least not enough to count as persons). He doesn’t appear to have trouble with killing being that he thinks are non-sentient (or whatever he calls it). He has trouble with causing them pain. He is a vegetarian for various reasons, including largely that he believes you can’t raise meat without causing pain.

But on the other hand he positively advocates killing disabled babies (presumably in a painless way).

“And in fact he has explicitly argued that much of infant euthanasia should be done not for the sake of children who are disabled, but for the sake of children who are born with some horribly painful condition which will cause them to die soon anyway, precisely because a newborn being in pain is a bad thing.”

No. He quite explicitly writes that even if the hemophiliac could have a good life, some other kid could have a better life which wouldn’t trouble her parents as much, and therefore killing her is morally fine.

That’s the monstrous part that his personal vegetarianism doesn’t protect against.

Why on earth anyone should want to dismiss an eloquent, persuasive book(…)

I’m amazed to find such strong opposition to someone who’s derived an obligation to “give till it hurts” advocating to the public to follow that rule in their lives. Of all the the stuff to criticize in his framework, _this_ is where you’re gonna pick your battles?

Last thing I’ll write on this: I criticize it because I think the solution he promotes is incredibly inadequate given the moral issue he presents. My point is that the two aims of the book that geo quotes just don’t measure up. If you “think about your obligations to those trapped in extreme poverty” and you can’t come up with anything more radical than giving more to charity, I just find that bizarre & disappointing. I think you have an obligation to address the underlying injustices and not provide some band-aids. And yes, I do think focusing on the one distracts from the other.
“There is no right way to live in a false world” was Adorno’s way of putting this.

I think I have a better sense of your perspective then. That makes more sense. I think your responses are kind of flawed in return but I can certainly appreciate where you’re coming from more.

Sebastian H, your whole last paragraph is highly flawed. Newly born infants cannot live without imposing on their parents – the fact that they’re no longer inside one of those parents doesn’t change the fact that they are imposing a huge burden on their parents. In previous eras this did indeed lead to infanticide. And Singer’s “because abortion” argument doesn’t work the way you say: his “because abortion” argument doesn’t claim we can kill born babies because we kill unborn babies; it points out that birth isn’t special and argues that, if we accept abortion as a necessary evil, the non-specialness of birth mitigates against infanticide.

Your problem is that you are unwilling to reject the specialness of birth. Which means that you can concede Infant A could be legitimately killed, but INfant B with the same condition could not be merely because Infant B was (accidentally) born premature. So Infant B has to live a short and brutal life of suffering and emergency medicine by a quirk of luck.

Z:

How do we know that they do not wish not to die? Did the babies tell us somehow?

Unless you are a vegetarian, this argument should have no meaning to you. Are you a vegetarian? If not, why do you care what the babies can tell us? If you are not a vegetarian, you support the industrialized slaughter of any creature that cannot tell you it does not wish to die, even though anyone with half a brain can guess from their behavior that animals don’t like to die.

I would be very interested to see how many people arguing Singer is a moral monster are vegetarians. Because if you’re not, you’re a moral monster. Singer has never killed a baby, but if you’re not a vegetarian you daily torture and murder multiple animals that don’t want to die. That makes you a moral monster, surely?

Newly born infants cannot live without imposing on their parents

But surely they can! If the parents are unable or unwilling to take care of a child, it is surely the responsibility of the society to do so (as it indeed does in civilized societies).

In previous eras this did indeed lead to infanticide

Yes, and exactly for that reasons I regard these previous societies as extremely unjust and immoral. Surely we want higher standards for ours.

Your problem is that you are unwilling to reject the specialness of birth

I realize that you are writing this to Sebastian H, but still, it quite an extraordinary statement: birth is very special in the sense that before, the foetus is an alien parasite living off someone else’s body. Surely, that gives the owner of said body a say in the matter. After birth, the child is a highly dependent being, but there is no special individual who has to bear the burden of the necessary care all by herself by virtue of biological necessity. Usually, the same person who did biologically support the life of the foetus ends up doing most of the care after birth, but if that person can’t or wouldn’t, then many others can. This is very different. Also, I would think this is recognized as a truism, but apparently not.

Unless you are a vegetarian, this argument should have no meaning to you.

Wait, what?? The fact that I personally may be a moral monster or not has absolutely no bearing on the strength of any given argument, and of course that is true for me, that is true for Peter Singer (whom I never accused of being a moral monster anyway). Earlier, UserGoogol gave a summary of Singer’s argument in four very precise, very carefully delineated clauses, making the logical structure of the argument absolutely crystal clear. I pointed out that premise 1 was weak and that premise 2 was very weak, with its strict negation much more plausible. Hence, Singer’s reasoning (as outlined by UserGoogol) is extremely weak. Apply his reasoning but with the much more empirically solid premise that babies wish not to die and you get completely different conclusions than his. And this is true quite independently of the truth of any of the following statements.

1) I am not a vegetarian. Also, I have in many occasions in my life tortured to death human beings.
2) I am indeed a vegetarian.
3) Peter Singer is a moral monster, the equivalent of Hitler or worse.
4) Peter Singer is a moral person.

adam.smith @109
Thomas Pogge is hugely more informed and – at least from the perspective of this non-philosopher — a lot more interesting than Singer on the topic [of global poverty].

The back cover of my paperback copy of Pogge’s World Poverty and Human Rights (2002) says “all royalties from this book will go to Oxfam UK” and also carries two blurbs praising the book in fulsome terms, the first of which is by none other than Peter Singer (“a wonderful book that could do an immense amount of good”).

Dear John,
You’ve defended Peter Singer against a number of probably unfair accusations. But I wonder: what do you make out of my criticism, that is that Singer’s reasoning (in its own terms) is quite logically weak? It would seem that if your reasoning leads you to a horrifying conclusion with very concrete real world impact, then you have a serious duty to double check its logic is really impeccable?

@170 This nails it, pretty much. If Sebastian and others want to label Singer a positive advocate for infanticide, then they might as well dispense with the pleasantries and label us pro-choicers pro-abortionists.

faustusnotes @ 170: “Newly born infants cannot live without imposing on their parents – the fact that they’re no longer inside one of those parents doesn’t change the fact that they are imposing a huge burden on their parents. ”

There’s an important difference you are overlooking: With a fetus that hasn’t been born yet, there is no way of enforcing its alleged right to life without infringing on the pregnant woman’s bodily autonomy. With already-born infants, some third party (such as an adoptive family, or failing that, the state) can take over the necessary responsibilities. Sure, babies and young children can’t live autonomously, but how many full-grown adults can? We all live in the context of a society, and most of us would die very quickly if separated from that society and made to fend for ourselves in some sort of wilderness or deserted island.

Re the passage Sebastian quoted upthread, and this paragraph in particular:

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.

This I find very dubious. First, I reject the act-to-maximize-total-happiness view. (Cf. a previous thread’s discussion of this w/r/t Rawls v. utilitarianism.) Favoring the reduction of needless or avoidable or remediable suffering, which seems right, is not the same as favoring the maximizing of ‘total happiness’. Second, even if one accepts the maximize-total-happiness view, there’s no guarantee that the woman in this (imaginary) example will proceed to have a child who is healthy/’normal’ — so you can’t say with certainty that the death of the disabled infant “will lead” to the “birth of another…with better prospects of a happy life.” Third, this phrase — “if killing the haemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others (emphasis added)” — is a weird phrase, since it is somewhat likely — isn’t it? — that the killing of that infant would have an adverse psychological effect on the parents. At least, it’s not unreasonable to think it might. So this whole passage seems strange to me.

I suspect one can get to some of Singer’s conclusions on poverty without accepting the maximize-total-happiness view, which is why I am a lot more comfortable with his views on poverty (and animals, probably) than with (what seem to be) his views on disability/infants/etc.

Once again, there’s an enormous uncharted space between anencephalic babies, and healthy babies: for example, babies who will with 90% certainty die before they’re five, and will spend those five years (if that) in a hospital bed, with needles poking them, in pain. Or who aren’t in pain because they can’t register pain, and so sit for an hour with an injury, not crying. It’s obscene to tell people they should be able to sit with that child for five years straight while nurses poke them with needles, because it’s possible to imagine a saint who would. And that although of course no one expects them to be a saint, to take any action away from possible sainthood makes them a moral monster.

But Singer isn’t apparently interested in that middle ground, any more than in the middle ground between a person’s family and immediate “village” (as if that made sense in today’s world) and the most remote people possible.

Whoops, what Prasad said.

Ah, for F’s sake, what the hell am I saying? Why am I rambling about stillborn children? I have flu and I really shouldn’t comment when I’m not thinking straight. Please laugh at the newbie and carry on while I exit around the back.

p.s. Though a lot might depend on the detailed circumstances of a particular situation, as bianca says.

@185
Sorry if I’m barging into the conversation
No need to apologize for that.

this seems like a thoroughly unfair swipe at Singer.

How so please?

Many people have commented on Singer arguing that the point of birth doesn’t logically delineate something significant. That argument could only be made surely if he has discounted the person bearing the baby.

I’m quite happy to be corrected – it would be nice to know that a well known ethicist has considered the involvement of the definitely sentient, definitely rights bearing human being when opining on the subject of the possibilites of sentience and rights of the baby/foetus/infant – but you can’t just declare me unfair without bothering to explain why.

Katherine, I linked to Singer’s account of his infanticide position above. In that text he takes the woman’s right to abortion for granted. The reason the person bearing the baby is discounted here is that (as far as I know) Singer takes her right to make decisions over the baby before birth as assumed. The reason he is disputing the validity of birth as a delineater is that he wants to extend those rights to after the birth.

Certainly when I “discount” the person bearing the baby in my comment above it’s because I take her rights for granted – I assume them complete – up until the point of birth. My suggestion (like Singer, I suppose) is that they shouldn’t stop there. That a woman who has a premature birth shouldn’t lose her rights a week earlier than someone else who doesn’t. Perhaps this also means I concede the personhood of the foetus relevant to the mother’s abortion rights (in that I don’t think the foetus has personhood, thus the mother’s rights supercede its); and that I’m clear-eyed enough to ponder the possibility that this personhood doesn’t magically appear in the baby just because it passed the barrier of the woman’s flesh.

I think when most women make the personal moral decision to abort, they do take into account their personal view of when humanity begins. Many women, I think, accept that humanity may have begun, but count their own rights more important, or accept this humanity is questionable; others choose not to abort because they can’t believe the foetus not yet human. The disputed nature of personhood at this stage of development is part of the reason why I think this decision should be personal and not restricted by society.

Incidentally, I think a lot of work was done on this question of women’s ability to make moral choices in this situation by Leslie Cannold, who was one of Singer’s students.

faustusnotes,

It’s perfectly possible to hold that the moral status of humans is categorically different from that of other animals. You may think that such a position is monstrous, but it’s not impossible to hold, nor incoherent or internally inconsistent. I won’t elaborate more because I already have up above, and I’d rather not repeat myself.

All I really want to say is that you might want to separate substantive (tho deep seated) differences from accusations of inconsistencies or fallacies.

Humans who keep companion animals usually end up having to decide when or if to euthanize them after some years. The human usually wishes that the animal could live forever, despite its negative economic utility, and has to make a decision regardless of the animal’s inability to express preferences for life or death. Most companion animals euthanized by their humans are put down with a sorrowful feeling of duty to spare the animal from suffering — not because the human is bored, or the animal is no longer making money, or because caring for it is inconvenient. Sometimes these colder motivations prompt the decision but I think that more suffering would be caused than prevented if humans could no longer make this choice for their companion animals, and the animals had to die of natural causes.

Singer very explicitly does not want to appeal to the sentiments of “animal people,” so almost all of his comparisons are with agricultural animals. But if we consider how people generally make decisions for companion animals, I think that giving the choice of infanticide to parents is not likely to be monstrous on balance. There might be the rare instance of callous parents disposing of a newborn hemophiliac as inconvenient, just as there may be the rare dog who is put down because it sheds too much, but it seems likely to me that more suffering will be avoided with the choice available than it not available, because most people aren’t actually callous that way. Most will only choose euthanasia as a last resort. Barring that choice altogether to protect the rare infant with deathly callous parents seems likely to me to cause more suffering than it prevents.

I don’t think that humans should have to suffer longer than dogs when grievously ill. That’s why I voted yes when my state legalized assisted suicide. And pretty much all the arguments for preventing death given here were advanced by the “no” side, plus the interesting idea that anyone in a state of mind to ask for death isn’t qualified to make life or death decisions.

js., I read halfway through Diamond before my work destroyed my life; I wasn’t entirely impressed, but I didn’t get to the meat of it. I will revisit when I have more time to do anything other than hold lame half-arsed opinions.

I’m not comfortable with a lot of Singer’s utilitarianism either, and I get the icks from some of his conclusions, but I can’t see any of his critics offering better practical ethics; and most of his critics seem to be anti-abortion religious types, so any morality they have to offer is clearly a wasteland from the get-go.

Why not wild [animals] though, I wonder?

Maybe he wanted to focus on agricultural animals because it’s the easier case for humans to act to reduce suffering. I’m not sure.

As I said way upthread, I think that technical hedonism mainly produces results that are in line with my ethical intuitions, but it bumps up against my intuition about preserving wild ecosystems. Technical hedonism and protecting nature are incommensurable values when nature contains predators and prey, because prey will do a lot of suffering.

For now I can fall back on “human knowledge of ecosystems is so limited that intervention against predators would probably increase suffering,” but it goes beyond that. I don’t think I would be comfortable with driving wild predators extinct or keeping them fenced off from prey even if improved knowledge enabled it to happen without unpredictable side effects.

But if we consider how people generally make decisions for companion animals, I think that giving the choice of infanticide to parents is not likely to be monstrous on balance.

During all this discussion, I haven’t noticed any specific mention of one of the commonest forms of infanticide: female infanticide. Sex-selective abortion and infanticide is a huge problem in India and China: saying infanticide is morally legitimate while ignoring all the inequalities in society that lead to some sub-groups being targeted leads to some horrendous results. I haven’t read much Singer: has he tackled such issues of gender inequality at all, or is he sticking to abstract thought experiments and ignoring the identity of the likely victims?

Dear faustusnote @195,
Your post is truly amazing and I would seriously wish you read it and compare it to what I wrote. So, to start

If the ability of animals to communicate their desire not to die is irrelevant to your decision about whether to kill them, why do you raise it about children?

I didn’t raise it. We are not discussing my ethics in case you haven’t noticed, just Peter Singer’s. According to UserGoogol, Peter Singer assumption 2 is that babies don’t want not to die. This looks patently false to me. So Peter Singer is conducting a reasoning on a patently false premise. This is his problem, not mine. And again, it is a truism that I didn’t think I would have to explain, much less twice, that this is a problem for his reasoning whether or not I am a moral monster and whether or not I am personally a morally consistent person.

You are a pro-euthanasia vegetarian? […] Or is it the case that you support the slaughter of animals despite your lack of knowledge of their wishes?

Well, even if I weren’t, this would have no bearing on the issue here discussed, as you really should realize or stop a long time to think about it, and honestly the answers to these questions belong to the commenting section of a post entitled Commenter Z, round 2, but since you ask, after all why not? I support euthanasia, as indicated above, and I oppose the unnecessary slaughter of animals (that is, I don’t oppose the killing of some vector of infectious diseases, for instance). Will you now please shut up about this and discuss the argument?

This isn’t about you being a moral monster (though I concede on the balance of probabilities there is a very high chance you are)

Thanks, greatly appreciated.

Z, go back through the thread. At 169 (sometimes the numbers don’t work at CT, but I think it should be fixed by now) you wrote:

How do we know that they do not wish not to die? Did the babies tell us somehow?

so you see, you raised the issue of whether or not babies can communicate their wishes.

At 170 I pointed out that this should not be relevant to you (or I suppose I should have said “anyone”), unless you are a vegetarian. You then responded (at 172) with

Wait, what?? The fact that I personally may be a moral monster or not has absolutely no bearing on the strength of any given argument,

I guess this means you missed the point I was leading up to. I assumed you were somehow responding to my point at 17o, and so at 195 I responded to the point that you raised (and now seem not to understand) by saying:

If the ability of animals to communicate their desire not to die is irrelevant to your decision about whether to kill them, why do you raise it about children?

So you see, you raised it. Singer’s point is that they don’t care about whether they live or die; your response (again, I point you to your comment at 169) was that we don’t know if this is true because we can’t ask them.

And again in 208 you claim that Singer’s original position (babies don’t are about being alive) seems false to you. Your reasoning appears (going on your comment at 169) that we don’t know because we can’t communicate with them. So it appears that the ability to communicate is central to your judgment about whether a living thing can decide if it wants to die or not. Is this an incorrect summary of your position? If incorrect, surely this is your fault for raising this point at 169?

So my question is (and was, after 169): do you accept that not being able to communicate with a thing is valid grounds to object to its murder? If so, then you must be a vegetarian. If not, you must have some other grounds for objecting to the infanticide you seem to think Singer is advocating, that isn’t about whether or not a baby wants to live (since you have now established that the ability to determine whether it wants to live is irrelevant to your decision about whether to kill it). Which is it?

“Many societies ban abortion beyond a certain stage. One assumes this is because they assign the child full personhood and once they do, the mother’s rights don’t count.”

Well, I suspect the bans on abortion originally had nothing to do with personhood or mother’s rights, but were all about creating new workers, soldiers, and mothers, for the tribe. And that is where we need to start. Morality is a mechanism for organizing society, not protecting individuals; if it does protect individuals, that’s only coincidental. China is now deemed overpopulated, and there abortion is a duty. Except, of course, for sex-selective abortions, which is a terrible thing. All this talk about rights and personhood is really a side-show, intellectual rationalizations, out of necessity to overcome the age-old intuition (that abortion is wrong).

Perhaps the question should be not whether the baby/foetus has rights to personhood, but who has the right to take those rights, or the potential for those rights, from them. Before birth, their bearer, incubator and sole provider. Afterwards?

Exactly. Thank you so much Katherine. And to me the only moral answer is clearly no one (anybody of a different mind has to propose an explicit procedure to choose the someone). On the contrary, we have a moral duty to assist the baby so that she can make the most of the (future) person she is.

I don’t think it’s detailed policy development to ask what ‘infancy’ means in this context. Since the the argument seems to be that there is no moral moral difference between a baby the day before birth and the day after birth, well, what’s the moral difference between a baby on the day it is born and the day after. And the day after that. And the day after that. Or a week or a month aftr that? If the significant point vis a vis the attainment of personhood isn’t birth, then when is it?

“I agree with you that his argument seems pretty weak. The problem is that all the other arguments seem weak, too. ”

Well then this gets back to why people end up with such a really strong reaction against Singer. He’s making a weak argument, with super-obvious objections, in favor of infanticide. And not just ‘going to die anyway’ infanticide, but eugenic infanticide of babies whom he admits could live perfectly good lives a stance last seen openly with the Nazis. And he does it pompously from a hyper-intellectual technocrat stance where you are supposed to defer to his naked intellect because regular people with emotions are too caught up to make decisions about ethics.

Which pretty much gets the “Ummm fuck you, you’re crazy” response that seems perfectly appropriate.

And then again I don’t see that the arguments against infanticide are equally weak. They look pretty good to me from here. But even if they were, I don’t see why we should err on the side of “Oh well, I guess killing them should be ok then.”.

@218: did you deliberately intend that as a reference to the paradox of the heap, or just reinvent it? In either case, it seems to apply here. Any decision about how to label the continuum of developmental stages into the people and the nonpeople is to some degree arbitrary. However, so is the division between the human and the nonhuman, the capable of suffering and the incapable of suffering (does Singer really want us all to spare the suffering of the innocent clam, or is it only large, charismatic, relatively brainy animals we should avoid eating?) and even the animal and the vegetable.

And it’s no help to say that we won’t police the morality of wolves because they can’t be expected to know any better: then you also need a standard for deciding which beings you will police, as well as one for which potential victims are deserving of protection from them.

You still have to get along in a world in which lots of things have to eat other things to live, almost always their own very distant relatives, and you’re one of them. So you have to be willing to draw some sort of line around beings that you won’t kill for your own survival, even if it must be arbitrary, or have no such limits whatsoever.

(does Singer really want us all to spare the suffering of the innocent clam, or is it only large, charismatic, relatively brainy animals we should avoid eating?)

He definitely rejects assigning protections to animals on the basis of size, charisma, or traditions. In 1985 he wrote:

My own view is that it is reasonable to suppose all vertebrate animals to be capable of feeling pain. With invertebrates the matter becomes more speculative but some invertebrates also seem likely to experience pain. In each case we must look at the nature of the creature and its nervous system. In some cases a decision will be difficult to reach, but this is no more an argument against my position than the parallel difficulty of saying when a person is bald is an argument against the existence of baldness.

I think he’s overstating the difficulty a little. Unlike judging baldness or heaps, there is the possibility of new material evidence coming in. For example, molluscs are now known to contain nociceptors, neural cells specializing in detecting noxious environmental stimuli such as mechanical stress or burning heat. They too avoid painful stimuli and have their avoidance reactions attenuated by treatment with analgesics such as morphine.

I agree that policing the morality of predators is a hard problem. He defers it on the eminently sensible grounds that humans have a long record of intervening in ecosystems but causing disastrous side effects, but I think it’s still a hard and intuition-challenging question even if humans could anticipate all side effects.

You still have to get along in a world in which lots of things have to eat other things to live, almost always their own very distant relatives, and you’re one of them. So you have to be willing to draw some sort of line around beings that you won’t kill for your own survival, even if it must be arbitrary, or have no such limits whatsoever.

But he doesn’t argue against killing for survival. He argues against inflicting suffering and killing when it won’t avoid comparable suffering or death. If it’s down to your life or the deer’s, you can kill the deer; it’s no better for you to suffer and die than for the animal to suffer and die. But the vast majority of human beings are not wilderness hermits or hunter gatherers who rely on wild game to survive. The vast majority of animals that suffer and die for human use do so for such comparatively trivial reasons as “pork is delicious” or “fur feels wonderful.” There’s a double utilitarianism at work here: he writes mostly about the most common sufferings inflicted and the least ethical reasons for such suffering, which overlap in large measure.

The Inquest
by William Henry Davies

I took my oath I would inquire,
Without affection, hate, or wrath,
Into the death of Ada Wright –
So help me God! I took that oath.

When I went out to see the corpse,
The four months’ babe that died so young,
I judged it was seven pounds in weight,
And little more than one foot long.

One eye, that had a yellow lid,
Was shut – so was the mouth, that smiled;
The left eye open, shining bright –
It seemed a knowing little child.

For as I looked at that one eye,
It seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
‘What caused my death you’ll never know –
Perhaps my mother murdered me.’

When I went into court again,
To hear the mother’s evidence –
It was a love-child, she explained.
And smiled, for our intelligence.

‘Now, Gentlemen of the Jury,’ said
The coroner – ‘this woman’s child
By misadventure met its death.’
‘Aye, aye,’ said we. The mother smiled.

And I could see that child’s one eye
Which seemed to laugh, and say with glee:
‘What caused my death you’ll never know –
Perhaps my mother murdered me.’

Sorites paradox, just FYI.

In the terms that UserGoogol@165 set, I think the intuition of the ordinary person (well, the ordinary non-theist, pro-choice, anti-infanticide, possibly meat-eating person) is easy to describe, and perfectly reasonable.

They see the sentient experiences of a baby and those of the self-aware adult as part of single, continuous neural process. They won’t accept that those sentient experiences are a person in the future but not in the present–there is a single mind that has both sets of experiences at different times. When they see your baby picture, they say “that’s you” not “that’s the baby that existed before you did”.

Under that common sense view of identity, a person is an existing sentient neural process that’s eventually capable of self-awareness. A newborn meets that definition. A potential (not yet conceived) person does not–they are eventually capable of self-awareness, but they are not yet sentient. Animals are sentient, but some of them may not ever be capable of self-awareness.