This reminds me of a recent discovery about the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. As I was reading it, I realized that Solomon's discoveries were completely independent of Adam and Eve, the Original Sin, and our fallen nature. Somehow, those important stories from the book of Genesis were not anywhere in Solomon's consciousness. He was spinning his wheels. The whole book is just puffs of air and vanity, alright.
You can probably guess why this came to mind. Singer's perfect world is also completely void of our fallen nature. There are a zillion ways to characterize what is wrong with society. But you can't talk seriously about how to improve it without acknowledging this.
Singer is looking at the gameboard without understanding the rules. I am imagine that he and I could put together an experiment to test my hypothesis, although I have a day job that this does not fall within.
Original sin wasn’t in Solomon’s consciousness because it’s a Christian idea that was developed 1,000 years after Solomon supposedly lived and a few hundred years after Ecclesiastes was composed.
Here is one from a Straussian type of bifurcation...
Say a relatively benign society was faced with an intransigent society of which by regular unbiased polling 99 percent of their population was willing and ready to sacrifice their own lives to kill off your society. And your society posed no threat to them. If you had a choice to defend yourselves by starving them or bombing them then which would be more ethically acceptable?
Clearly you must provide them a million meals per day, medical care up to and including brain surgery, probably also ongoing financial aid if not just arming them directly . . .
Over the years, I've emailed repeatedly trying to get another prominent utilitarian, Sam Harris, to respond to the following question: You claim that no one deserves punishment because the universe is deterministic and hence there is no free will. But of course that means no one deserves anything, including non-punishment. So what would be wrong with employing Philip K. Dick's precogs to eliminate some of the suffering caused by crime? To leave the realm of science fiction, how about we just lock up say the predicted worst 5% of black boys (because race is in the algo') before they do anything wrong? Let 'em out when their testosterone has dipped low enough, say age 50? Crickets.
On Julie and Mark, I'd say they've each imperiled their own ability to enjoy healthy sexual, and ultimately, romantic, relations in the future. Since Haidt took the liberty of adding interpretive detail, I'll respond in kind. Part of what they enjoyed was the frisson created by the clandestine and transgressive nature of their congress. Well if that's what gets you off, good luck finding a partner together with whom you can go out into the world and build a life. Or as the ideal is expressed in Genesis 2:24, with whom you can become "one flesh."
Yes, the important point is that we believe in deservingness and it will always play a role in functional human societies. The "free will" that Harris rejects is a metaphysical monstrosity that is irrelevant for day-to-day human interactions.
I think some of the main failure points of utilitarianism come from the short-sightedness of its followers, such as their ignorance of long-term consequences and even competing ethical frameworks like kin selection (and how they came about).
If you observe utilitarians, they take the future for granted and devote their resources to things like open borders, foreign aid, climate change, and even things beyond their own species like bug suffering. The counterevidence and counterfactuals are not explored much nor carried far into the future (like Aporia's articles do in criticizing open borders). They think in a short-termist way which doesn't take multigenerational and unintended effects into account.
Most of them effectively neuter themselves in the process, too; i doubt their fertility is anywhere near replacement-level. So, they devote resources into a future that is clearly unsustainable even in maintaining their own goals.
Even as someone who has some utilitarian elements to my morality (I'm a vegan who has non-zero care about bug suffering!), I left "full" utilitarianism because of these clear failures. Kin selection should always be the primary focus of moral systems. Other considerations can come second. Imo, put your own mask on before helping others (even if you're a utilitarian, lol).
"I think some of the main failure points of utilitarianism come from the short-sightedness of its followers... ...they think in a short-termist way which doesn't take multigenerational and unintended effects into account"
There might well be short-sighted utilitarians, but that's not exactly an intrinsic feature of utilitarianism. Anyone on the lesswrong/EA forums concerned about the long-term ramifications of misaligned AGI is hugely concerned about the projected integral of the utility function of future tech developments over a timescale of centuries, for example.
I don't think Singer is actually wrong about people paying insufficient attention to 3rd-world suffering. There are lots of practical counter-arguments relating to, e.g, losses from corruption and inefficiency in various aid programs, not all human lives actually being equally valuable, the problem of the neediest populations on earth demographically exploding while the most philanthropy-inclined are going demographically extinct, et cetera. But the brute fact remains that we could triple the income of the poorest 700 million people on earth for around 1% of the global economy, and I doubt that 1% will make the difference between, e.g, white extinction vs. survival/prosperity, if that's what the kinship-focused people are worried about.
I'm not against foreign aid when it's done by the private sector, but it's a great example of what I'm talking about. Rather than focusing on things which get the most bang for the buck in terms of creating more self-sufficiency in third world countries (prenatal nutrition, reducing IQ-relevant pollution, cracking down on violence and theft, educating elites on better economic theories, etc.), foreign aid people often use taxpayer funds on vanity projects with insufficient oversight, poor or unclear target metrics, and no competition. These projects aren't doing the most effective job at helping these areas become more self-sufficient in the future. That threatens the job and emotional security of the foreign aid people.
Effective altruist types are definitely better at thinking into the future, but they aren't perfect about it. I don't know what their fertility rate is, but I'd imagine it's below the average of even the developed world. People have a finite amount of energy and resources. Being excessively preoccupied with people or even animals very distant from oneself can lead to missing the forest for the trees and creating unintended consequences from a lack of full experise and misaligned incentives.
"Being excessively preoccupied with people or even animals very distant from oneself can lead to missing the forest for the trees and creating unintended consequences from a lack of full experise and misaligned incentives"
Again, to whatever extent this is true, there's nothing about utilitarianism that implies unconcern with the effectiveness of policy interventions. And I think the concerns about 'finite energy and resources' or 'people very distant from oneself' are basically specious when the developed world already spends vastly more on domestic social programs than it does on foreign aid. (And frankly, I think the evidence for domestic programs being ineffectual is stronger.)
Granted, there's a large element of waste relating to first-world welfare transfers to groups that *used* to be from the third world, but EA isn't the culprit here so much as the importation of left-wing voting blocs.
I'm not saying that utilitarianism inherently implies any of these things. I'm talking about utilitarians as they exist in practice. All of the things I said fit into a utilitarian framework perfectly fine... Theoretically.
However, I think the best moral philosophies work even when they are practiced by people who aren't the most forward-thinking and don't have the most expertise, because those are frankly going to be the majority of people in any given society. How utilitarianism gets practiced in reality is far more important to me than its potential theoretically.
The same applies to economies theories, imo. I agree with you that domestic policies are often ineffective too, but who often pushes these? People whose morality is utilitarian, but too short-sighted to see the long-term unintended consequences of what they push. They get drunk on care-harm principles but think only in the given moment.
Granted, you you bringing up effective altruists. I agree with you that they are significantly more philosophically sophisticated. Again, though, how much effort are they putting into their moral system sustaining itself generationally? Frameworks that don't center and encourage this die out. You can't help anyone if your framework dies with you (or your one child) because you failed to balance your moral framework.
As I said before, I'm someone who has a utilitarian element to my framework. You might even call me an ultra-long-termist utilitarian. I come to very different conclusions from most who identify with the label, through. So, the distinction is important in practice.
Thanks for the comment. I agree. I noted in a footnote that a utilitarian could argue that the pleasure from inflicting punishment might make retributive punishment worth it. That takes us into tricky territory though because we then are forced to add and subtract utility across people, which is quite difficult to do. It also, again, makes the question of retributive punishment dependent on the popularity of the victim. TBC, I think mental states such as pleasure and pain are morally relevant; I just think humans care about more than utility (e.g., they care about fairness and character).
Yeah, I don't really get that argument at all. If psychopaths don't respond to punishment then you should either incarcerate them to keep the public safe or execute them if that's not feasible (due to expense or attacks on prison staff, or what have you.)
"If psychopaths don't respond to punishment then you should either incarcerate them to keep the public safe or execute them if that's not feasible (due to expense or attacks on prison staff, or what have you.)"
I think most of these problems for utilitarianism are resolved with rule consequentialism. It avoids the repugnant conclusions of act utilitarianism and most of the counterintuitive conclusions that might come out of cosmopolitanism and rationalism. We don't prioritise distant people over our own children because in general taking care of your own children is the rule that leads to flourishing; having a strong taboo against incest likewise leads to greater flourishing.
While in extraordinary cases we might break a rule for "the greater good" (like telling a lie to a murderer), in general we don't want to undermine the use of the rules, as would be the case if everyone was worried about others making cold act calculations. The classic example of a doctor killing one person to save five patients makes this clear: as a one off it could really save more lives, but overall more lives would be lost if people were too worried about their doctor cynically chopping them up and so avoided medical care.
I largely agree, though the line between rule consequentialism and deontology is quite fuzzy. Also, I don't think the best version of rule consequentialism would work to maximize hedons, but rather a broader sense of flourishing.
I agree, as soon as ethicists start positing calculable units of pleasure or goodness or whatever, they begin missing the wood for the trees (or perhaps, one specific species of tree).
Does the West have an equal responsibility for conformal generally authoritarian societies' well being as opposed to the opposite ?
Answer is No and whether one gets there from a utiliarian or deontic or simple rational calculus it will be the same, that is unless one wants to create a ballet on the head of a pin.
Here is a thought experiment about utilitarianism, either kind.
There is another planet near enough to earth that with new rockets, it can be reached fairly quickly. It is called Utilia. The first human beings go there and learn that they have a trillion people -- well, "people," meaning organisms at about our level of intellect. They experience pleasure and pain, evidently. But it turns out that the Utilians need something earth has: water and air. For their own planet is dying.
Fortunately, they have a technology that will let them take all of earth's water and air and bring it to their own plant. Once Utilia has been resupplied with earth's water and air, it will go on for a good long time, with future trillions being born.
Earthlings cannot relocate to Utilia because their air is toxic to us, and they have diseases that kill us fast. Our astronauts went there in Hazmat suits. Besides, getting our ten billion off planet would require far more fuel than we could ever muster.
Utilia's continued existence requires that all of the earthlings commit suicide, per Singerism, since, actually, Utilia's rulers have a law that says they cannot take our water and air without the earthlings' majority consent.
They won't kill us. We have to kill ourselves, or let them do it. So we have to vote: should we kill ourselves off to save Utilia?
This is a great piece of writing, but I feel that you are too easy on him. He's clever in his arguments, but he *willfully* resists analyzing the outcomes of his philosophy, incontrovertibly proving that he is more motivated by vanity than he is by the desire to improve anyone's life. It's not a "mistake" that he refuses to analyze the outcomes of his philosophy, it's a moral failing.
"First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. . . . The first premise seems nearly incontrovertible."
Well, surely it merits the same qualification offered earlier in the article: that suffering is proper when it is deserved.
Regarding concentric circles of concern, I was just reading L. Sprague de Camp's biography of H. P. Lovecraft, and de Camp has this to say about Lovecraft's notorious racism:
"Yet ethnocentrism . . . is one of the oldest and most universal of human traits. . . . Only in recent decades has disapproval of ethnocentrism become widespread, and such disapproval is anything but universal. . . . Herodotus noted that the ancient Persians
'. . . honor most their nearest neighbors whom they esteem next to themselves; those who live beyond these they honor in the second degree; and so on with the remainder, the further they are removed, the less the esteem in which they hold them. . . .'."
Incidentally, he also writes:
"A scientist who tries to find out if the races do in fact differ in ability is persecuted. He gets anonymous threats and is howled down when he lectures."
Given that the book was published in 1975, de Camp probably had Richard Herrnstein (and perhaps Arthur Jensen) in mind.
In my 20s I engaged in many arguments with singer-utilitarians on how these views are flawed. I must say I don’t even find singerianism interesting to trash anymore.
The TLDR is simply that singerianism = a form of utilitarianism = (at its core) hedonism = pleasure / pain mathematics. It’s neither how humans are (descriptively) nor how we should be (normatively).
Perhaps it’s a useful starting point for getting 18yro freshmen interested in ethical questions… and about thinking of people other than themselves… but that’s about it
"On the other hand, if the goal is to maximize aggregate utility, we encounter a different conundrum famously articulated by Derek Parfit as the Repugnant Conclusion. The basic idea is this: if total utility is what matters, then we can (almost) always imagine a scenario in which average well-being decreases, but total well-being increases, by adding more people whose lives are barely worth living. For instance, if we have 100 people each enjoying a utility level of 90 out of 100, we could improve the overall total by adding 1,000 people whose lives are just above the threshold of despair. The result is a larger population living more joyless lives, but a bigger total utility score. By this logic, a million people in purgatory are morally preferable to a thousand people in paradise."
No. You are the one making the claim that "a million people in purgatory are morally preferable to a thousand people in paradise", not utilitarians. If a thousand people in paradise is better than a million people in purgatory, then it would be preferable to utilitarians. You have simply drawn the lines for your example wrong.
I believe that the repugnant conclusion is not any more an argument against utilitiarianism than Zenon's paradox is an argument against my butt ever reaching the chair. It's just that human intuition is not good for sums of large numbers of small fractions.
You could perhaps make a claim that, say a thousand billion people in purgatory overall is better for the people than 1000 people in heaven. And then go on to say that this is repugnant. But why is it repugnant again? You are the one who is saying it is better for the people overall, in your own example.
Similarly, do you think people just above the threshold of despair are better off existing than not existing? (It does sound somewhat bad.) If yes, what is your issue with them being alive again? If no, then you have simple drawn the lines for your example wrong.
"Furthermore, by this logic, most of us (at least in affluent societies) have a moral obligation to have as many children as possible, so long as those children would live lives above the threshold of suffering. If a couple could achieve a utility level of 70/100 with one child (who also enjoys 70/100), it would be morally preferable, on aggregate utilitarian grounds, for them to endure a lower personal utility (to 55/100) to raise fifteen children who each have lives at that same 55/100 level."
I think we need to discern two things here,
1. what the overall good is for society, and
2. whether individuals are morally obligated to always make actions that move towards this end.
I think (2) is a very dubious claim, pretty much regardless what we see as the overall good. Children or no children hardly has anything to do with it. Would utilitarians really say that you are ie obligated to sweep in front of your neighbours door if that brings him slightly more joy than it would if you swept in front of yours? I'm not sure how it is normally understood. But the point here is:
Either (a) utilitarianism is understood in this way, and then it is dumb, regardless of anything about children, or
(b) it is not understood in this way, in which sense considering the value of potential future humans makes a lot of sense.
This reminds me of a recent discovery about the book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. As I was reading it, I realized that Solomon's discoveries were completely independent of Adam and Eve, the Original Sin, and our fallen nature. Somehow, those important stories from the book of Genesis were not anywhere in Solomon's consciousness. He was spinning his wheels. The whole book is just puffs of air and vanity, alright.
You can probably guess why this came to mind. Singer's perfect world is also completely void of our fallen nature. There are a zillion ways to characterize what is wrong with society. But you can't talk seriously about how to improve it without acknowledging this.
Singer is looking at the gameboard without understanding the rules. I am imagine that he and I could put together an experiment to test my hypothesis, although I have a day job that this does not fall within.
Original sin wasn’t in Solomon’s consciousness because it’s a Christian idea that was developed 1,000 years after Solomon supposedly lived and a few hundred years after Ecclesiastes was composed.
Well, whatever Hebrews and Jews call the aftermath of Genesis Chapter 3; (or Bereshit if you prefer); that is what i am referring to.
Here is one from a Straussian type of bifurcation...
Say a relatively benign society was faced with an intransigent society of which by regular unbiased polling 99 percent of their population was willing and ready to sacrifice their own lives to kill off your society. And your society posed no threat to them. If you had a choice to defend yourselves by starving them or bombing them then which would be more ethically acceptable?
Clearly you must provide them a million meals per day, medical care up to and including brain surgery, probably also ongoing financial aid if not just arming them directly . . .
You say it all heh heh
First-rate article Bo, entirely convincing.
Over the years, I've emailed repeatedly trying to get another prominent utilitarian, Sam Harris, to respond to the following question: You claim that no one deserves punishment because the universe is deterministic and hence there is no free will. But of course that means no one deserves anything, including non-punishment. So what would be wrong with employing Philip K. Dick's precogs to eliminate some of the suffering caused by crime? To leave the realm of science fiction, how about we just lock up say the predicted worst 5% of black boys (because race is in the algo') before they do anything wrong? Let 'em out when their testosterone has dipped low enough, say age 50? Crickets.
On Julie and Mark, I'd say they've each imperiled their own ability to enjoy healthy sexual, and ultimately, romantic, relations in the future. Since Haidt took the liberty of adding interpretive detail, I'll respond in kind. Part of what they enjoyed was the frisson created by the clandestine and transgressive nature of their congress. Well if that's what gets you off, good luck finding a partner together with whom you can go out into the world and build a life. Or as the ideal is expressed in Genesis 2:24, with whom you can become "one flesh."
Thank you!
Yes, the important point is that we believe in deservingness and it will always play a role in functional human societies. The "free will" that Harris rejects is a metaphysical monstrosity that is irrelevant for day-to-day human interactions.
I think some of the main failure points of utilitarianism come from the short-sightedness of its followers, such as their ignorance of long-term consequences and even competing ethical frameworks like kin selection (and how they came about).
If you observe utilitarians, they take the future for granted and devote their resources to things like open borders, foreign aid, climate change, and even things beyond their own species like bug suffering. The counterevidence and counterfactuals are not explored much nor carried far into the future (like Aporia's articles do in criticizing open borders). They think in a short-termist way which doesn't take multigenerational and unintended effects into account.
Most of them effectively neuter themselves in the process, too; i doubt their fertility is anywhere near replacement-level. So, they devote resources into a future that is clearly unsustainable even in maintaining their own goals.
Even as someone who has some utilitarian elements to my morality (I'm a vegan who has non-zero care about bug suffering!), I left "full" utilitarianism because of these clear failures. Kin selection should always be the primary focus of moral systems. Other considerations can come second. Imo, put your own mask on before helping others (even if you're a utilitarian, lol).
"I think some of the main failure points of utilitarianism come from the short-sightedness of its followers... ...they think in a short-termist way which doesn't take multigenerational and unintended effects into account"
There might well be short-sighted utilitarians, but that's not exactly an intrinsic feature of utilitarianism. Anyone on the lesswrong/EA forums concerned about the long-term ramifications of misaligned AGI is hugely concerned about the projected integral of the utility function of future tech developments over a timescale of centuries, for example.
I don't think Singer is actually wrong about people paying insufficient attention to 3rd-world suffering. There are lots of practical counter-arguments relating to, e.g, losses from corruption and inefficiency in various aid programs, not all human lives actually being equally valuable, the problem of the neediest populations on earth demographically exploding while the most philanthropy-inclined are going demographically extinct, et cetera. But the brute fact remains that we could triple the income of the poorest 700 million people on earth for around 1% of the global economy, and I doubt that 1% will make the difference between, e.g, white extinction vs. survival/prosperity, if that's what the kinship-focused people are worried about.
I'm not against foreign aid when it's done by the private sector, but it's a great example of what I'm talking about. Rather than focusing on things which get the most bang for the buck in terms of creating more self-sufficiency in third world countries (prenatal nutrition, reducing IQ-relevant pollution, cracking down on violence and theft, educating elites on better economic theories, etc.), foreign aid people often use taxpayer funds on vanity projects with insufficient oversight, poor or unclear target metrics, and no competition. These projects aren't doing the most effective job at helping these areas become more self-sufficient in the future. That threatens the job and emotional security of the foreign aid people.
Effective altruist types are definitely better at thinking into the future, but they aren't perfect about it. I don't know what their fertility rate is, but I'd imagine it's below the average of even the developed world. People have a finite amount of energy and resources. Being excessively preoccupied with people or even animals very distant from oneself can lead to missing the forest for the trees and creating unintended consequences from a lack of full experise and misaligned incentives.
"Being excessively preoccupied with people or even animals very distant from oneself can lead to missing the forest for the trees and creating unintended consequences from a lack of full experise and misaligned incentives"
Again, to whatever extent this is true, there's nothing about utilitarianism that implies unconcern with the effectiveness of policy interventions. And I think the concerns about 'finite energy and resources' or 'people very distant from oneself' are basically specious when the developed world already spends vastly more on domestic social programs than it does on foreign aid. (And frankly, I think the evidence for domestic programs being ineffectual is stronger.)
Granted, there's a large element of waste relating to first-world welfare transfers to groups that *used* to be from the third world, but EA isn't the culprit here so much as the importation of left-wing voting blocs.
I'm not saying that utilitarianism inherently implies any of these things. I'm talking about utilitarians as they exist in practice. All of the things I said fit into a utilitarian framework perfectly fine... Theoretically.
However, I think the best moral philosophies work even when they are practiced by people who aren't the most forward-thinking and don't have the most expertise, because those are frankly going to be the majority of people in any given society. How utilitarianism gets practiced in reality is far more important to me than its potential theoretically.
The same applies to economies theories, imo. I agree with you that domestic policies are often ineffective too, but who often pushes these? People whose morality is utilitarian, but too short-sighted to see the long-term unintended consequences of what they push. They get drunk on care-harm principles but think only in the given moment.
Granted, you you bringing up effective altruists. I agree with you that they are significantly more philosophically sophisticated. Again, though, how much effort are they putting into their moral system sustaining itself generationally? Frameworks that don't center and encourage this die out. You can't help anyone if your framework dies with you (or your one child) because you failed to balance your moral framework.
As I said before, I'm someone who has a utilitarian element to my framework. You might even call me an ultra-long-termist utilitarian. I come to very different conclusions from most who identify with the label, through. So, the distinction is important in practice.
Bo, thanks for an interesting article. This is not your first essay on moral absolutism, and they are always thought-provoking.
"Inflicting pain on certain individuals can be good precisely because they deserve it."
But you are gaining pleasure from vindictiveness
Thanks for the comment. I agree. I noted in a footnote that a utilitarian could argue that the pleasure from inflicting punishment might make retributive punishment worth it. That takes us into tricky territory though because we then are forced to add and subtract utility across people, which is quite difficult to do. It also, again, makes the question of retributive punishment dependent on the popularity of the victim. TBC, I think mental states such as pleasure and pain are morally relevant; I just think humans care about more than utility (e.g., they care about fairness and character).
Bo
"...I just think humans care about more than utility (e.g., they care about fairness and character)."
I hope you are right, but I sometimes have my doubts.
Yeah, I don't really get that argument at all. If psychopaths don't respond to punishment then you should either incarcerate them to keep the public safe or execute them if that's not feasible (due to expense or attacks on prison staff, or what have you.)
"If psychopaths don't respond to punishment then you should either incarcerate them to keep the public safe or execute them if that's not feasible (due to expense or attacks on prison staff, or what have you.)"
Agreed, but I would much prefer incarceration.
Excellent article, and a great antidote to the deluge of wild utilitarian hot takes that I have been reading lately.
I think most of these problems for utilitarianism are resolved with rule consequentialism. It avoids the repugnant conclusions of act utilitarianism and most of the counterintuitive conclusions that might come out of cosmopolitanism and rationalism. We don't prioritise distant people over our own children because in general taking care of your own children is the rule that leads to flourishing; having a strong taboo against incest likewise leads to greater flourishing.
While in extraordinary cases we might break a rule for "the greater good" (like telling a lie to a murderer), in general we don't want to undermine the use of the rules, as would be the case if everyone was worried about others making cold act calculations. The classic example of a doctor killing one person to save five patients makes this clear: as a one off it could really save more lives, but overall more lives would be lost if people were too worried about their doctor cynically chopping them up and so avoided medical care.
I largely agree, though the line between rule consequentialism and deontology is quite fuzzy. Also, I don't think the best version of rule consequentialism would work to maximize hedons, but rather a broader sense of flourishing.
Bo
I agree, as soon as ethicists start positing calculable units of pleasure or goodness or whatever, they begin missing the wood for the trees (or perhaps, one specific species of tree).
Universalism ....
Does the West have an equal responsibility for conformal generally authoritarian societies' well being as opposed to the opposite ?
Answer is No and whether one gets there from a utiliarian or deontic or simple rational calculus it will be the same, that is unless one wants to create a ballet on the head of a pin.
Linking my response in the comments here, in case others are interested: https://open.substack.com/pub/gumphus/p/a-partial-defense-of-singerism-against
Here is a thought experiment about utilitarianism, either kind.
There is another planet near enough to earth that with new rockets, it can be reached fairly quickly. It is called Utilia. The first human beings go there and learn that they have a trillion people -- well, "people," meaning organisms at about our level of intellect. They experience pleasure and pain, evidently. But it turns out that the Utilians need something earth has: water and air. For their own planet is dying.
Fortunately, they have a technology that will let them take all of earth's water and air and bring it to their own plant. Once Utilia has been resupplied with earth's water and air, it will go on for a good long time, with future trillions being born.
Earthlings cannot relocate to Utilia because their air is toxic to us, and they have diseases that kill us fast. Our astronauts went there in Hazmat suits. Besides, getting our ten billion off planet would require far more fuel than we could ever muster.
Utilia's continued existence requires that all of the earthlings commit suicide, per Singerism, since, actually, Utilia's rulers have a law that says they cannot take our water and air without the earthlings' majority consent.
They won't kill us. We have to kill ourselves, or let them do it. So we have to vote: should we kill ourselves off to save Utilia?
Peter Singer's side is clear, I take it.
So is mine.
This is a great piece of writing, but I feel that you are too easy on him. He's clever in his arguments, but he *willfully* resists analyzing the outcomes of his philosophy, incontrovertibly proving that he is more motivated by vanity than he is by the desire to improve anyone's life. It's not a "mistake" that he refuses to analyze the outcomes of his philosophy, it's a moral failing.
“Peter Singer is rightfully applauded as a philosophical giant. He's also spectacularly wrong.”
Hmm…. “John Smith is rightfully applauded as an architectural giant. Unfortunately, all of his buildings soon fell down.”
https://jclester.substack.com/p/peter-singers-famine-affluence-and
Good thing philosophy isn't like engineering or architecture! If so, the history of philosophy would be a history of calamities.
Bo
Marxism and Wokeism are at least to some extent philosophies, and both are certainly calamities.
https://jclester.substack.com/p/woke-a-libertarian-viewpoint
"First premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad. . . . The first premise seems nearly incontrovertible."
Well, surely it merits the same qualification offered earlier in the article: that suffering is proper when it is deserved.
Regarding concentric circles of concern, I was just reading L. Sprague de Camp's biography of H. P. Lovecraft, and de Camp has this to say about Lovecraft's notorious racism:
"Yet ethnocentrism . . . is one of the oldest and most universal of human traits. . . . Only in recent decades has disapproval of ethnocentrism become widespread, and such disapproval is anything but universal. . . . Herodotus noted that the ancient Persians
'. . . honor most their nearest neighbors whom they esteem next to themselves; those who live beyond these they honor in the second degree; and so on with the remainder, the further they are removed, the less the esteem in which they hold them. . . .'."
Incidentally, he also writes:
"A scientist who tries to find out if the races do in fact differ in ability is persecuted. He gets anonymous threats and is howled down when he lectures."
Given that the book was published in 1975, de Camp probably had Richard Herrnstein (and perhaps Arthur Jensen) in mind.
Nice article.
In my 20s I engaged in many arguments with singer-utilitarians on how these views are flawed. I must say I don’t even find singerianism interesting to trash anymore.
The TLDR is simply that singerianism = a form of utilitarianism = (at its core) hedonism = pleasure / pain mathematics. It’s neither how humans are (descriptively) nor how we should be (normatively).
Perhaps it’s a useful starting point for getting 18yro freshmen interested in ethical questions… and about thinking of people other than themselves… but that’s about it
An important difference between Singer and The Doors is that The Doors are actually good.
"On the other hand, if the goal is to maximize aggregate utility, we encounter a different conundrum famously articulated by Derek Parfit as the Repugnant Conclusion. The basic idea is this: if total utility is what matters, then we can (almost) always imagine a scenario in which average well-being decreases, but total well-being increases, by adding more people whose lives are barely worth living. For instance, if we have 100 people each enjoying a utility level of 90 out of 100, we could improve the overall total by adding 1,000 people whose lives are just above the threshold of despair. The result is a larger population living more joyless lives, but a bigger total utility score. By this logic, a million people in purgatory are morally preferable to a thousand people in paradise."
No. You are the one making the claim that "a million people in purgatory are morally preferable to a thousand people in paradise", not utilitarians. If a thousand people in paradise is better than a million people in purgatory, then it would be preferable to utilitarians. You have simply drawn the lines for your example wrong.
I believe that the repugnant conclusion is not any more an argument against utilitiarianism than Zenon's paradox is an argument against my butt ever reaching the chair. It's just that human intuition is not good for sums of large numbers of small fractions.
You could perhaps make a claim that, say a thousand billion people in purgatory overall is better for the people than 1000 people in heaven. And then go on to say that this is repugnant. But why is it repugnant again? You are the one who is saying it is better for the people overall, in your own example.
Similarly, do you think people just above the threshold of despair are better off existing than not existing? (It does sound somewhat bad.) If yes, what is your issue with them being alive again? If no, then you have simple drawn the lines for your example wrong.
"Furthermore, by this logic, most of us (at least in affluent societies) have a moral obligation to have as many children as possible, so long as those children would live lives above the threshold of suffering. If a couple could achieve a utility level of 70/100 with one child (who also enjoys 70/100), it would be morally preferable, on aggregate utilitarian grounds, for them to endure a lower personal utility (to 55/100) to raise fifteen children who each have lives at that same 55/100 level."
I think we need to discern two things here,
1. what the overall good is for society, and
2. whether individuals are morally obligated to always make actions that move towards this end.
I think (2) is a very dubious claim, pretty much regardless what we see as the overall good. Children or no children hardly has anything to do with it. Would utilitarians really say that you are ie obligated to sweep in front of your neighbours door if that brings him slightly more joy than it would if you swept in front of yours? I'm not sure how it is normally understood. But the point here is:
Either (a) utilitarianism is understood in this way, and then it is dumb, regardless of anything about children, or
(b) it is not understood in this way, in which sense considering the value of potential future humans makes a lot of sense.