He chooses dolphins. The primary reproductive strategy of many dolphins is to gang up on a female, beat her into submission and gang rape her. They also routinely murder the infants of rivals. They’re vicious predators, with all the behaviours that come with that. Given the right context of communication it’s a likely a group of dolphins would side with us to exterminate another group to take their territory and females, as condemn us for anything.
Oh but we can’t call it rape or murder because that’s projecting human values. He’s doing exactly the same thing.
I’m not saying humans are beyond criticism or that his points against us are wrong. He makes a lot of actually very good points. I’ve discussed his ideas with my kids before.
It’s just trying to portray humans as specially, egregiously worse than any conceivable comparison is kind of stupid frankly. It’s children’s fairytale morality.
"moral agent" is someone whose actions are actions are eligible for moral consideration.
Non-human animals are usually considered "moral subjects" or *"moral patients". Moral agents must treat them well because they can suffer, but they don't have moral agency themselves. They can be purely amoral. Their acts can be horrible, but they don't have concepts of morally right or wrong.
In the middle-ages pigs were were tried and sentenced to death for murdering humans, but today attributing moral responsibility to non-moral agents is usually considered wrong. Within humans, insanity or young age can limit moral agency. Little children are moral subjects.
Infanticide was very common in ancient times pre-Christianity:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
and is still somewhat accepted in modern many cultures if the child is a girl:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
It also should be noted that Singer himself is not against it in many circumstances (though he doesn't view the entities involved as people, so it's not infanticide under his own definition):
> Similar to his argument for abortion rights, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[61]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".[62]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Euthanasia_and_in...
What many in the West think of as 'obvious' universal rights are in fact culturally contingent on Christianity.
But christianity allows for infanticide. God himself did wipe out all the first born infant sons of egypt after all.
> What many in the West think of as 'obvious' universal rights are in fact culturally contingent on Christianity.
The racism, misogyny, slavery and genocide is also culturally contingent on Christianity as well.
"Now go and strike Amalek and devote to destruction[a] all that they have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey."
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Samuel+15%3A2...
The "beauty" of the bible is that it is hundreds of pages long and gives christians the justification for all the evil and good in the world. It isn't an accident that the greatest acts of genocide in human history have been carried out by christians. Entire continents genocided, entire races enslaved, entire cities nuked. All by christians.
A religion, book, god, etc that orders you to murder children and infants cannot be a source of morality. If you think equality of sexes, races, etc are grounded in christianity then you do not know christianity. A religion that believes a woman was created from a man's rib and brought about his downfall is the basis of the universal rights?
Can you pinpoint where you got that impression? Note that it's not him that "chooses" dolphins, but it's the interviewer that asks him about what would it look like if we had an LLM that works with dolphins.
Uh... Okay. The Industrial Revolution to me is just like a story I know called "The Puppy Who Lost His Way." The world was changing, and the puppy was getting... bigger.
So, you see, the puppy was like industry. In that, they were both lost in the woods. And nobody, especially the little boy - "society" - knew where to find 'em. Except that the puppy was a dog. But the industry, my friends, that was a revolution.
maybe with great brains should come more responsibility/morality ?
You can also see his perspective on dolphin gangbang in his discussion about reintroducing or controlling predator species (these seem to me to be morally similar situations); he is not very confident on such marginal cases.
How would we go about doing it in a sane way for animals?
He seems to accept that what most folks would call infanticide is okay:
> Similar to his argument for abortion rights, Singer argues that newborns lack the essential characteristics of personhood—"rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness"[61]—and therefore "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".[62]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Singer#Euthanasia_and_in...
So he's not just "I'm just asking question, bro.". He seems to accept many positions and not just using them as though experiments. Or, if he started things as 'just' thought experiments, he has now accepted those "inhuman answers" as valid.
So whereas your disgust (and our illegality) at infanticide today serves as a good starting point to thinking about its morality, I don't think it's infallible and certainly not a veto over Singer's reasoned argument.
I have not read Singer's position on the issue until just now. His position is basically exactly the same as what I independently concluded (and still believe).
> He seems to accept that what most folks would call infanticide is okay
If you life begins at conception and abortion is never morally okay, you can skip reading my argument because I know it won't convince you; I'll see you in the footnote [1].
If you believe abortion is okay before a fetus is A weeks old, pick some X < Y < A. Two women are pregnant with fetuses of X weeks old. Alice gets an abortion at Y weeks (morally okay, according to you). Brenda gives birth at X weeks, then asks to have the baby euthanized at Y weeks (morally murder, according to you).
The only difference in the two situations is that Alice's child happens to live in her body, and Brenda's child does not. They are at the same stage of development otherwise. If Brenda's child has additional rights that Alice's does not, what are those rights based on?
My answer is that the law needs a bright-line test to determine what is or is not a person. Whatever test we pick should be easy to understand / perform (even for a layman), and there should be no false negatives (it's fine to forbid the killing of an organism that does not yet have the moral status of a person, and abhorrent to permit the killing of an organism that has the moral status of a person.)
"Birth" is an easy-to-measure bright line that already has some legal and historical backing (e.g. for establishing one's legal age for things like school / driving / tobacco use, we count since birth.)
So I would say infanticide of an infant that has the same level of personhood as a fetus is morally on the same level as abortion, which is morally on the same level as euthanizing a pet. Having infanticide be regarded as murder (legally) is an unavoidable side effect of trying to find an easy-to-test heuristic (has the person been born yet?) to approximate something with moral color that's hard to test (is this organism human enough yet that killing it is morally worse enough than euthanizing a pet that the parent should go to jail for it?) [2]
Your argument is basically a reductio: You have decided that infanticide must be defined as murder, and any moral system that allows it must therefore be thrown out. "Infanticide = murder" is "too far up the stack" to be used as a premise, especially if you're pro-choice. If you say "infanticide = murder, we must adopt a system that provides this outcome" then a pro-life opponent would say "abortion = murder, we must adopt a system that provides this outcome." It's basically that one weird trick that makes mathematicians hate you: If coming up with an argument is too hard, just make your desired conclusion an axiom; the proof is then trivial.
[1] I reject the premise that life begins at conception, as the arguments in favor seem to invariably rest on either an unmeasurable claim based on the "soul," or some religious authority. Government is in the reality business, and separation of church and state is an important principle. Therefore the premise is invalid for creating policy.
If you accept the premise, it seems to me that the pro-life side has an enormously strong case for its conclusion that abortion is murder. Despite the simplicity of the pro-life argument, I'm always astounded when I realize how many pro-choice people seem to be fundamentally, perhaps willfully, ignorant or incapable of logically addressing their opponents' position.
[2] The logic behind "innocent until proven guilty", and the entire legal/court system, is based on the same kind of thinking. You're trying to find an easy-to-test heuristic (was there a written law against something the person did, did the court system follow the rules of evidence and procedure?) to approximate something with moral color that's hard to test (did this person do something so bad that they deserve to be jailed or otherwise systematically punished?)
Goes back to Schopenhauer:
"Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills."
If it is morally ok for Lions to kill their prey. Then it is also morally ok for humans to do human things, which includes killing each other and eating everything in sight.
The only morality is enforced by humans on other humans. There is no universal morality. Humanity is just a group of monkeys that would prefer to live where killing within their group is not allowed and appoint other monkeys to police their area and put any killers or thieves in a monkey prison. Note, killing or stealing from other groups of monkeys is a-ok.
That kind of life is preferable to not being vegan. I think it is a realistic perspective instead of an idealistic one.
The same goes for meatless Mondays. If you get one population to eat vegan food on Mondays, it is as if you turned one seventh of them full vegan.
I have been vegan for 12 years, and telling people it is not about being 100% pure, but about striving towards 100%. That is probably that made me stay 99% vegan in bum-fuck-nowhere northern Sweden the first couple of years.
After skimming the content:
I guess most controversial ideas are to controversial to be published in this journal. (which is maybe a good thing)
Every democratic country has laws which are motivated by the way people feel emotionally. Check out this map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion_in_Europe#/media/File...
12 weeks in Germany, 24 weeks in the UK. Why is there such a difference? Because these laws are based on how people feel.
Apologies, but I could not find any recommendations for killing babies. Please clarify.
Practical Ethics 3rd ed [2011], Peter Singer https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=02C20FF721FBFC562268D14...
Perhaps an earlier edition advocated infanticide?
https://libgen.is/search.php?&req=singer+Practical+Ethics&ph...
I believe the relevant section is page 169 of this: https://www.stafforini.com/docs/Singer%20-%20Practical%20eth...
Some of the text is copied and pasted below, but it should be read and interpreted in context:
ABORTION AND INFANTICIDE
There remains one major objection to the argument I have
advanced in favour of abortion. We have already seen that the strength of the conservative position lies in the difficulty liberals have in pointing to a morally significant line of demarcation between an embryo and a newborn baby. The standard liberal position needs to be able to point to some such line, because liberals usually hold that it is permissible to kill an embryo or fetus but not a baby. I have argued that the life of a fetus (and even more plainly, of an embryo) is of no greater value than the life of a nonhuman animal at a similar level of rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. etc., and that since no fetus is a person no fetus has the same claim to life as a person. Now it must be admitted that these arguments apply to the newborn baby as much as to the fetus. A week-old baby is not a rational and self-conscious being, and there are many nonhuman animals whose rationality, self-consciousness, awareness, capacity to feel. and so on, exceed that of a human baby a week or a month old. If the fetus does not have the same claim to life as a person, it appears that the newborn baby does not either, and the life of a newborn baby is of less value to it than the life of a pig, a dog, or a chimpanzee is to the nonhuman animal.
Eg, try and find people who believe US participation in WWII was immoral because participation involved German children as collateral damage.
Rules like "don't murder people" don't ever work. If you held yourself to that rule, your opponent would have a very easy time exploiting it. So in my opinion such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice.
I’ve found it to be a pretty workable rule in living my actual life so far.
> such rules more exist as a pretty fiction than as an actual practice
I’m curious what life experiences you’ve had which lead you to conclude that “don’t murder people” is so inapplicable as to be fiction. Are you living near Bakhmut?
What about the Golden Rule? It would provide for not killing others, except in self-defense.
Note that I probably agree with you, but the solution isn’t as simple as you think.
Except it doesn't. The "simple" cases of utilitarianism (i.e. happiness-maximizing or unhappiness-minimizing) are both supportive of killing people if their expected remaining lifetime happiness is negative or if their death would result in others being happier - see the infamous organ donor problem. Worse, by following that philosophy you eventually get to the Repugnant Conclusion[0], which is a world of as many minimally-happy humans as possible. The complex cases result in complex epicycles of propagating out utilitiarian ideals to the rest of society and eventually asserting that heuristics of the moral value of actions would actually be best in most cases because the effects of actions are impossible to quantitatively evaluate for anyone. Those heuristics essentially boil down to deontological principles.
[0]: The fact that many public utilitarian philosophers are so unable to find a way out of this, yet so enamored with the idea of utilitarianism that they can't imagine it being wrong, that they signed a public statement saying that actually the Repugnant Conclusion is totally fine and people should still push for population ethics that lead to it is wild to me. See https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/utilitas/article/wha...
> There are acts which are right only if no one – or virtually no one – will get to know about them. The rightness of an act, in other words, may depend on its secrecy. This can have implications for how often, and in what circumstances, such an act may be done.
> Some people know better, or can learn better, than others what it is right to do in certain circumstances.
> There are at least two different sets of instruction, or moral codes, suitable for the different categories of people. This raises the question whether there are also different standards by which we should judge what people do.
> Though the consequentialist believes that acts are right only if they have consequences at least as good as anything else the agent could have done, the consequentialist may need to discourage others from embracing consequentialism. …
> The idea that it is better if some moral views are not widely known was not invented by Sidgwick. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes that ordinary people be brought up to believe that everyone is born ‘from the earth’ into one of three classes, gold, silver or bronze, and living justly consists in doing what is in their nature. Only the philosopher-rulers will know that this is really a myth, a ‘noble lie’. …
> Esoteric morality is a necessary part of a consequentialist theory, and all of the points above can be defended. …
> One of the most common objections to consequentialism is based on a hypothetical situation in which a surgeon has to do a delicate brain operation on a patient who happens to be the ideal organ donor for four other patients in the hospital, each of whom will die shortly unless they receive, respectively, a heart, a liver, and – for two of them – a kidney. The doctor is highly skilled, and is confident of her ability to carry out the brain surgery successfully. If she does, her patient will lead a more or less normal life.
> But because the operation is a delicate one, no one could blame her, or have any reason to suspect anything, if the patient were to die on the operating table. Moreover, the hospital is experienced in organ transplantation, and the surgeon knows that if the patient were to die, the recipients of the patient’s organs would soon be able to go home and lead a more or less normal life. The surgeon knows no other details about her patient or the other patients, such as whether they are married, have children, or are about to discover a cure for cancer. In these circumstances, critics of consequentialism say, the consequentialist must think that the doctor ought to kill her patient, since in that way four lives will be saved, and only one lost, and this must be better than four dying and only one being saved. But, so the objection runs, it is obviously morally wrong for the surgeon to kill her patient, and any moral theory that says the contrary must be rejected.
> We agree that the consequentialist must accept that, in these circumstances, the right thing for the surgeon to do would be to kill the one to save the four, but we do not agree that this means that consequentialism should be rejected. We think, on the contrary, that the appearance of unacceptability here comes from the fact that this is one of those rare cases in which the action is right only if perfect secrecy can be expected. Moreover, it is not an action that should be recommended to others.
0. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-9329....
Which, morally sophisticated people inevitably find is almost comically sensitive to details of the scenario or context, and that's it's virtually impossible to find a satisfying generalizable solution. And then singer is just like "no. u simply pull the lever." It's not interesting.
So for instance, in the real world you can't guarantee you will get away with it. Real surgeons operate in teams, not alone, and are surrounded by other well trained professionals. Real people have loved ones that may press for an investigation of what happened, especially if the patient's death was suspiciously convenient.
So now the real calculus is more complicated. Your calculus isn't nearly as simple as "1 patient vs 4 recipients". You could get caught. The organs might be unusable. The transplant might get rejected. Investigations may result in enormous negative consequences. Etc.
If you were the conductor, what choice would you make?
so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.
The point of his argument is not that under certain exceptional conditions surgeons should kill people to harvest their organs to save more lives, but precisely that any sort of formal pledge or personal obligation or non-utilitarian moral code can be betrayed if that leads to higher expected utility; and that it is prudent to lie about your true intentions and convictions if you think that is a precondition to achieving greater total utility. It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset, and not just specifically on the issue of saving lives – like the trolley problem, this is only an illustration. This applies to utility in general, and thus to all instrumental preconditions for creating it: to money, power, anything; therefore, any act of a Singerian should be suspected as part of an instrumentally useful scheme to secure a position to achieve more utility. This applies the most to pretenses of having integrity, valuing promises or even some kind of sentimental loyalty.
People who profess to believe in Singerian doctrine can not be trusted to mean what they are saying, because you cannot know what sort of a convoluted scheme to maximize total utility they have imagined that could necessitate deception in a particular case.
Again, his follower Sam Bankman-Fried has demonstrated this very clearly by defrauding his clients and appropriating money for the purposes of Effective Altruism and AI Alignment movements, and then by piling an absurd lie on an absurd lie. Singer defends the teaching by claiming, contrary to his somewhat more sophisticated argument, that "honesty is the best policy"[0]. This is what he, in his article, describes as morality for children – that is, the immature people who cannot be trusted to make consequentialist decisions and should be taught deontology.
> and he believes you could never recommend the action to others
Oh. Okay, so he says that it is the morally correct course of action logically following from moral philosophy he has been advancing and propagandizing all his life, but [generic] you should not recommend it to others. How is that very claim not such a recommendation? What is the meaning of this sophistry?
Perhaps it serves to separate those who can practice the shallowest Straussian reading from those who are effectively children.
0. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/dec/24/giving-goo...
He's sitting on the fence about being a species traitor?
Maybe this is just pure projection on my part, but I’m having a hard time imagining this species being eco-friendly, animal rights upholding, etc. considering Singer’s standards. But again, I only have one species to go by (currently).
Bearing the collective guilt of all mankind is not a noble burden to bear because it is totally detached from taking actions that care for others. It seems more likely to motivate people to self-flagellate, stay in bed depressed by the fact that all of their actions will still result in a hugely negative outcome, or spend lots of time commenting on the internet. The results are as productive and caring as someone playing Call of Duty.
Seems more effective to pick something very specific to strive for like the joy of knowing that some specific group of users from Senegal can provide for their families and to strive towards that.
that's the most ridiculous thing i've ever read and i hang out on fark.com sometimes.
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