In his book “Practical Ethics” he recommends infanticide up to 2 years old as a logical extension to abortion.
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Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
101–110 of 134 posts
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#102Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
To the downvoters: do you have any experience with little kids? As a father of a 2 year old, it is pretty obvious what's wrong with infanticide...
Cultures that don’t practice infanticide are the exception in the historical and anthropological record. Not killing your children was invented by the Egyptians, taken up by the Jews and spread by the Christians, Muslims, presumably other Abrahamic faiths and cultures derived from them. It has not been obvious to the huge majority of people ever born that there was anything wrong with infanticide. If you think it is…
> Cultures that don’t practice infanticide are the exception in the historical and anthropological record
That's a non-argument. People did all kinds of horrible things in the past (human sacrifice, cruel corporal punishment, slavery) and yet it is now obvious to us that these things are bad. I think it is safe to say that infanticide is one of the things that we don't need to debate in modern times.
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> A 23 months old human is generally less intelligent than a dog Wow. Do you have any experience with little kids? With 23 months my daughter was drawing pictures, singing songs, laughing at my jokes, reenacting scenes from theater plays, etc.
The question isn’t if 2 year olds are intelligent it’s if dogs are of comparable intelligence to a human 2 year old. They are. > As for language, the average dog can learn 165 words, including signals, and the "super dogs" (those in the top 20 percent of dog intelligence) can learn 250 words, Coren says. "The upper limit of dogs' ability to learn language is partly based on a study of a border collie named Rico who s…
I have been replying to OP who literally said:
> A 23 months old human is generally less intelligent than a dog and has a consciousness vastly different from us. If the lives of people (and everyone else) got better from killing such a being, then why not?
So what is your point?
Is today "rationalist edgeloard"-day?
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#105In his book “Practical Ethics” he recommends infanticide up to 2 years old as a logical extension to abortion.
Whether you agree with him or not, the argument is more nuanced.
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.
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was in my teens and early twenties, seriously grappling with establishing my positions on fundamental moral issues for the first time, I thought carefully about abortion, because I didn't want to mindlessly adopt any side's shouted slogans. I wanted to have an independent, logically well-constructed view on the issue. I have not read Singer's position on the issue until just now. His position is basically exac…
Could the baby fully develop outside the womb to it's full fledged human potential is my personal "ideal" cut off date, some use so called point of viability of the fetus [1] but from reading up on it (just now) 28 weeks would be the date for me based on [2] But in all honesty given the trauma, complications,... involved my simple solution [3] would be to just hand out free pregnancy tests (one for every week of the…
> Infanticide was still practiced even in late 19th century in Europe/France by poor farmers who were starving [5]
It is still practiced now:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Modern_times
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peter Singer's FAQ: > […] Newborn human babies have no sense of their own existence over time. So killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living. That doesn’t mean that it is not almost always a terrible thing to do. It is, but that is because most infants are loved and cherished by their parents, and to kill an infant is usually to do a great wrong to her o…
That is about babies with life-threatening diseases that are being kept alive by medicine who have zero chance of leading any form of normal life. One chance was more than enough. I assume you're arguing in bad faith at this point.
> That is about babies with life-threatening diseases […]
No, it is not. When he talks about "disabilities" he also means things like Downs syndrome.
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
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We need you to stop using HN for ideological flamewar. You've been doing it a lot, and breaking the site guidelines a lot in other ways too, such as by crossing into personal attack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36247136
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36243998
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36243288
and failing to edit out swipes:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195095
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195079
I don't want to ban you because I don't get an impression of malice or abuse from your comments, but we need you to review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the intended spirit of this site. Ideological battle, political battle, and flamewar are very much against that spirit. We want curious, thoughtful, substantive, respectful conversation. Please do that going forward, and refrain from posting when you can't.
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I’m disappointed he projects some sort of idealised aloof moral superiority on anything non human 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.
Fair enough, but he’s said stuff like this before and nobody twisted his arm.
> I’m disappointed he projects some sort of idealised aloof moral superiority on anything non human
I see no evidence in the podcast transcript of Singer making such a claim. What exactly are you basing your assertion on? Quote the transcript please.
Re: Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
just going from your own quotes here, he describes the cases in which one might "apparently unacceptably" as "rare", and the example he gives has lots of conditions. and he believes you could never recommend the action to others. so I don't think "any utterance" of his or his followers is inherently untrustworthy no.
This is comically naive and literal. Have you read any moral philosophy before? 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 y…
> It is very much an argument in favor of a fundamentally untrustworthy and conspiratorial mindset
That's a misreading of the paper and a misrepresentation of the position that Singer holds. It is also a misrepresentation of what utilitarians more generally think about practical ethics and the virtue of truth-telling. The following text is in my experience fairly representative of the views held by real world utilitarian philosophers: https://www.utilitarianism.net/guest-essays/virtues-for-real...