Peter Singer on utilitarianism, influence, and controversial ideas

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.

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.

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.

> [Truman administration head of Joint Chiefs, General Omar] Bradley accused the Navy of being in “open rebellion” against the civilian leadership of the United States. The admirals were “Fancy Dans” and “aspiring martyrs” who just didn’t like to take orders. As for the accusation that [an “atomic blitz“] targeting [seventy] cities [hosting a plurality of the Soviet population] was immoral, Bradley responded, “As far as I am concerned, war itself is immoral.”

I can’t model or even try to imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to just stop at this—as opposed to continuing to “therefore we should not engage in it”, which is of course refuted by that (supposedly) being even more immoral, which in turn breaks the original assumption that all immoral things are equally bad.

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...