TracingWoodgrains
No bio...
User ID: 103
TracingWoodgrains
12d ago
Not really something I have the bandwidth for atm, unfortunately, but I'm happy to provide the questions as a base template for anyone wanting to run it again.
TracingWoodgrains
19d ago
What are you talking about here? Last time I recall mentioning systems on Twitter it was to marvel at the way some people take the whole thing seriously.
TracingWoodgrains
19d ago
That's the pipeline for you. I was surprised it went quite that far, but it's a good story!
TracingWoodgrains
19d ago
While I maintain my reservations, I also generally enjoy the company of the people here and have nothing to hide in terms of associations. In this case, I was referring to his original posts and to Substack, as @FirmWeird accurately noted. I'm mostly just too distractable to post to multiple platforms simultaneously with any regularity, and yeah, Twitter is in a bit of a golden age for Mottelike effortposts atm, so I've been enjoying my time there.
I freely admit association with the Motte as appropriate. This place was a big part of my own intellectual journey and I have nothing to hide about it. In this case, Twitter throttles Substack links as if they're ads, so I couldn't link the Vitalist's blog without my posts getting throttled into oblivion. I even mention my connection in the replies to that post.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence.
This is healthy for me to hear. He and I had a falling out some time back, and I admit it's colored my impression of things; I'm glad to have such a clear reminder of what he could bring to the table at his best to balance against my own sentiment.
TracingWoodgrains
1mo ago
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
Now featuring a semi-interactive version of the quiz itself.
Thanks for posting this here, by the way! I've, uh, had my hands full with a few things.
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
Thanks! I’ll see what I wind up doing—I don’t think taking time off school is necessary, but I was definitely more than a little distracted in class today. I figure I’ll see who reaches out to me about what, if anything.
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
I appreciate the apology. I have always been upfront about precisely who I am.
TracingWoodgrains
2mo ago
In the Google Drive folder, I shout at people to install RECAP. I went with the first guy who had PACER access, a stranger to me, trying to get into the story as quickly as possible.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I don’t think it works to treat that passage as not specifically about sex when he emphasizes it is why he will not bother to address sexual ethics. What does Singer think about sexual ethics? That. That is the core of it.
I don’t precisely disagree that utilitarians, in their daily lives, are conscious of duty to the near. I disagree that they have a philosophical justification for it that amounts to more than just stapling the same instinct all people feel onto their framework. More, I disagree that their advocacy for increased duty-to-the-far can or claims to come without tradeoffs. Attention is limited, and utilitarian arguments—Singer’s in particular—constantly focus on the need to assign less of it to the near and more of it to the distant.
So—yes, in their daily lives, they have friends and family members, and yes, when pressed, they come up with utilitarian-sounding justifications for it. But that, I argue, is a second- or third-order kludge to reconcile human instinct with a moral system that does not inherently account for it or treat it as relevant.
I expect people to have insightful comments on every domain of behavior they claim authority over. Singer claims authority over all of ethics and should be held to that standard.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I think the two are inherently connected in important ways—that a world where people share more of Singer’s ideals is one where they share more of his behavior as well. For an ethicist, their life is and must be their message. We all know about the sexual misadventures of Mohammed and Joseph Smith. Secular ethicists, too, must be judged by more than simply their abstract ideas.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Sure. Of the things I listed, I think lying to your affair partner is rather less significant than most other parts of the story—I just wanted to establish that it was one of the points demonstrated by the email.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
“I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.”
“If you were thinking you were the only one, and if that was crucial to what you felt about our relationship, I’m sorry, that isn’t true.”
That is: he lied by omission by not mentioning multiple simultaneous affairs. I don’t find your “emotional cheating” reading plausible; in context, it seems strained to read it in any way other than “actively pursuing the same sort of relationship he has with her, as the opportunity arises based on distance.”
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I feel like you’re eliding the point in arguing against my case that his behavior follows from his ethics by referring to the drowning child argument rather than the argument I linked, in which he states explicitly that sexual ethics is unimportant and sex raises no unique moral issues at all.
I’m not the one who tied them together—he is! “Why are you focusing on petty things like sex when there are kids starving in Africa?” is only the slightest rephrasing of his argument. I absolutely would expect someone who takes Singer’s explicitly stated attitude towards sexual ethics to have looser sexual ethics than someone who takes the mainstream societal view, and while it would be unfair to pre-judge him based on that, it is eminently reasonable to take it into account after the fact.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Ah—I have no idea whether he explicitly said such a thing and would be quite startled if he did. From my angle, the fact of an affair and concurrent/subsequent collaborative work are already sufficient to establish a degree of fairly serious misconduct, where the spectres of professional reward and punishment inevitably loom given the power dynamics in play.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Oh, I see a lot of open questions and a lot of room for my judgment to shift in a number of directions—but few beyond complete falsehood that are highly exculpatory for Singer. Your hypothetical is not impossible but even in a scenario like that the mixing of career benefits and an affair is morally fraught.
Yes—the email I screenshot in my Twitter thread on the matter. Unless it’s fake, which I place low likelihood on given that she submitted it as evidence in a court filing, it’s strongly indicative that they had an affair and that she was not the only affair partner at the time.
EDIT: The court filings also include an email from him rebuking her about an interaction they had at a fundraiser meeting for her charity, which he was on the board of. The contents of that interaction and email, as described in the court filing, are not nearly as clear of evidence but are still worth mentioning.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
In what sense am I not being skeptical enough? My strongest conclusion by far is based on the email from Singer she entered into evidence and the evidence of their collaboration during the time frame of the alleged affair. Did you read the email? Unless it is inauthentic, it makes it hard for me to see a world where they were not having an affair, he did not initially lie to her in at least one way about it, or he was not having at least one other affair at approximately the same time.
It’s worth being skeptical of her claims, and I am, visibly so and stated every time I post about it. I agree that the “made advances on every female coauthor” claim in particular strains credulity. But there is enough that does not rely solely on her word to make it noteworthy and tough for me to dismiss in full.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
It’s not priced in, though, except perhaps to the extremely aware. Not a single article has been written about it, it gets not a single mention in his biographies, virtually nobody in the public knows any details of it. If it was an open secret, it certainly never escaped the circles closest to him, and while it’s possible and natural to assume he’d be the sort of person not to take serious issue with it, that doesn’t reveal much if anything about him actually doing it.
It makes sense, yes. But many things make sense without actually being part of people’s stories. He has been meticulous at keeping it out of the public eye.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
I have no idea who Walter Block is without looking him up. Singer is one of a small handful of living philosophers to make it into standard intro to philosophy courses. He is the only living person in the lede of Wikipedia’s article on utilitarianism and is, I would guess, virtually universally considered the greatest living utilitarian. He’s made Time top 100 lists and received a long list of public honors.
By any measure, he is one of the most influential ethicists of all time, certainly one of the most influential living ones. Few people’s ideas have shaped and shifted the public idea of morality as his have. He is almost singularly influential in his field.
TracingWoodgrains
3mo ago
Than virtue ethics, deontology, or contractualism? Yes. I am not claiming they are more likely than people who do not actively aim towards upholding high, clearly articulated ethical standards, but yes, I assert that moral systems have measurable impacts on people’s behavior in important ways, and the safeguards against cheating within utilitarianism—and particularly, by Singer’s own explicit admission, in his brand of it—are straightforwardly less than those in other ethical systems.
Why would I? That tension between his present and his past, and my conflicted thoughts about it, is core to the reason we thought it would be interesting to do a podcast in the first place. We chatted in advance as well and covered some of the same ground; he came in fully aware that it could get combative and was not just amenable to that approach but actively interested in it. Masking my own sentiment towards the alt-right would be a disservice both to him and to listeners. When we moved past that part, I went back to engaging in a milder, more deliberate way, but both have their place.
Walt doesn't praise Hitler, but analogies are just that: analogies. I absolutely would push soft democratic socialists who had histories full of guillotine memes and so forth on those topics in very much the same tone I was pushing Walt. In his own writing, he makes the explicit comparison between himself and liberals who had communist phases, so it's worth exploring that comparison on its own terms.
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