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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25614 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 1, 2024

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In news that went mostly unnoticed at the time but has since picked up some steam, Peter Singer was sued pro se by a woman who alleged they had an affair twenty years ago and that he's had affairs with many other women, including many co-authors, over his career. Her lawsuit was pretty transparently weak due to statute of limitations issues and the affair being consensual--the "damages" she claimed were the loss of the house her ex-fiance bought as he was breaking up with her due to the affair--but the claims in it are nothing short of a terrible look for Singer: propositioning and sleeping with married and unmarried women in his field over a long period of time, giving career benefits (eg coauthorship) to affair partners, misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife and lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs, and more. It was dismissed after a demurrer claiming no actionable claims was granted: that is, no facts were actually discovered or litigated.

In terms of hard evidence, she included several emails between Singer and her in the filing, one of which included him confessing to her that he had multiple other apparent affair partners. They collaborated on at least four op-eds during the affair or its immediate aftermath, and she contributed a chapter to a book he wrote, so it does appear that her portrayal of career benefits for affair partners has some substance.

I read the court filings and have contacted the parties involved; I'm working on a more detailed article about the whole thing. If you'd like to see the court files yourself, the relevant court is here. Search for case number 22CV01792. The accuser also wrote a shorter essay about it on her website.

While she should not be viewed as a fully reliable narrator, the evidence suggests the truth of her claims that they had an affair, that he admitted to her he was having other affairs, and that she got career benefits from the affair. It's a bit mysterious to me that nobody has touched the story, but at least until a somewhat obscure December YouTube video, about the only place I can find the allegations having been discussed is a quiet EA forum thread.

It caught my attention because of that lack of attention despite its clear newsworthiness. It's the sort of thing I think is easy, but incorrect, to dismiss as mere gossip: Peter Singer is one of the leading ethicists of our time, and I believe his behavior follows from his ethics in visible, important ways. More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.

I don't think it's the sort of thing that should, or will, define Singer. I do, however, think that it's the sort of thing that should be part of his life story and so far has conspicuously not been.

I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights.

I take it a bit further and argue that utilitarianism in general, and the more classical and universalist varieties of utilitarianism in particular are incompatible with "duty" as a concept.

One of the core reasons that I continue to maintain that "AI Alignment Problem" is misnamed and has far more to with the inherent flaws of utilitarianism as espoused by men like Singer, Benatar, Yudkowsky, Et Al than it does intelligence artificial or otherwise is that a utilitarian cannot credibly commit to cooperate in a prisoners' dilemma or be held to an existing agreement. Because, contra Scott Alexander, one of the core tenets of utilitarianism is that one has a moral duty to renege on said agreements should it become convenient to do so if doing so can be plausibly framed as "increasing net utility."

ETA: As I have argued previously, the difference between virtue signaling and real virtue is that virtue entails sacrifices. It requires suffering and foregoing things you want, things like defrauding your investors (looking at you SBF) or in this case banging your students/coworkers and cheating on your wife.

Yudkowsky

cannot credibly commit to cooperate in a prisoners' dilemma or be held to an existing agreement.

Come on man. Yudkowsky has made more progress on this general problem than any other living philosopher.

First, I'm not convinced that Yudkowsky Et Al actually demonstrated what they seem to think they've demonstrated (convient assumptions and seemingly arbitrary weights abound). Second, it's debatable whether adding the equivalent of epicycles to geo-centerism constitutes "progress".

If sufficiently advanced utilitarianism approaches virtue ethics in its' outputs, it raises the question; "why bother with utilitarianism in the first place?"

You have to distinguish between the ridiculously-abstract question of what should lie at the base of an ethical system, and the ridiculously-empirical question of what kinds of ethical injunctions people will successfully understand and consistently obey.

There’s no reason that we should have to choose the same answer to both of these questions. Arguing that we should feels to me like arguing that we shouldn’t, say, take the axiom of choice in our system of mathematical logic because the average dude on the street is likely to mis-apply it.

I will further clarify that in both cases, the abstract question of “what should we take at the base of our system?”, divorced from its actual consequences, seems wildly pointless to me. Only what happens when you adopt a rule should matter. Which is, despite everything, what you’re saying above, right?

Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.

All of Yudkowsky's philosophical work is grounded on the framework of AI development.

Because you can't program virtue ethics into an AI. You need a utility function.

I am not even sure Yudkowsky would argue this. In any case this is not defensible unless you think that virtue ethics is in principle not computable.

You need a utility function.

Debatable, there are alternative architectures available and Yudkowsky is pretty open about the fact that he sees AI development as a means not an end. I think it would be more accurate to say that it's the other way. You go back and read his early writings on LessWrong it's all about using advanced computational methods to finally "solve" the question of morality once and for all and immanentize the eschaton be it through Fully-Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism or by paving the universe with computronium.

Credit where credit is due though, while he may have started out in the "hyper intelligence for hyper intelligence's sake" camp I think at some point he realized that a true hyper intelligence's that shared his philosophy and preferences would view him with the same indifference/lack-of-moral-regard with which he views "the less intelligent" (IE normies) and that this triggered something of an existential crisis which is the source of his current focus.

I do not think that his infidelity remotely outweighs any contribution he made to ideals (utilitarianism) by the first and second order effects from his promulgation of it.

He's not perfect. Nobody is, as far as I'm aware.

I fail to see much reason to care, and I'm not a utilitarian, and I wouldn't see any even if I was.

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.

Must seems to mean more to me than it does to you.

At least in the case of Mohammed, he is explicitly lauded as a nigh-perfect entity, a sinless being who does no wrong, and thus any apparent moral failing must be taken as evidence that it's not a moral failing, not that he's flawed. But Singer is not a religious prophet, him having feet of clay earns a big fat "duh" from me, and even the majority of those who follow him. If his message is worth following on its own merits, his peccadillos are irrelevant, or of remarkably little relevance.

I have no idea if it's true, but that a famous academic would be banging all round him isn't on the face of it incredible. I'm more surprised these accusations only date to the 2000s, because if they came from the 70s-90s well that was the hey-day of professors on the prowl (as it were). And also definitely career benefits for being teacher's pet (again, as it were). EDIT: And not just academics, Willie Brown in SF seems to have been famous (and admirably even-handed) about helping advance the careers of his lady friends, as well as other favourites/clients. (Would it be very crude of me to say "if you want a leg up, let the guy get a leg over" about all such arrangements?)

I suppose the idea here is that "But it's Singer, famous ethicist!" Well, a lot of people find it no trouble at all to separate out sexual ethics from the rest of the bundle, ranging from religious leaders onwards.

I'm not sure the 'behavior following from ethics' thing applies well here. It's easy to make that argument for a monk who says his Way grants you equinamity, freedom from desire, and universal love, his affairs and fraught personal drama are good arguments against his ideas. But the e.g. drowning child argument isn't a prescription for smooth interpersonal interaction, it's an argument for donating to the Against Malaria Foundation or GiveDirectly. And given Singer has done a lot of work on things like that, it's not obvious why affairs undermine that, it's just a different area. You can be a useful moral philosopher while behaving badly in your personal life in a way similar to how you can be a good mathematician but a bad engineer, I think.

I don't really find the argument that utilitarianism leads to this persuasive, tbh. The philosophical utilitarians I personally know still manage to find some rationalized justifications for why cheating and other common non-normative behaviors are bad, and they seem to do negative interpersonal behaviors as much as more normal people. And there are a bunch of utilitarian public figures, so it should be expected that some of them will cheat. A lot of people cheat. I think it's analogous to SBF - just because he's a utilitarian and fraudster doesn't mean that one led to the other, there's a certain base rate of financial criminals (and that base rate is already pretty high in crypto) and you'd have to show that the rate among utilitarians is even higher, not that utilitarian financial criminals exist.

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.

Oh, sorry, my bad, I should've clicked that. I think what happened is I parsed this as a 'post with a lot of links, so I'm not going to click on most of them', and then didn't pay as much attention to individual links.

I think my main argument is just that I don't expect moral philosophers to have insightful comments in every domain of ethical behavior for the same reason that I don't expect mathematicians to be experts at every domain of math. I see Singer's comment there as less a flaw in utilitarianism and more this xkcd comic. Most people who are very smart have huge blind spots outside of the area they're experts in, and this is often worse for smart and contrarian thinkers, because they have a habit of coming up with their own ideas, and the first few times (usually many more) you try that in a new area you'll be retreading the mistakes of others in the far past.

When I interact with people who claim to be philosophical utilitarians in person, I don't really see a 'lack of duty to the near' - they seem to have similar levels of personal attachments and duties to their friends and families as non-utilitarians, with various rationalizations. There's a significantly higher rate of 'polyamory', but they still consider cheating and 'trading sexual favors for status at work' to be bad. (And, indeed, there are strong consequentialist reasons to believe those are bad). They also seem to have similar levels of interpersonal bad behavior as non-utilitarians.

Second of all, I don't disagree too much with that passage. I think the context is important - this is the second and third paragraph of the first chapter of his book on ethics, and it exists to introduce / frame his philosophical approach, not specifically to make an argument about sex.

There was a time, around the 1950s, when if you saw a newspaper headline reading RELIGIOUS LEADER ATTACKS DECLINING MORAL STANDARDS, you would expect to read yet again about promiscuity, homosexuality and pornography, and not about the puny amounts we give as overseas aid to poorer nations or the damage we are causing to our planet’s environment. As a reaction to the dominance of this narrow sense of morality, it became popular to regard morality as a system of nasty puritanical prohibitions, mainly designed to stop people from having fun.

Fortunately, this era has passed. We no longer think that morality, or ethics, is a set of prohibitions particularly concerned with sex. Even religious leaders talk more about global poverty and climate change and less about promiscuity and pornography. Decisions about sex may involve considerations of honesty, concern for others, prudence, avoidance of harm to others and so on, but the same could be said of decisions about driving a car. (In fact, the moral issues raised by driving a car, both from an environmental and from a safety point of view, are much more serious than those raised by safe sex.) Accordingly, this book contains no discussion of sexual morality. There are more important ethical issues to be considered.

He isn't really trying to make a novel point about the unimportance of sex - he's mostly claiming his ideas are aligned with the mainstream perspective (the 'progressive, tolerant' one) in not placing the kind of moral taboos on sex as history's conservatives. And, he's not claiming morality has nothing to say about sex, just that it's not special - the standard 'duty for the near' requirements of honesty, concern for others, avoidance of harm, are still present! He is still underrating the importance of sexual ethics somewhat, but eh.

And I do think people think more about the morality of sex than they should, and less about the morality of other things (the impact of their occupation on other people, AI, ...), while even progressives think a lot about the morality of sex.

Even philosophically, I think utilitarianism is very compatible with quasi-virtue ethics behavior in interpersonal behavior. Indeed, I think that's actually the standard line from Yud and rationalists - "yeah, i'm a utilitarian, that's why I act virtuously and care for my friends, because it has predictably good consequences!"

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.

Most critics and some self-identified utilitarians seem incapable of distinguishing between what utilitarianism might recommend as policy for say all of humanity vs. any given human.

The level of analysis and uncertainty and heuristics all matter a lot, as Yud recognizes. In my view, rule utilitarianism combines all this into something practical.

This seems like a good time to bring up Resident Contrarian's piece on escapism:

I once heard about a thing called “philosophy”, which is a sort of scavenger hunt game combined with literary critic role-play. You read all these books that talk about how humans should live, and how they should think about concepts like “good” and “virtue”. Each book has an at least slightly different take on how you should think about these things, and there’s millions of them to sift through.

Some philosophies are drastically different than others, but there’s absolutely no consensus on which is right or wrong - you can pick one that says that nothing you do matters or one that says that every waking moment should be spent in service to some concept of good, and each choice is exactly as legitimate within the context of philosophy as the other. You get to say you are a philosopher (or that you appreciate their work) in either case.

The most common way to interact with moral philosophy is to collect a bunch of favorite moral positions, then to sit around arguing with people about how correct you are in your opinions about what you theoretically could do with those moral philosophies. Nobody will ever check to see if you actually put them into action, and you will look very smart.

By their fruits ye shall know them.

Modern philosophy I’d agree with. Most philosophers are so far removed from anything like a normal person’s existence that they cannot possibly hope to create a moral philosophy that anyone would be able to live by.

I find myself much more impressed by the Stoics, Confucianists, Buddhists, and so on who at least attempted to create philosophy for the world people actually live in and dealing with the suffering that goes along with it. Peter Singers declarations that animals are exactly equal to humans is not based in the real world where people go hungry and in some parts of the world animals are still the best way to move yourself and other objects about. Pacifism is silly in a world where wars happen regularly. Stoics believed in morals and created a good system for masking good moral decisions and for not being attached to outcomes. Confucius came up with the laws of reciprocity and self cultivation. Buddhists came up with the 8-fold path. You might have a hard time doing some of those things at times, but they were based on real life, and written by people who lived a real life in a real world.

I don't see what salience that really has to the value of a moral code.

There is no reason that a "perfect" moral code (not that I think that's even possible, I see no reason why morality isn't anything but subjectivity and the occasional illusion of objectivity where ~everyone ended up with similar stances, usually for strongly convergent evopsych reasons, such as even monkeys and dogs prizing fairness) should be instantiable by less than perfect humans.

All it has to do is be directionally better than the alternatives, even if nobody alive can claim to embody it perfectly. If you're a utilitarian, then imperfect utilitarianism beats everything else. If you're a vegan, tben occasionally being tempted into trying a burger beats not being vegan.

Moral philosophy is a vector with both direction and magnitude. Directional correctness is not sufficient on its own, one also needs to execute, which means decision theory, coping/motivational strategies, societal organization, etc. Devout Hindus probably do more for animals than vegans (perfect or not) despite being directionally less correct. Philosophy just has a lot to it besides picking your axioms--there's all sorts of tradition associated with how to best live up to the ideals any given philosophy espouses.

The absence of such traditions is evidence of greater failings. If you actually believe something you should strive to change yourself into someone better able to execute on your beliefs. That's why the Stoics, Confucianists, and Buddhists are more impressive--they seem to have decided upon values, then taken the execution seriously, even to the point of designing powerful social technologies to help others execute too.

Imperfect obedience is one thing, but at some point people's actions stop looking like "earnest people trying and failing to follow their values" and start looking like "duplicitous people lie about what their values actually are, maybe even to themselves." Singer's actions obviously aren't utilitarian, nor does it appear he made any serious effort to reign himself in. This matters because it's evidence that he does not truly believe in his life's work.

"Bentham was a hedonist who really believed he was a philosopher. Rawls was a hedonist who hoped he was a philosopher. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the West would be guided by hedonists who were only pretending to be philosophers."

...With apologies to Spufford, and likely to Bentham and Rawls as well.

Is there any evidence about Peter Singer's alleged infidelity that is not ultimately based on the word of the woman who sued him? I looked at the websites you linked to in your post and did not notice any other evidence, but I did not watch the video so if some additional evidence is mentioned there I may have missed it.

If it's really true that the only public evidence is the word of the woman who sued him then I'm not sure how confident we should be about her allegations. Yes, it would not be shocking if a powerful male figure in a field used his status to seduce and/or coerce women into sleeping with him. On the other hand, it is also not impossible that someone would either exaggerate or even make up accusations against a powerful and controversial figure in their field. I also find it slightly suspicious that the accuser's blog post you linked to spends much more time talking about Peter Singer's ideological faults than his sexual bad behavior. The accuser hardly seems unbiased.

Edit: Additionally, I find some of the claims in the accuser's blog post and lawsuit hard to believe. She claims he has either been sexually involved with or made his sexual interest clear to all of his female coauthors from 2002 to 2020. Peter Singer has published a huge number of articles, op-eds, etc in that time, many with female coauthors, and it is hard for me to believe he has really propositioned all of them.

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.

I was insufficiently clear in my comment. Singer seems to acknowledge they had a sexual relationship and that he has had sexual relationships with other women as well. However, accepting that fact does not seem equivalent to accepting all of her claims. For example the claim that he used the promise of professional reward and the threat of professional punishment to control their relationship seems like one of the most damaging accusations and it is not clear to me there is any evidence for that other than the word of the accuser (though it's very possible that I missed something). Likewise her claims that Singer has done similar things with many other women.

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.

I do not think you are being nearly skeptical enough towards the account, not just regarding the possibility of deliberate lies but regarding how distorted memories can get regarding emotionally-charged events from 20 years prior. Have you ever had the experience of someone telling you a story regarding a grudge repeatedly over the course of years, and noticing it increasingly differ from your own recollection of the original story until you're pretty sure it's complete fiction? The way that, for instance, "X said Y, I bet that means he was thinking Z" becomes "X said Z"? (And then sometimes, upon further rumination, "X said Z, I bet that means he was thinking A" becomes "X said A".) If you haven't, trust me when I say it happens. Records like emails can tell you the actual contents of the email if you assume they weren't fabricated, but a lot rests not on them but on the context of the narrative surrounding them.

misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife

As an example, this is a description of the arrangement between two other people 20 years ago. It could easily mean that, for instance, she had agreed to the arrangement but exhibited some amount of jealousy, or something Dawn interpreted as jealousy.

lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs

Meanwhile this could easily mean "had sex with me without mentioning that he had already had sex with someone else".

Or take this from the excerpt you tweeted:

From 2002 through 2020, all of Singer's female co-authors were women with whom Singer had been sexually involved, or to who he had made clear his sexual interest.

How the hell does she claim to know this about all his female co-authors for almost 20 years after their supposed relationship? For reference here are his publications. This made me curious enough to download the original complaint, but there's no elaboration or evidence provided that I can see. The language of "made clear" is of course great material for distorted interpretations and memories, all sorts of meanings become "clear" when you're nursing a grievance for 20 years.

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.

initially lie to her in at least one way about it

I don't see how that is shown by the email in question.

having at least one other affair at approximately the same time

The email talks about feelings rather than actions, so this may depend on whether we're including "emotional cheating". I'm not saying that multiple extramarital sexual relationships are an implausible interpretation, but it's not completely definitive. More to the point:

having an affair

Note that, while in the email he says "affair", whether he was actually having an affair may depend on the definition you are using. She claims that he falsely claimed his wife was fine with it. If that arrangement was instead actually real, having extramarital sex with his wife's permission would not fit the definition of affair typically used by "polyamorous" people, even if Singer himself used the word. I am not very inclined to think polyamory is a good idea, not least because it leads to more relationship drama like this, but I do think it makes a difference ethically if he had permission. And it doesn't seem terribly implausible for a philosopher and his wife to be the sort of people to think open relationships are a good idea in 2002.

“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.”

“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 must admit, lying by omission by not mentioning multiple simultaneous affairs to someone you're having an affair with seems like the kind of dishonesty that I would put in the same category of dishonesty as responding with "fine" when asked "how are you?" by your coworker when, in fact, you're feeling a little tired. Perhaps an ethicist should be held to such a high standard of honesty, though.

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.

I don't think it's the sort of thing that should, or will, define Singer. I do, however, think that it's the sort of thing that should be part of his life story and so far has conspicuously not been.

Of course it's part of his life story. Peter Singer is a world-renowned hedonistic utilitarian philosopher. No shit he's sleeping around at work. I recall hearing similar rumors about Will MacAskill too. This is "priced in" as they say.

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.

There is something ironic about an ethicist cheating on his wife, but I do think it's mostly gossip; Peter Singer is well known, but I don't think that he's actually that influential- EA's might pay attention to him, sure, I'll buy that, but it seems like outside of that bubble, he's mostly known as one of those guys who publishes ethics papers which are straight nuts. Like Walter Block, just on the other side of the coin.

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.

I absolutely agree.

Direct quote from Singer: "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".

This is why contemporary academic philosophy is bankrupt. The most influential living ethicist has concocted a pseudo-formal structure that result in infanticide being on the table, and no one has stopped to say, "Hey, that's fucking bananas."

I'm a big fan of engaging with potentially "dangerous" ideas. Not to try and figure out how to prove them actually valid, but as a means of understand the limits, logical extremes, and unforseen weaknesses in one's own argument or viewpoint. When you end up holding one of these crazy ideas, however, that's when you have to go back to the first draft and try to unravel the bad thread.

Singer, instead, sits in supreme comfort in his abstracted-away EA fantasy world where an affair isn't an affair per se and when a living human isn't really human-y enough.

What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.

If you build a theory and something like this pops out naturally, then your choices are either to admit to that fact or muddy the waters to hide the issue.

Non-speciesist, Non-infanticide, Non-vegan: pick any two. Apart from its species, a pig is cognitively closer to a person than a baby is. If killing the baby is inherently wrong, then so is killing the pig. You could try to salvage this by looking at the future potential, but then you will have to be strictly anti-abortion because a fertilized human egg has basically the same potential to become a person as a baby has.

There is certainly something to be said about being careful with implementing newly found insights of your moral theory, and you will notice that Singer is not actually campaigning for infanticide. In the real world, babies bring tremendous utility to their caretakers, thus killing them would be wrong.

when a living human isn't really human-y enough

Read his argument in Practical Ethics. His first step is to taboo the word human, replacing it with "member of homo sapiens" and "person", just like EY taboos the word "sound" in the Sequences.

What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.

I think the bankruptcy is of intellectual sort. Newborn babies have many complaints and they make them loud, and while they are not very eloquent and detailed in their requests, all of them indicate willingness to continue living (and to have the uncomfortable things to go away).

What you are saying is basically that first you write down the bottom line dictated by your gut feeling, "Therefore killing babies is always wrong.", then try to fill out the empty space above that to fill your page.

And Utilitarian calculations are different? "Building a theory", in the context of philosophy, is not a rigorously deterministic process. Utilitarian philosophy in particular seems to optimize for the appearance of a rigor that does not seem to me to be possible even in principle, which means that people should be even more skeptical of it than other varieties.

Non-speciesist, Non-infanticide, Non-vegan: pick any two.

Non-infanticide and non-vegan. I am absolutely speciesist.

Then you will have to be strictly anti-abortion.

Already have been for some time.

you will notice that Singer is not actually campaigning for infanticide.

Correct and fair. Still, at best he is an edge lord dressed up in fancy degrees and tweed patches, then. Whatever you can call this, (maybe "experimental philosophy"?) is, in my opinion, just less readable sci-fi. "Wouldn't it be wacky if...." Sure, whatever, have fun. But trying to dress it up as Very-Serious-Smart-People work is insincere and will lead the earnestly interested astray.

His first step is to taboo the word human.

I can't bring myself to pen a response to this beyond "oh, for fuck's sake." But that's directed at Singer, not @quiet_NaN.

How do you envision a proof of a moral/ethical principle as valid or invalid to actually proceed? I would have thought that persuasiveness, and elegance (which contributes to the former), is the only standard. Singer's views seem elegant/simple enough, and clearly people in a large bubble are persuaded.

If nobody is challenging an argument "for infanticide" (which seems like an exaggeration: it only really seems to be an argument that infanticide is less bad than murder of adults), this primarily just betrays a lack of ideological diversity (which is unsurprising) and willingness to argue for positions that are not one's own (which is only surprising if you have an unrealistically idealistic view of philosophers).

How do you envision a proof of a moral/ethical principle as valid or invalid to actually proceed?

The hard requirement is that there's some sort of moral absolute from/to which to trace validity. Moral relativism is chaotic meaninglessness. You can't "prove" anything from chaos.

More generally, however, I'm not sure that I see much value in wholly secular moral / ethic philosophy. I see it failing in one of two directions. Either (a) You get into a sort of recursive set of definitions. This is the Sam Harris issue as he tries to define "good" morals as "those things that help to realize human flourishing." Okay, well, what does "flourishing" mean? And what if two people, or groups, use it to mean different things? The other failure mode (b) is when you do create an internally coherent rubric that seeks to maximize some sort of measurable norm. Enter utilitarianism and, eventually, effective altruism (Singer et al). You can concoct some sort of scheme that lets you say things like "in order to maximize the happiness function, in aggregate, of all humanity .... it's totally alright to unalive the following criteria of already existing humans ..."

Furthermore, secular moral philosophy seems to me to be amazingly epistemically arrogant. The complex system of systems of 7 billion people (with different languages, cultures, etc.) is on its face impossible to model with any accuracy, let alone to make normative recommendations for. But, the EA types have revealed themselves to be bad at the smart thinkin'. When you start to worship the Chubby Behemoth, you can update your priors all you want, but dividing by zero was probably when it all went sideways.

Direct quote from Singer: "killing a newborn baby is never equivalent to killing a person, that is, a being who wants to go on living".

The argument that some cases of infanticide (nobody is defending King Herod here) are not immoral is fairly standard utilitarianism - when I was an impressionable 18-year old choosing between degree courses it was one of the things that put me off philosophy (after checking that multiple textbooks agree on this point).

If you include deliberately withholding medical treatment as "killing" then it is also policy in most countries. The textbook example is surgery for the most severe forms of spina bifida - if you don't do the surgery, the child will die relatively quickly, and if you do do it the child will probably be severely disabled because any damage to the spinal cord before the surgery is done (including in utero) is irreparable. I don't know about the US, but in the UK the surgery would not be done unless the parents wanted it to be, and there if anything the system would encourage the parents not to go ahead on the basis that people underestimate how hard it is to raise a severely disabled child.

From my perspective as a now-grownup, I no longer think the argument is horrific - I find it intuitively obvious that infanticide is morally the same kind of act as late abortion, and "it is morally okay to unalive this child if there is no realistic hope of their caregivers having the resources required to give them a worthwhile life" entirely defensible. In this framework early abortion is slightly less bad than late abortion is slightly less bad than infanticide is slightly less bad than euthanasia of an adult who is too disabled to meaningfully give or withhold consent, all of these things are bad, but many other things are worse and sometimes they are the least bad option. (My personal view on The Abortion Question TM is that a majority of the abortions happening today are immoral under the circumstances, but that the consequences of trying to ban them are worse than the consequences of allowing them).

The strong pro-life position (that abortion for reasons other than life-of-the-mother is infanticide, and both are always wrong, as is euthanasia) is intellectually coherent, but I do not take the secular arguments for it seriously given the way people make other resource-allocation decisions with life-or-death consequences. Or to be blunt, any secular argument for making parents raise disabled children they don't want applies even more strongly to making people pay taxes they don't want in order to fund safer roads.

I don't know about the US, but in the UK the surgery would not be done unless the parents wanted it to be, and there if anything the system would encourage the parents not to go ahead on the basis that people underestimate how hard it is to raise a severely disabled child.

The doctors involved have the outright ability to deny the parent's wishes here, if they consider it to be against the best interests of the child. This goes the other way too, they have the legal ability and duty to forcibly provide care in situations where the parents might vehemently disagree, if they think it's in the child's best interests.

Source: I've studied enough of UK medical ethics for my exams that I'm now more familiar with it than the laws in India.

Source: I've studied enough of UK medical ethics for my exams that I'm now more familiar with it than the laws in India.

You are of course, correct, but the reported legal cases where doctors have refused treatment that parents wanted on "best interests of the child" grounds (e.g. Charlie Gard) involve more severe disability than spina bifida - mostly cases where the treating doctors thought it was unlikely that the child would ever breathe unaided. If doctors were deciding to withold treatment based on a judgement that parents who claimed to be willing should not in fact be allowed to parent a child who could have a "normal disabled" life then there would be parents suing and the cases would be showing up in the law reports.

The reason why the ethics textbook I hurled across the room in my youth used spina bifida as a case study is that the surgery is sufficiently simple that refusing it is clearly infanticide-by-omission, and was therefore a live controversy at the time (example discussion from a quick google) with the Reagan administration treating it as a right-to-life issue in the US and repeatedly being overruled by the courts, leaving it as in issue of de facto parental discretion.

As far as I can see, that specific issue is no longer live in the UK because modern imaging means that spina bifida is diagnosed in utero and the standard response outside pro-life culture is an abortion (although fetal surgery which seals the spinal cord and prevents damage before it happens is now an increasingly available option). I don't think this affects the ethics much - I genuinely struggle to see how the morality of unaliving a likely-to-be-disabled child depends on which side of the birth canal it is on.

The point I am trying to make is that nobody (except parts of the US pro-life movement) treats infanticide-by-omission in this type of case as "monstrous" - everyone understands that it is a practically and morally difficult decision. And utilitarians (or any other form of consequentialist ethics) think that infanticide-by-omission and infanticide-by-deliberate-act are approximately morally equivalent. So when I see "Singer is a monster who promotes infanticide of disabled kids" I assume I am seeing either an ill-thought-out emotional response similar to my 18-year-old self, or a religiously motivated pro-lifer (who secular philosophers have already written out of the conversation because "God says so" is not a valid argument unless both sides acknowledge that God is real).

I don't really have a longer response to make because I happen to agree with you here haha. Yes, a few centimeters of flesh and fluid doesn't change the moral valence as far as I'm concerned (and thus I see no difference of note between abortion or infanticide, at least for identical periods of gestation), and knee-jerk emotional responses attract at best my bemusement, at worst my disdain.

There are legitimate reasons to deny personhood to infants. Some scientists have determined that babies do not achieve sapience until several months after birth; and some moral frameworks attribute little or no moral value to beings that have never achieved sapience, regardless of their status as humans or as probable future sapients.

I think someone else in these threads recently mentioned that, for most people, sapience is not the only factor in personhood, and humanness is a major factor as well. Those moral frameworks are reasonable as well. Holders of frameworks in that second set should not denigrate holders of moral frameworks in the first set as "crazy" or "monstrous" ( @ChickenOverlord )—at least in the view of this forum's censors.

and some moral frameworks attribute little or no moral value to beings that have never achieved sapience, regardless of their status as humans or as probable future sapients.

How do you objectively measure "sapience"?

If it is discrete, what's the dividing line?

If is is continuous, this leads to the conclusion that the "less sapient" are less human than the more sapient.

If this is your position, exactly where is the cutoff point for disenfranchising already living humans from their right to remain alive?

If you can identify that point, where is the point (necessarily further upstream) wherein we disenfranchise humans in a democracy from being able to vote because of their substandard sapience?

tl;dr Eugenics and explicit genetic tyranny all the way down.

tl;dr Eugenics and explicit genetic tyranny all the way down.

Is that supposed to be a bad thing? (I know you consider that to be the case, this was a rhetorical question)

Modus ponens and modus tollens applies. I can answer each of those questions, I have internally satisfactory cutoffs (and I do not consider it a failing if they're not universally popular, merely saddening), and I am okay with arbitrary cutoffs, at least where a more principled cost-benefit analysis isn't worth it.

Someone born a meter away over the border from the US is a Mexican citizen, and nobody I know claims that they should be considered 50:50 each for that reason alone. Arbitrariness, while ideally avoided, is acceptable.

I will bite every bullet I must bite, and not one more or less (while lead poisoning is less of a concern, I wish to retain my teeth). You have no recourse to someone who does that, short of force of arms, and that's a symmetrical weapon and deprecated by civilized society for good reason.

some moral frameworks attribute little or no moral value to beings that have never achieved sapience

Correct, the monsters I was referring to.

Holders of frameworks in that second set should not denigrate holders of moral frameworks in the first set as "crazy" or "monstrous"

Holders of frameworks in the first set shouldn't be the ones deciding how holders of frameworks in the second set are allowed to think and talk about them.

Funnily I mostly know him as "That monster pretending to be an ethicist who supports infanticide."

“Ah, but you have heard of me!”

In all seriousness, why should some monstrosity mean he’s pretending?

Because he holds extremely unethical positions for an ethicist?

That’s like claiming a man can’t really be a doctor if he gets sick.

Actually, it's more like claiming a man can't really be a doctor if he says bloodletting is an appropriate treatment for lung cancer.

If he has an arrangement with his wife that allows this then they're not affairs.

Do the emails actually say 'I will let you have a chapter in my book if you fuck me', or does he just meet people through work?

Unless there's actual evidence of coercion or quid-pro-quo, idgaf.

Actually idgaf either way, I don't have a parasocial relationship with Singer and his sex life doesn't change the quality of the arguments themselves. But it's double-ultra transparent if people are going to try to attack him for his sex life when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.

There’s no evidence either way about an arrangement except the accuser’s claim that he lied about having one.

If you do not consider breaking monogamous relationships up and giving career benefits to affair partners in a domain where he holds immense power to be evidence of wrongdoing, I will not be able to convince you otherwise, but my impression is that most people (correctly, in my estimation) disapprove of both.

When:

  1. someone is in a monogamous relationship, 2. Singer propositions her, 3. They have an affair, and 4. He publishes alongside her through the course and in the immediate aftermath of the affair…

I see very little left to demonstrate.

I agree it seems likely that Peter Singer acted poorly in his relationship with his accuser (though it also seems likely she acted poorly as well), but I feel you are a little too trusting of her narrative. You really can't imagine any other facts that would change your judgement of Singer? What if the accuser misled him about her own relationship (e.g. telling him she was polyamorous, etc)? I'm not claiming that it's likely that happened, but it does not seem impossible.

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.

Peter Singer considers himself a hedonistic utilitarian. My understanding is that (broadly speaking) lying is nearly intrinsically bad to the preference utilitarians (most people have a preference against being lied to) but not the hedonistic utilitarians (if the lied-to-party never finds out, their hedonism is not impaired).

Which is to say... if we're going to use his affair as evidence of anything, it should be to discredit hedonistic utilitarians.

More specifically, I think classical utilitarianism as a whole suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near in ways that this sort of misconduct highlights

No comment on whether utilitarianism "suffers from a lack of respect for duty to the near", but I really don't see how Peter cheating on his wife is related to this. Like, if he was sleeping with people to get them to donate to malaria charities, you'd have a point - but, per your summary, he was enjoying sex for purely selfish reasons.

I think his comment on sexual ethics provides a hint as to what his rationalization of having affairs would be: people get so caught up on sexual ethics when what really makes a difference in the world are things like donating to overseas charities and advocating for animal rights. Yes, his affairs were selfish, but they were a small selfishness as he was pushing large groups towards immense utilitarian good, so to focus on it is a mere distraction. Particularly if nobody finds out—as you say, what’s the harm?

Even in utilitarian terms, this is a rationalization. He knows the second-order effects of affairs and knows what society’s actual feelings on sexual ethics are. He knows, surely, that it is the stuff of scandals and cratered reputations, that it could bring immense harm not just to him but to the ideas he champions, to his philosophy as a whole.

And you can argue that in a utilitarian frame, but we are all at war with our own minds to one extent or another, and the possibility of rationalization depends on the strength of one’s safeguards. Singer’s brand of utilitarianism is unusually bad, I would argue (and I think his quote on sexual ethics supports my argument), at providing defenses against rationalizing sexual misconduct to oneself.

To clarify: are you arguing that subscribing to utilitarianism causes people to be more likely to cheat on their romantic partners?

Or are you merely exploring how utilitarians rationalize cheating - as opposed to how people of other ethical persuasions rationalize it?

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.

This is well put.

It seems like most of the responses you've gotten are questioning the severity of the events rather than occurrence, which seems to be "non-news" to most. Maybe it's just understood they're cheaty mfers and just don't put such a fine point on it?

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