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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.
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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Non-infanticide and non-vegan. I am absolutely speciesist.
Already have been for some time.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Correct, the monsters I was referring to.
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.
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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.
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