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