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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'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.
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.
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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.
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